Lord John Russell

by Stuart J. Reid

After lingering for a while in Vienna, Florence, Rome, Naples, and other cities, Lord John returned home by way of Germany, and on June 5 he spoke in Parliament against the renewal of hostilities. He was one of the small minority in Parliament who refused to regard Napoleon’s flight from Elba as a sufficient casus belli. Counsels of peace, however, were naturally just then not likely to prevail, and Wellington’s victory a fortnight later falsified Lord John’s fears. He did not speak again until February 1816, when, in seconding an amendment to the Address, he protested against the continuance of the income-tax as a calamity to the country. He pointed out that, although there had been repeated victories abroad, prosperity at home had vanished; that farmers could not pay their rents nor landlords their taxes; and that everybody who was not paid out of the public purse felt that prosperity was gone. A few weeks later he opposed the Army Estimates, contending that a standing army of 150,000 men ‘must alarm every friend of his country and its constitution.’

It was probably owing in a measure to the hopelessness of the situation, but also partly to ill-health, that Lord John absented himself to a great extent from Parliament. He was, in truth, chagrined at the course of affairs and discouraged with his own prospects, and in consequence he lapsed for a time into the position of a silent member of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, the summer of 1816 was wet and cold and the harvest was in consequence a disastrous failure. Wheat rose to 103s. a quarter, and bread riots broke out in the Eastern Counties. The Luddites, who commenced breaking up machinery in manufacturing towns in 1811, again committed great excesses. Tumults occurred in London, and the Prince Regent was insulted in the streets on his return from opening Parliament.

PANIC-STRICKEN AUTHORITY

The Liverpool Cabinet gave way to panic, and quickly resorted to extreme measures. A secret committee was appointed in each House to investigate the causes of the disaffection of a portion of his Majesty’s subjects. Four bills were, as the result of their deliberations, swiftly introduced and passed through Parliament. The first enacted penalties for decoying sailors and soldiers; the second was a pitiful exhibition of lack of confidence, for it aimed at special measures for the protection of the Prince Regent; the third furnished magistrates with unusual powers for the prevention of seditious meetings; and the fourth suspended the Habeas Corpus Act till July 1, giving the Executive authority ‘to secure and detain such persons as his Majesty shall suspect are conspiring against his person and Government.’

The measures of the Government filled Lord John with indignation, and he assailed the proposal to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in a vigorous speech, which showed conclusively that his sympathies were on the side of the weak and distressed classes of the community. ‘I had not intended,’ he said, ‘to trouble the House with any observations of mine during the present session of Parliament. Indeed, the state of my health induced me to resolve upon quitting the fatiguing business of this House altogether. But he must have no ordinary mind whose attention is not roused in a singular manner when it is proposed to suspend the rights and liberties of Englishmen, though even for a short period. I am determined, for my own part, that no weakness of frame, no indisposition of body, shall prevent my protesting against the most dangerous precedent which this House ever made. We talk much—I think, a great deal too much—of the wisdom of our ancestors. I wish we could imitate the courage of our ancestors. They were not ready to lay their liberties at the foot of the Crown upon every vain or imaginary alarm.’ He begged the majority not to give, by the adoption of a policy of coercion, the opponents of law and order the opportunity of saying, ‘When we ask for redress you refuse all innovation; when the Crown asks for protection you sanction a new code.’

All protests, as usual, were thrown away, and the bill was passed. Lord John resumed his literary tasks, and as a matter of fact only once addressed the House in the course of the next two years. He repeatedly declared his intention of entirely giving up politics and devoting his time to literature and travel. Many friends urged him to relinquish such an idea. Moore’s poetical ‘Remonstrance,’ which gladdened Lord John not a little at the moment, is so well known that we need scarcely quote more than the closing lines:

Thus gifted, thou never canst sleep in the shade;
If the stirring of genius, the music of fame,
And the charm of thy cause have not power to persuade,
Yet think how to freedom thou’rt pledged by thy name.
Like the boughs of that laurel, by Delphi’s decree
Set apart for the fane and its service divine,
All the branches that spring from the old Russell tree
Are by Liberty claimed for the use of her shrine.’

Lord John’s literary labours began at this time to be considerable. He also enlarged his knowledge of the world by giving free play to his love of foreign travel.

FEELING HIS WAY

A general election occurred in the summer of 1818, and it proved that though the Tories were weakened they still had a majority. Lord John, with his uncle Lord William Russell, were, however, returned for Tavistock. Public affairs in 1819 were of a kind to draw him from his retirement, and as a matter of fact it was in that year that his speeches began to attract more than passing notice. He spoke briefly in favour of reducing the number of the Lords of the Admiralty, advocated an inquiry into domestic and foreign policy, protested against the surrender of the town of Parga, on the coast of Epirus, to the Turks, and made an energetic speech against the prevailing bribery and corruption which disgraced contested elections. The summer of that year was also rendered memorable in Lord John’s career by his first speech on Parliamentary Reform. In July, Sir Francis Burdett, undeterred by previous overwhelming defeats, brought forward his usual sweeping motion demanding universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, and annual Parliaments. Lord John’s criticism was level-headed, and therefore characteristic. He had little sympathy with extreme measures, and he knew, moreover, that it was not merely useless but injurious to the cause of Reform to urge them at such a moment. The opposition was too powerful and too impervious to anything in the nature of an idea to give such proposals just then the least chance of success. Property meant to fight hard for its privileges, and the great landowners looked upon their pocket-boroughs as a goodly heritage as well as a rightful appanage of rank and wealth. As for the great unrepresented towns, they were regarded as hot-beds of sedition, and therefore the people were to be kept in their place, and that meant without a voice in the affairs of the nation. The close corporations and the corrupt boroughs were meanwhile dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders or a laugh of scorn.