Fed up with politicians today? Just look at this rotten lot!
HISTORY PERILOUS QUESTION: THE DRAMA OF THE GREAT REFORM BILL 1832 by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20 £16.99)
WE ARE terribly proud of our parliamentary tradition in this country. The House of Commons: incorruptible, steeped in tradition, never afraid of looking ridiculous when the situation demands it. The House of Lords: ancient, wise and possibly a bit sleepy after lunch.
We rely on them to do whatever they are doing in the knowledge that they are doing their best and better than we would in the circumstances.
Or put it this way: while we might complain incessantly and vociferously about politicians, we would no more try to overthrow them than we would dance naked down Whitehall, led by Simon Cowell and with Esther Rantzen bringing up the rear.
But it wasn’t always so. In 1830, British politics was a messy business, compromised to the hilt. At the General Election that year, held because George IV had died, just over 3 per cent of the population were able to vote: 400,000 people of a population in excess of 16 million. Needless to say, they were all men.
There were 658 seats in Parliament, representing 379 constituencies. ‘Within the simplicity of these figures is concealed a system of fiendish variety and intricacy, just because it had originated so many centuries ago and evolved according to perceptions of another time,’ writes Antonia Fraser.
Many ‘pocket boroughs’ were controlled by landowners who nominated their MPs, who were expected to do what they were told. When the abolition of such seats was suggested, the Duke of Newcastle shouted: ‘May not I do what I like with my own?’ He regarded the constituency as his, and effectively it was.
In the meantime, because they had been little more than villages five centuries before, the teeming industrial powerhouses of Manchester and Birmingham returned no MPs at all.
Most parliamentarians, though, were more than happy with the status quo.
The Duke of Wellington, national hero and Tory prime minister, stood up in the House and declared ‘the country possessed at this time a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, and this by a “greater degree” than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever’.
Indeed, if he was going to start building Parliament f rom scratch, this is just the way he would do it.
‘Democracy’, meanwhile, was a
dirty word, not to be mentioned in polite conversation. (Fraser says it was roughly equivalent to the word ‘communism’ in America in the Fifties.)
But the people didn’t like it and started to show it. The French Revolution, 40 years before, was warm in their memories, as was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. More recently, a series of appalling harvests, followed by severe winter weather, had made millions hungry.
Agricultural machines were replacing men on the l and, and the replaced men were smashing them in the dead of night.
Political unions were forming around the country, some peaceful in intention, others less so.
Outside the House of Lords, people were demonstrating. ‘Liberty or Death!’ yelled one of them at a soldier.
‘I am very sorry I cannot give you Liberty,’ replied the soldier. ‘But I can give you Death if you like it at this very moment.’
Wellington’s refusal to countenance reform brought down his government and the Whigs took over. Earl Grey’s Cabinet included a duke, a marquess, two more earls, four viscounts, a baron and a baronet. (And yes, the tea was named after him.)
They began the long, drawn-out and frankly agonising process of bringing about parliamentary reform. First reading of the Bill, second reading, committee stage, third reading, off to the Lords . . . it could have failed at any stage, and actually did so at least once. When the Lords threw it out by 41 votes, one observer reflected that ‘there was no sense within the House that a measure was being decided which might cause the land to be deluged in blood’. This, then, was probably the closest we ever got to full-blooded revolution, and Fraser describes it all with gusto. As she says in her introduction, we know the Reform Bill will pass, but the people who fought for it did not. And the people are the meat and drink of this story.
Wellington and his ‘aloofness from popular reality’, in Fraser’s delicious phrase. Earl Grey, noble of demeanour, passionate reformer, but also shame- lessly nepotistic: three sons-in-law served in his government, as did a coachload of cousins.
Thomas Atwood, county banker, bourgeois Midlander, founder and leader of the Birmingham Political Union, which campaigned for reform, but only by peaceful means. Viscount Althorp, bluff countryman but skilful man manager in the House of Commons. Francis Place, the so-called ‘Radical Tailor’, raised in a debtors’ prison, autodidact, founder of the National Political Union.
In St James’s Palace (where he lived because he considered Buckingham Palace too expensive), the new king, William IV, cautiously in favour of reform, because he smells the way the wind is blowing, while his wife, Queen Adelaide, remains unrelentingly hostile.
And in the background, one or two stars of the next generation make walkon appearances. Thomas Babington Macaulay, then a young MP and already a noted orator. And a young parliamentary reporter called Charles Dickens, quietly gathering material.
It all makes for a rich landscape, a gripping tale and another fine book from one of our best popular historians.