EARL GREY BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

History Today Vol 1 - May 1951 - British Prime Ministers : II

By D. H. PENNINGTON - A Monthly Magazine Published From 72 Coleman Street London E.C. 2 -

The Crisis Of 1831-32 in Britain was not quite a revolution. There was no sudden or violent replacement of one ruling class by another: indeed the House of Commons and the Cabinet in 1833 were, if anything, more exclusively composed of the gentry and the aristocracy than in the 1820's. Nevertheless, the Reform Act marked a decisive stage in the achievement of the parliamentary democracy that in the next hundred years offered to more and more of the British people a share in choosing and influencing their rulers. During the struggle over Reform many of the typical phenomena of nineteenth-century revolutions appeared: urban riots and demonstrations, a brief resistance by the most privileged of the ruling class, and finally, the acceptance by the revolutionaries of a settlement that brought no benefits to them but conceded the demands of a broad middle section of the politically conscious. In France in 1830 and in Germany in 1848, the revolutions were perverted or defeated. The success, within its limits, of 1832 was shaped by two men - Francis Place the tailor, and Charles, second Earl Grey. Place was the organizer who took charge of a popular revolution and imposed on it a restricted political object; in Grey the Whigs had a leader who had been a Reformer in the days when Reform was a gentlemanly eccentricity and who achieved it now as a gentlemanly necessity.

Grey was born in 1764. Almost any other date would have made his career impossible, for he would have teen too young to rise with Fox or too old to triumph with Place. The Greys were a landed family in Northumberland in the fifteenth century, and had contributed members to both houses of Parliament. General Grey, father of the Prime Minister, was a younger son; but the elder brother, Sir Henry, never married, and before his death he invited his nephew to take over the estate at Howick. There, in an atmosphere of affection and unrepressed freedom, Charles and Elizabeth brought up their fifteen children. Grey's devotion to his remote country home and his reluctance to make the four-day journey to London became a source of amusement and irritation to his colleagues. Sometimes he found that the most convenient way to handle a political crisis was to stay at Howick. But his early years were spent away from home in the accepted routine of his class Eton, Cambridge, the Grand Tour. Entry into Parliament and the circle of one or other of the leaders of political society was a normal next step.

Sir Henry Grey had been a member for Northumberland, and had once led the gentlemen of the county in resisting an attempt by the Duke to choose both their members instead of only one. The Greys and the Percies were now reconciled, and when a county seat fell vacant in 1786, on the succession of the Duke's younger son to a peerage, Charles Grey became an M.P. without interrupting his continental tour or declaring his politics. It was rumoured later that Pitt had half-promised him office but the opposition, centred in the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire, offered greater social attractions. "All the beauty and wit of London ", says Lady Holland, "were on that side" , and Grey was soon " the bien aimé of the Duchess . . . a fractious, exigeant lover " - and the only one she ever had. In a very short time he was on intimate terms with Fox and with the Prince. He was one of those who knew - and denied in Parliament - the secret of the Prince's marriage to Mrs. Fitz Herbert. At Carlton House and at Brooks's Club the Whigs drank and gambled and looked forward, more or less flippantly, to the attainment of office. But their attacks on the government were not entirely devoid of political principle.

The word "Reform" was already familiar in the vocabulary of Westminster and the clubs. At its most respectable it meant "Economical Reform " - the attempt to curtail the reigning government's domination of the House of Commons through patronage and "influence". Those who demanded a change in the electoral system did so usually with the object of sharing out political power more equitably within the class that already held it. A reformed Parliament, they believed, would be more under the control of men of property. To the political chiefs Reform had many attractions, but attractions to be measured dispassionately according to the tactics of the moment. Pitt in 1785 had introduced and readily abandoned a Reform Bill. Fox, despite his desertion of the cause in his coalition with North, remained the hope of the more daring Reformers, especially when he championed the French Revolution and quarreled with Burke. But the Whigs were divided on Reform, just as the Reformers were divided between Pitt and Fox; and it was chiefly the energy and constancy of Grey that made Fox in his last years an active Reformer at the cost of losing the right wing of his followers.

For forty years before his ministry, Grey accepted as part of his political and intellectual equipment the opinion that Reform was in itself desirable. He adopted it with an ardour that distinguished him from the other prominent Whigs - and was naturally accused of doing so for the sake of his career. Its merits as a debating point were obvious. Here was a cause reminiscent of the legendary glories of 1688, and contrasting happily with the indeterminate Whig foreign policy. "A certain disposition to Reform of Parliament ... I allow to be essential in a Good Whig ", wrote Lord Holland. But he deplored Grey's rashness in "entering into an association for promoting it". Lady Holland described the Friends of the People as an after-dinner folly inspired by Lord Lauderdale's wine; and Grey himself confessed long afterwards that a word from Fox would have kept him out of " all the mess of the Friends of the People ". Fortunately, somewhere beneath Grey's cold impassive exterior, was a capacity for not always standing aloof from the "messes" his ideas produced.

Despite its daring title, the new society was as respectable as Wyvill's Yorkshire Association and more so than Cartwright's Society for Constitutional Information. Neither its "Address to the People" nor the motion which Grey introduced in the House contained specific proposals or dangerously democratic ideas. He repudiated with horror republican and Painite notions; but be did not refuse contact with Cartwright's organization, and that in turn had dealings with the London Corresponding Society and its leader, Thomas Hardy. These members of "the industrious lower and middle classes of society ", as Hardy called them, did not amount to anything like a mass movement. Nevertheless, they were active enough to alarm the government and encourage the repression that culminated in the trial of Hardy for treason. Grey watched the trial "in order ", he told Elizabeth Ponsonby to whom he had just become engaged, "to learn how to conduct myself when it comes to my turn". The jury found Hardy not guilty, and Grey's turn never came.

In 1795 the Society of the Friends of the People succumbed to the fears - or patriotism - of its members. But support for Reform was still part of the price of admission to the most brilliant and most aristocratic Whig circle. In 1797 ninety-three Foxites dutifully supported Grey in a Reform motion which included a ratepayer franchise, triennial Parliaments, and a large redistribution of seats. Many of the ninety-three must have been Reformers because they wanted to be Foxites rather than Foxites because they were Reformers. The rejection of this motion marked the beginning of an episode that would have been impossible at any later date - the "secession" of the Foxite Whigs. The parliamentary struggle for peace and liberty was called off; its leaders retired from Westminster, visited each others estates, hunted and dined, read and talked, and toasted "our sovereign the People"." If," wrote Grey to Fox," idleness is the best gift of God to man, there was never anybody so highly favoured of heaven." Reform now became - for Grey hardly less than the others - a principle but not a policy. Reform someday, Reform" in a manner consistent with the security of the constitution" he still approved; but "to the success of a temperate reform no impediment is calculated to have a more hostile influence than the attempt to force a reform by public clamour ". When the movement was revived in 1808, with Burdett and Whitbread - the brewer's son who had been Grey's friend since Eton days - organizing meetings and petitions, he approved of Burdett's imprisonment. He offered no support to a measure, much less drastic than his own of 1797, for which Brand got 115 votes in the Commons. And he remained silently hostile to the movement which produced in the Hampden club a firm link between the new generation of young Whigs and the popular Reform movement.

Meanwhile, the Foxites, having drifted back from their secession, found themselves in an uneasy and un-heroic position on two other professed principles - peace with France, and religious liberty. They had loudly proclaimed their sympathies with the original ideals of the French Revolution; but guillotines and invading armies were another matter. Foxites must not be jacobins or traitors. They combined therefore energetic complaints of the government's mismanagement of the war with intermittent and equivocal demands for peace. To overthrow the government they cooperated and eventually united with the Grenville group which was most eager for war; and for a year, from February 1806 to March 1807, they had their reward in the Ministry of All the Talents. Grey took the Admiralty, and then, on the death of Fox, succeeded to the Foreign Office and the leadership of the party, repudiating Whitbread and the more radical section of the Whigs who wanted a new attempt at peace. On Catholic Emancipation the Whigs professed to be united; but the introduction of a very small measure of relief brought the government down. It seems probable that Grey hoped to deceive the King, and that George pretended to have been deceived in order to provoke a crisis. Grey offered to drop the measure for the time being; but the King demanded a pledge that it should be dropped for ever. He knew his Whigs well enough to beat them.

The years of the retreat from Moscow, of Waterloo, and of Peterloo were spent by Grey in his " beloved idleness ". After his resignation the Duke of Northumberland and the " no popery " cry deprived him of his county seat. He became a member for Appleby (where the Earls of Thanet and Lonsdale owned the pigstyes that constituted burgage tenures) and then for Tavistock, the Russell family borough. In 1807 he succeeded to his father's new Earldom. Whig society saw little of the "very type of a grand seigneur " who was its nominal head. In addition to his love for Howick and his wife and children, bad health helped to keep him away from London. ( " And no wonder," said Creevey, " with all he eats and his little exercise." ) His friends paid tribute to his honesty, openness and humanity. His enemies among the writers of elegant gossip agreed in condemning his laziness and his vanity. "A man of violent temper, haughty, arrogant and overbearing ", said Mrs. Arbuthnot. After the war he gave them scope for other accusations. The Princess Lieven, to whose wiles Metternich had already succumbed, made it her pleasant duty to assist her husband, the Russian ambassador, by charming her way into the confidence of political leaders on both sides. From 1824 almost to the end of his life Grey was her faithful friend and correspondent, writing warmly affectionate, though never passionate, letters to his "dearest Princess ", and looking forward impatiently to their not very frequent meetings. Their fundamental disagreement on European and British politics produced some sharp exchanges; occasionally be complained of her indiscretion in passing on his confidences to Tories or foreign powers ; but in return she kept him well informed of the views of his friends and enemies. The correspondence continued throughout his ministry: once he wrote her a hasty note from a cabinet meeting. But it is impossible to define any point at which she changed his views on persons or policies.

In October 1830 Grey, at the age of sixty-six set out from Howick on the road that was at last taking him to political power. There had been violent revolts that summer in Paris and Brussels. In Britain, at the election after the death of George IV, every popular seat had returned a candidate pledged to Reform. For Grey it was not the climax of long years of patient resolve. Between 1809 and 1812 there were repeated intrigues for a coalition - which he eventually rejected. In 1825 he resigned the leadership and in 1826 announced his " fixed and final determination " never to take office again. In 1827 and 1828 he once more considered coalition with the Canningites or even with Wellington, and it was the hostility of George IV rather than the question of Parliamentary Reform that kept him out. But there had been a moment when the popular agitation for Reform, born of the post-war poverty an oppression, and culminating in Peterloo, revealed to him the new significance of his old principles. Reform was no longer an adventure among the Whigs of Brooks's; it was the opportunity to find new and lasting strength for the party after a generation in opposition, and save the country from" an alternative of a most afflicting nature ". In 1820 Grey confided Holland proposals almost identical with those of 1831. "Less than this. . would do little to conciliate public opinion"; a Whig ministry could only stand upon public confidence; an the details of the Reform might be so arrange as to help that confidence to show itself in seats.

After a winter of doubts and speculation Russell announced the proposals to a shocked House of Commons in March 1831. Nearly a quarter of the seats were to be transferred from small boroughs to the larger un-represented towns, and there was to be a new uniform franchise which in practice almost doubled the existing number of half a million voters. During the next fourteen months Grey won the struggle to save his England from the follies and passions of immoderate men. In the cabinet (every member of which had inherited or acquired a hereditary title) he defeated, by uncompromising threats to resign, the attempts to move too quickly. In the Lords his smooth, never brilliant oratory and his assiduous personal negotiations may have held a few waverers. But it was in handling the King that Grey's qualities were of most value. The two had much in common - an inborn preference for stability and inaction, a recognition of necessity, and a determination to act " correctly ". They agreed, too, in horror at the notion of the secret ballot, "so inconsistent", William wrote to Grey, with the manly spirit and free avowal of opinion which distinguish the people of England". Without ever yielding on major policies, Grey was able to overcome the Queen's opposition and the King's evasiveness, and to win him back to his broken promise of the creation of peers. He could only do so because William also was a little afraid of his people.

Twice during the struggle the danger of violent revolution seemed imminent. In the autumn of 1831 Place's National Political Union, formed "to support the King and his ministers in accomplishing their great measure of Parliamentary Reform ", barely held its own against the working-class bodies demanding universal suffrage. The riots and fires in town and country, the stories of men arming and drilling, and the memories of France helped Grey to resist every proposal to come to terms with the enemies of the Bill. In the spring, when Grey resigned with the inevitable professions of relief, Place had the popular movement under better control. By the threat of civil war, and by the run on the banks, the tailor put the earl back into power. Only once did Grey meet his ally in person, when Place led an uninvited midnight deputation of London tradesmen to Downing Street. The interview was not a success. It was necessary to hide one of the delegates whose appearance might have disgusted the Prime Minister; and Grey's brief replies gave them the completely false impression that he had agreed to whittle down the Reform proposals. Thereafter his only contacts with his sovereign the people were through the medium of Hobhouse.

When the Bill was passed Grey suffered the embarrassment of being a popular hero. A banquet in his honour at Edinburgh was welcome enough, but he felt that there was some misunderstanding in the tumultuous enthusiasm that pursued him on the journey. "My speeches ", he assured the Princess, " were uniformly and strongly conservative in the true sense of the word" ; and he deplored the signs that all the Whigs were becoming Radicals. His calm old age after he resigned in 1834 was broken only by the momentary possibility of a return to power with Peel. But Peel was the man of the new era in politics which Grey's achievement had opened. He understood, as Grey did not, the problems and strategies of a reformed Parliament in an industrial nation. Neither the high principles nor the political cunning embodied in the Reform Act prevented the Whig defeat in 1841 ; and the years of Chartism and the Anti-Corn-Law League showed little sign of that social and political stability for which Grey had worked. He died at Howick in the wet summer of 1845 which led to the repeal of the Corn Laws. Very slowly power was moving away from men of his kind.