Lord Grey of the Reform bill, being the life of Charles, second Earl Grey

Front matter

V

.0^-.

5.0 <^.

Preface

When the late Earl Grey invited me, in 191 3, to make use of the Howick Papers, in order to write the life of his grandfather, I asked him whether I might be allowed a freedom of historical comment more extensive than would be proper in the biography of a statesman recently dead. The permission was granted with characteristic readiness and generosity. My work was interrupted by an interval of more than four years of war, during which the late Lord Grey died, but his son, in the same spirit, desired me to complete the book.

The original biography of the Reform Bill Premier, begun by his children for the benefit of a generation that had known him, was suspended midway,^ and the work had to be undertaken afresh. After the lapse of so many decades, the nature of the task had changed. A very different book is now wanted from that which would have been welcomed at a time when Russell, Palmerston, and other leading actors in the conflict of the great Reform Bill were still in public life, and when the clubs were full of men who remembered the Prince Regent and the Rotten Boroughs. Many debates, incidents, and intrigues that convulsed Brooks's, and were long held in memory there, have now lost the halo of traditional interest, without acquiring historical importance. The biographer, for example, is no longer called upon to narrate in detail the series of once famous negotiations by which Grey evaded office between 1809 and 18 12. On the other hand, the trend and change of middle and working class opinion during the forty years of

^ Some Account of the Life and Opinions of Charles, Second Earl Grey, by Lieut.-Gen. Hon. C. Grey, 1861, goes no further than the year 18 17.

viii PREFACE

the movement for Parliamentary Reform over which Grey presided, are of deeper interest than ever in the historical perspective of our own day, and give unity and permanent value to Lord Grey's career, as viewed down the lengthening ages.

For this reason I have not only used the rich treasury of the Howick Papers themselves, and the documents relative to my subject in Holland House and Lambton Castle, most kindly put at my disposition by Lord Ilchester and Lord Durham, but I have studied — among the Additional MSS. in the British Museum and among the Home Office Papers — the currents on which the ship of Reform was launched by Grey in the period of the first French Revolution, and the all-powerful but dangerous flood-tide on which he brought the vessel into harbour in 1832.

The object of the present volume is to recall the life of a great historical character to the public of our day. In an age when the law of perpetual and rapid change is accepted as inevitable, and the difficulty is to obtain progress without violence, there may be profit in the story of a statesman who, after a period of long stagnation and all too rigid conservatism, initiated in our country a yet longer period of orderly democratic progress, and at the critical moment of the transition averted civil war and saved the State from entering on the vicious circle of revolution and reaction.

I am grateful to Sir Algernon West for access to letters of Lady Grey, and to Lord Spencer for Grey's letters to Althorp. I am much indebted to Mr. and Mrs. Hammond for help and suggestions ; and to Lord Halifax for putting at my disposal, with indefatigable kindness, his traditional knowledge of the Grey family in that period, and of the circle in which they moved.

G. M. TREVELYAN.

December, 191 9.

Book I The Formation Of Parties

CHAP. PAGE

I. Boyhood and Youth — Whig Society and Politics on the Eve of the French Revolution . . . . . i

II. The Friends of the People . . 28

III. Fox, Grey, and the Party Split —

Loyalists and Democrats — War — June 1792 to February 1793 . . S3

IV. The Great Repression — Hardy's Trial

— Grey's Reform Motions — 1 793-1 797 73

V. The Secession — The Foxite Whigs at

Home — Howick — Ireland — 1 797-1 801 98

BOOK II THE STAGNATION OF PARTIES Introductory . . . . .117

I. The * Euthanasia ' and the Confusion OF Parties — Peace and War — 1801- 1805 ^^^

K CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

II. The Ministry of All the Talents — February 1806 to March 1807 — The Death of Fox . . . .142

III. Shades of Opposition — Tilsit to

IV. Whigs, Radicals, and Reform — Peter-

loo AND THE Second Repression — Home Life — Lambton and Brougham — The Queen's Trial — Canning and the Whig Party — 18 16-1827 . .180

Book III The Reform Bill

I. Fall of Wellington — Formation of the Grey Ministry— Difficulties of the First Months, November 1830 to February 1831 . . . ' "^33

II. The Preparation of the Bill — November 1830 to February 1831 . .261

III. The Struggle for the Bill — King,

Commons, and People — March to October 1831 .... 280

IV. The Struggle for the Bill — King,

Peers, and People — October 1831 to April 1832 . . . . . 311

V. The Struggle for the Bill — The

' Days of May ' . . . . 337

CONTENTS

XI

VI. After the Bill — Belgium Established — The First Reformed Parliament to THE Retirement of Lord Grey, July

Epilogue — The Last Years, i 834-1 845

Appendix

A.

B.

D.

E.

F.

G.

H.

J.

APPENDICES

PAGE

'The Bill' in Embryo (1820) . . -371

Grey's Views of Canning's Policy, 1822-

1827 373

The Question of Grey taking Office

under Wellington, i 828-1 830 . . 376

Formation of the Grey Ministry . '378

The Framing of the Reform Bill . . 380

The Dissolution of April 1831 . . 382

'Bear' Ellice as Whip during the Reform

Bill .,,.... 384 Peer-making and the 'Days of May' . 385 Lord Grey's Retirement. . . -391

Genealogical Tree . . . facing p. 392

ILLUSTRATIONS

Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, k.g., i 764-1 845 Frontispiece

From the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence at Hozvick, about 1827.

Facing page

Sir Henry Grey, of Howick, Bart., 1722-

1808, Uncle of the Prime Minister . 2

From a picture at Hozoick.

Charles Grey at the Time he left Eton . 9

From the picture by Romney at Howick.

Charles Grey, M.P., 1793 • • • 75

From the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence at Howick.

Mary Elizabeth (Ponsonby), Lady Grey,

1776-1861 ...... 83

From the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence at Howick.

Some of the Grey Children on the Sea-shore NEAR Howick, 18 13 . . . 109 From the picture by Henry Thomson^ R.A., at Howick.

General Sir Charles Grey, of Fallodon.

Afterwards first Earl Grey ; 1 729-1 807 ; father of the Prime Minister . . .146

From the picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1795) at Howick.

From a print at Howick.

xiv ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing page

The Queen's Trial in the House of Lords,

1820 ...•••• ^-' Froffi an engraving after the painting by Sir George Hayter.

Burdett, Cobbett, Althorp, Stanley . .216

Prince Talleyrand and Lord Holland *A

tete a tete' ^^9

From ' U. B.' Political Sketches.

The Bill in Committee— Wetherell Speaking 283 From ' H. B.' Political Sketches.

' A Political Union ' : John Bull, Grey, William IV. .

Grey and Brougham Dining at Hounslow,

'John Bull Intervenes': Grey, John Bull,

the King, Wellington .... 34° From ' H. B.' Political Sketches.

The Reform Bill receiving the Royal Assent in the House of Lords . • • 349

After the painting by Samuel W. Reynolds.

Chapter I Boyhood And Youth Whig Society And Politics

ON THE EVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

' At an age when most of those who distinguish themselves in life are still contending for prizes and Fellowships at college, he had won for himself a conspicuous place in Parliament. At twenty-three he had been thought worthy to be ranked with the veteran statesmen who appeared as the delegates of the British Commons at the bar of the British nobility.' — Macaulay on Charles Grey.

The map of Britain shows England thrusting up a wedge far northward along its eastern coast, to touch the Tweed and claim the Till. This extremity of Northumberland consists of a long belt of low countrylying between the highest part of the Cheviots and the Northern Sea, arable along the coast, but some miles inland swelling up into moors. Moorland and arable alike are dominated by great presences — to the west the rounded mass of Cheviot Hill, and to the east the ocean, seen from every piece of rising ground when the day is clear, while the west wind is for ever tearing across, as a messenger between hills and sea. Since the days of Cuthbert on Holy Island it has been a fine coast for the breeding and rearing of men. It could not have been held for England without hard fighting, on a larger scale than in other parts of Northumberland, for it was a royal highroad of invasion between Scotland and England; Names such as Flodden and Etal, Bamborough and Dunstanborough, Alnwick and Warkworth recall, not the bickerings of border outlaws, but the strife of two great Kingdoms. In all this work the Greys had their full share. But, although they possessed land at Howick from 1319 onwards, they seem not to have lived there during the period of the Border Wars. Only when that rough school of heroism and romance was about to be closed for ever we find, at the end of Elizabeth's reign, the * Greys of Howick ' setting up as a distinct local branch. When George III came to the throne these Greys of Howick were a numerous clan. The eldest. Sir Henry, uncle to the Reform Bill Premier, lived as a bachelor in the old peel tower of Howick, near the sea, perhaps already meditating the more habitable j mansion that twenty years later he built in a fortunate! hour. The only one of Sir Henry's brothers who concerns f our story was Charles Grey the elder, w^ho had already |j been wounded at Minden, and was destined to notable military services in another hemisphere, which earned him in the end the title of first Earl Grey of Howick. But he always lived, as a cadet of the family, not at Howick, but five miles off at Fallodon, a small country house half-way between the moors and the sea, which! his mother had brought into the Grey inheritance. Here, on March 13, 1764, his son Charles, the future Reform Bill Premier, was born, and not many weeks later, by the death of a baby brother, became the eldest of his generation.^

^ See genealogical tree at end of book.

Sir Henry Grey, of Howick, Bart., 1722-1808. Uncle of the Prime Minister.

From a picture at Howick.

NORTHUMBERLAND 3

Both Fallodon, his parents' house, where he was born, and Howick, his uncle's house, which he himself was to inhabit for the last forty-four years of his life, were familiar ground to him in his childhood, and in his schoolboy holidays. Fallodon and Howick both breathe the spell of that windy land between hills and sea, which few cast off if they have been bred in it, least of all the Greys in the cherished intervals between one bout of public service and the next. But it was Howick that most won the heart of Charles Grey the younger. It stands, drawn back a mile from the shore, between the lonely ruins of Dunstanborough and the little port of Alnmouth. That coast, since celebrated by Turner and by Swinburne, was then bleakly unknown to good society, which had not yet developed a taste for such severe and distant joys. Their friends in London thought of the Greys, as old Chaucer thought of Alan de Strother, as coming from some place

' Fer in the North, I can not telle where.'

It would have been happier for Grey if yet more of his boyhood had been passed in the kindly North. But the custom of the age prevailed even with the most loving of parents, and at six years old he was sent to an ill-chosen school at Marylebone. There he remained miserably for three years, suffering from a series of illnesses. The first of these overtook him immediately after his arrival in the South, and the poor little sick child, separated by four long days* posting from his parents' care, was put in the sole charge of a nurse who lived, as luck would have it, at Tyburn. The first day when the boy of six was well enough to be taken out of doors she took him across the road to see a batch of Jews hung for forgery, and lest he should miss any of the sight mounted him on the shoulders of a grenadier. The dying contortions of the wretches as they were one by one turned off the cart, left such an impress on a mind more than ordinarily sensitive that, in the reign of Victoria, the statesman who had passed the Reform Bill would wake sweating from a nightmare vision of this old horror of Hogarth's London.

At nine years old he was sent to Eton, and remained there till he was seventeen (1773-178 1). It was here that he first touched the great world of politics and fashion, to which Eton was then an antechamber. Here he began a friendship of more than sixty years' duration with Richard, afterwards Marquis Wellesley, the half-ally of his later political life ; here he formed a yet closer personal attachment with his more shortlived brother Liberals, Sam Whitbread and William Lambton.^ Canning was such a small boy when Grey left the school that we can hardly suppose that they had yet found occasion to dislike one another.

Grey, I believe, gained much from Eton, but, at the risk of alienating from him a powerful body of opinion, I must confess that he was not a good * Old Etonian.' In the first year of his Reform Ministry he wrote to Wellesley on July 22, 1831, 'I am to be at Windsor on Sunday for [Eton] Speeches on Monday, where I have not been since I spoke myself fifty years ago.' He refused to send any of his numerous sons to a public school, on the ground that he himself had been taught nothing at the most famous of those establishments. This must be taken as a criticism directed at the limited aims of the curriculum and of the system, for he certainly got the best that Eton set out to provide. He succeeded there, socially and scholastically, and in those days athletic prowess was not indispensable.

Some of Grey's school verses won a place in the

^ Grey was in the Sixth Form 1780-1 ; Wellesley in 1778 ; Whitbread in 1779-80; Lambton in 1782.

ETON 5

famous selection published some years later under the title ' Musae Etonenses.' Although, to judge by his strictures on the school course, he did not regard the writing of Latin verse as affording by itself a complete education, he was nevertheless much devoted to the lore of that peculiar art, which Milton did not disdain. In 1842 the octogenarian Marquis of Wellesley sent a volume containing his own Latin verses to Earl Grey, aged seventy-eight. The ex-Premier replied to the ex- Governor-General of India : * I remember well admiring when at Eton the beautiful exercises which are contained in this collection, and which then made so great an impression on me that I could still repeat many of them by heart.' When we remember what had happened in the world in East and West during the sixty and odd years that Grey was carrying about Wellesley's Eton verses in his head, and what parts the two boys had played in preserving the Imperium et Libertas of modern Rome, we may think that the schoolrooms as well as the playing fields of Eton have had their part in English history.

The fact is that the Eton and Harrow education of that time was well directed towards a definite if insufficient end. It may have ill served some of the larger purposes of the community, but at least it forwarded the success in later life of the most important boys, those namely who were born to the purple of a seat in either House of Parliament, or who seemed likely by their talents to become recipients of a well-bestowed interest in a rotten borough. As Mr. Butler has admirably put it,^ the system of these schools

aimed at the training of statesmen, at a time when statesmanship consisted largely in winning and retaining the confidence of an assembly of some six hundred gentlemen. Special attention was therefore paid to oratory, and oratory of a particular type — large, dignified, lofty, appealing to the sense of honour and

1 Passing of the Great Reform Bill, J. R. Butler, p. 233.

responsibility of a particular class. Such was the object of the Speech-days so much in vogue, not less than of the specialized study of the Classics as the model of language and taste. Parliamentary eloquence was founded on the pure and lordly speech of the ancient poets and orators, who were freely quoted in the ordinary conversation of gentlemen ; Shakespeare was their only rival, but he was known with a thoroughness that would be rare to-day. Similarity of education combined with similarity of social position to produce a close society favourable to high spirit and intensity of life rather than to breadth of sympathy. For effective debate it is necessary that speakers and audience should share a common fund of experience and a common hinterland of thought.

Eton was a recruiting ground for Parliament, not only because of its peculiar education, but by reason of its personal connections. An ' Eton reputation ' was a long step towards a seat in the House. Grey might or might not have sat for Northumberland at twenty-two if he had never been at Eton, but it is in the highest degree unlikely that the friends and relations of the bourgeois Canning and Whitbread would have put those young gentlemen into the House so soon as they did, if Eton had not first proclaimed them as two of her chosen spirits.

It is indeed easy to point out the shortcomings of an education which Grey himself thought bad. And certainly, when the two Houses of public-schoolmen and classical scholars were asked by an untimely Fate to deal with the economic and social problems of the Industrial Revolution during a twenty years' war, the result for the community was as disastrous as might have been expected. But during the greater part of the eighteenth century, itself a * classical ' period of stationary happiness for a considerable portion of the people of England, this close literary education had at least the merit of producing an aristocracy fit to set the fashion to other classes. Men of the world, but by no means ashamed of the things of the mind — •

GENERAL GREY 7

brought up to be proud of their knowledge of the Classics, Shakespeare, and Milton, and the histories of Greece, Rome, and Stuart England — the small group of families who governed the State with perhaps indifferent success, proved the best patrons of literature since the Athenian democracy. These aristocrats made the world, that doffed its hat to them, doff to the Muses also. For instance, while Grey was at Eton, the first volumes of Gibbon's History appeared ; at the high prices of that time they only sold 2,000 copies in the first year, but those copies, having been sold to the right kind of people, at once ensured to Gibbon an European reputation, and placed him, in the just regard of his contemporaries, by the side of Livy and Tacitus. Similarly, the great world of fashion and politics imposed on England the worship of Shakespeare ; it is due to the patrons of Garrick and Dr. Johnson that we still call the Elizabethan age, * the age of Shakespeare,' as if letters were three parts of life. It was in this limited but truly civilised state of society and intellect, now very barely imaginable to us, that Grey was brought up, both at Eton and at home.

While his son was at Eton, General Charles Grey was earning fame as one of the best of our Generals in the war of the American Revolution. In a night onslaught at Paoli, near Valley Forge, he achieved all the conditions of successful surprise, and beat up Wayne's quarters with the cold steel. Among other expedients, he had caused the men whose muskets were loaded to knock out the flints, so as to prevent any chance explosion, a device which gained for the victor of Paoli the honourable nickname of ' no-flint Grey.' During the nineteenth century a portrait of Benjamin Franklin looked down from over the chimney-piece of Howick library at the domestic felicity o^ the Whig statesmen descended from this fine Tory soldier. When the British troops occupied Philadelphia, the portrait had been taken out of Franklin's house as the only permissible spoils of war, implying indeed a compliment to the worldwide fame of the philosophic rebel. The plunderer was no less interesting a person than the unfortunate Major Andre, then General Grey's aide-de-camp, who presented the picture to his chief. In the twentieth century Albert Earl Grey, Governor- General of Canada, gave back the portrait to the American people, who presented him instead with an excellent copy that now hangs in the same place at Howick.

In 1 78 1 Grey left Eton for Trinity College, Cambridge. The eighteenth century was not a time of profound learning or of intellectual ferment at either University. The dons, as described by Gibbon for Oxford, and by Wordsworth for Cambridge, seem scarcely to have been libelled in Rowlandson's caricatures. They were little better than the other clerical sinecurists of that epoch, with some touch of eccentricity often added to distinguish the academician. On the walls of Trinity College there is a strange absence of portraits of great men of learning between Bentley and Porson. One must look before or after the sleepy century for true academic fame. Under such careless tutelage young men of family at least enjoyed themselves, continuing the lazy, lively existence, far from purely philistine, which they had begun at Eton or at Westminster.

Grey ^ consorted at Cambridge with his Eton friends, Lambton, of his own College, and the Johnian

^ The Dictionary of National Biography incorrectly states that he was at King's, no doubt because he came so prominently from Eton. His real College is stated not only in a MS. by his son, but in Mr. Rouse Ball's monumental work. Trinity College Admissions, where we read, under the year 178 1 : — ' Grey, Charles, son of Charles Grey of Falladon (query Fallowdon), Northumberland. School, Eton (Mr. Davies). Age 17. Fellow-commoner, Nov. 12, 178 1. Tutors, Mr. Therond and Mr. Cranke. Matriculated 178 1, Did not graduate.' The Trinity registrar of that date was probably not the first, and certainly he was not the last, to boggle over the spelling of Fallodon.

Charles Grey at the time he left Eton.

From the picfitre by Roinizcy at Hoivick.

CAMBRIDGE 9

Whitbread. It may have been in their company that he first developed a leaning towards what we now call Liberal opinions, which were a novelty in his father's house. At any rate, when the test of the French Revolution came, ten years later, this Eton and Cambridge trio figured together in the list, once of reproach, now of honour, of the Society of ' Friends of the People,' and stood together in Parliament for the down-trodden liberties of Englishmen till the death of Lambton in 1797 and of Whitbread in 18 15. The brewer married Grey's sister ; and Lambton, the landed magnate of County Durham, was the father of Grey's son-in-law and Cabinet colleague, the famous Lord Durham of the Canadian report. During their Cambridge period the three friends were painted by Romney, each seated with a book in his hand, as if the three pictures formed one set ; they were done for the Head Master of Eton as * leaving presents,' and hang in the Provost's Lodge with other fine portraits by Reynolds and Romney of the young men whom Eton delighted to honour.^

But it would be a mistake to imagine that these three scholars and future statesmen chose while at Cambridge * to scorn delights and live laborious days,* like Pitt at Pembroke a few years before. They were devoted friends of the Falstaff of the University, Thomas Adkin of Corpus, a Bachelor of Arts, a little older than themselves, whose strange life and ready humour have been rescued from oblivion by Gunning. In his quarters at the White Bear Inn, known in his day as ' Adkin College,' nearly opposite Trinity, he used to entertain Grey and his other friends with Attic revelry, where much true wit degenerated, as night wore on, into Bacchanalian riot.

^ For reproductions see Mr. Lionel Cust's Eton Portraits. The reproduction opposite is from the replica at Howick, where it forms one of a set of Romneys representing the four sons of General Grey.

lo LORD GREY OF THE REFORM BILL

Whenever the Proctors entered the Inn [writes Gunning] for the purpose of sending to their respective Colleges any undergraduates who might be found amongst so tumultuous an assemblage, they were immediately informed by the waiter that the noise proceeded from a private room where Squire Adkin was giving a dinner to a few friends. Whether this was a sufficient answer to prevent the University officers entering the room, I am not able to say, as the experiment was never made ; but the waiters were always questioned as to there being any undergraduates in the party. They never failed to answer, they could not tell, but imagined there were none, as they had seen neither caps nor gowns, and that the gentlemen were all in boots and leather breeches. ^

The studies of Cambridge were in those days in somewhat too striking contrast to the rigorous classicism of Eton. The only letter of Grey's of this period that has survived, written in his second term at Trinity, says :

You enquire how I like Cambridge. I answer, very much. My only objection to it is that I think the study too confined. If a man is not a mathematician he is nobody. Mathematicks and Philosophy supply the place of Classicks and all other studies ; though whatever mode is most agreeable to a young man he is at perfect liberty to pursue.

After school and college came, in those days, the third part of a gentleman's education — the Grand Tour. Foreign travel was then taken, not as now in sips periodically administered once or twice a year, but in one deep draught in early youth. During most of the time between his departure from Trinity in 1784 and the beginning of his Parliamentary career in 1787, Grey was moving about through Southern France, Switzerland, and Italy, at first alone and later * in the j suite of Henry Duke of Cumberland.' One long letter I of his, that chance has preserved, gives us a glimpse of him,

^ Gunning's Cambridge, i. 56-66 ; Broughton (Hobhouse), Recollections, i. 92.

THE GRAND TOUR ii

like so many before and after, fascinated by Palladio's Theatre at Vicenza, astonished by the Roman amphitheatre at Verona, depressed by the gloom of Mantua, and preferring the scenery of Lago Maggiore even to the shores of Lake Leman. In the larger cities he had the opportunity of seeing much of foreign society, for travelling Englishmen then enjoyed the hospitality not only of the French but of the Italian Courts and salons. He came away with a lifelong skill in the language and literature of Italy. The Grand Tour helped to develop in him that excellent habit of mind whereby he always regarded foreign countries, not as pawns in the diplomatic game, but as places inhabited by human beings with rights and aspirations of their own.

In July 1786, while still abroad, he was returned at a by-election for the County of Northumberland, and he first took his seat in the new session of January 1787. The scarcity of family papers prior to 1792 makes it impossible to analyse with certainty the motives of his early political attachments. The difficulty is the greater because these motives, before the issues raised by the French Revolution sobered him for life, were probably not a little personal, and as much connected with Brooks's Club, Devonshire House, and the company of Charles Fox and his friends, as with any principle in politics. It is indeed hard to discern any principle, least of all of a Liberal character, in the actions of Opposition during the years when they were denouncing Pitt's Free Trade and pacific policy' towards France, and plotting to climb back to power on the shoulders of the Prince Regent. Grey's father was, if anything, a supporter of Pitt, and the junior member for Northumberland had been returned at his first election with that delightful freedom from pledges and obligations which county members then so often enjoyed. Even after he had been taking a leading part in opposition for several months, Fox still denied to him the title of * party man.' ^ But it would appear that from the moment he arrived in London he had gravitated to the society of those who were working for Pitt's overthrow. And, indeed, for good company and good talk, no party was ever better worth joining than that of Fox, Burke, Sheridan, and the authors of the Rolliad when it was still swelling in size at every new edition. Grey had soon adopted all the quarrels of his allies with the light-hearted enthusiasm of two-and-twenty.