100 DUKE OF YORK CUSTOS OF THE KING. [1819. Household Bill, and the majority for the clause had been 59:-" You see this spirited House of Commons knows how to demean itself when any solid act of baseness, such as the 10,000l. to the duke of York, is in agitation.” Mr. Charles Williams Wynn, in a letter to the marquess of Buckingham, shows that there were other reasons for this measure than the desire to put a large sum into the somewhat empty pockets of the king's son :—“ The duke of York's anxious wish was to have avoided the question, by declining all salary; but general Grenville says, 'the Regent compelled him to take it.' And one of the duke's most intimate friends, who came down to vote for him last night, told Phillimore, in confidence, that the answer to the duke's request was, 'So, sir! you want to be popular at our expense.'"† The state of the currency, and the question of the resumption of cash payments, were subjects of paramount importance in the deliberations of this session. Secret Committees of both Houses had been appointed to inquire into the state of the Bank of England. Early in April both committees presented Reports, recommending that a Bill should be forthwith passed to prohibit the continuance of the payment in gold by the Bank of their notes issued previous to the 1st of January, 1817, in conformity with the voluntary notice to that effect of the directors. The circulation of these notes having been unusually large, and the price of gold being about 3 per cent. above that of paper, six or seven millions had been rapidly withdrawn from the Bank coffers. It was stated in the Reports of the Committees that the measure which they recommended had for its object to facilitate the final and complete restoration of cash payments. Mr. Peel, who had been first returned to Parliament in 1809, and who was now, at the age of thirty-one, member for the University of Oxford, was chosen chairman of the Committee of the House of Commons on the currency question. He then filled no office under government. In the agitation of this question he first signally manifested that remarkable quality of mind which led to the most important results of his statesmanship. Early in February Mr. Wynn wrote, “Peel, who is the chairman of the Bank Committee, professes, I find, to have as yet formed no opinion on the subject, but to be open to conviction; and the same is the language of the duke of Wellington." On the 24th of May the ministerial resolutions were proposed to the House of Commons by Mr. Peel. The Resolution which he had to submit to the House had been adopted unanimously by the Committee. In consequence of the evidence before the Committee, and the discussions upon it, his opinion with regard to this question had undergone a material change. "He was ready to avow, without shame or remorse, that he went into the Committee with a very different opinion from that which he at present entertained; for his views of the subject were most materially different when he voted against the resolutions brought forward by Mr. Horner in 1811, as the chairman of the Bullion Committee. He now, with very little modification, concurred in the principles laid down in the fourteen first resolutions submitted to the House by that very able and much lamented individual. He conceived them * . "Memoir of Sydney Smith," vol. ii. p. 177. "Court of England during the Regency," vol. ii. p. 321. 1819.] CURRENCY-CRIMINAL LAWS. 101 Founded to represent the true nature and laws of our monetary system." It was in this Session of Parliament that sir James Mackintosh succeeded to a great trust which devolved upon him by the death of sir Samuel Romillythe advocacy of amendment in the criminal laws. On the 2nd of March, he moved for a Select Committee "to consider of so much of the Criminal Laws as relates to capital punishment in felonies." He did not propose, he said, to form a new criminal code, nor to suggest the abolition of the punishment of death, nor to take away the right of pardon from the crown; he did not aim at realizing any universal principle. His object was to bring the letter of the law more near to its practice, under which the remission of the law formed the rule and the execution the exception. "It is one of the greatest evils which can befal a country when the criminal law and the virtuous feeling of the community are in hostility to each other. They cannot be long at variance without injury to one, perhaps to both. One of my objects is, to approximate them; to make good men the anxious supporters of the criminal law, and to restore, if it has been injured, that zealous attachment to the law in general, which, even in the most tempestuous times of our history, has distinguished the people of England among the nations of the world." The proposition of sir James Mackintosh was opposed by the government; but, upon a division, the numbers in favour of the motion were 147; against it, 128. The Report of the Committee recommended the repeal of many capital punishments. Six bills, embodying some of these recommendations, were introduced by Mackintosh in the Session of 1820. The determination of the Lord Chancellor to stand, without yielding an inch, upon the ancient ways, was put to the test by a remarkable occurrence in 1818. In the Court of King's Bench, in the celebrated case of Ashford and Thornton, an "appeal of murder" was prosecuted, which involved such a "trial by battle" as Shakspere has exhibited between "the armourer and his man." Lord Campbell says, as regards the appeal of murder in 1818, “I myself saw the appellee, on being required to plead, throw down his gauntlet on the floor, and insist on clearing his innocence by battle-as the judges held he was entitled to do." Lord Campbell adds, that it was the opinion of many great lawyers that this appeal of murder, which might be brought after an acquittal before a jury, and in which the Crown had no power to pardon, was a glorious badge of the rights and privileges of Englishmen. "Yet Hansard, vol. xl. col. 677. Ibid., vol. xxxix, col. 784. Henry VI., Second Part, act 2, scene 3. 102 PARLIAMENTARY REFORM-GRAMPOUND. [1819. Lord Chancellor Eldon, to the amazement of the House of Peers and of the public, moved the second reading of a Bill, sent up by the Commons, to reform those practices, which he described as abuses, and, notwithstanding their antiquity, attacked in the most unsparing manner."* The conversion of lord Eldon to the support of any legal innovation was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was opposed to a great popular authority, the Common Council of the City of London, who petitioned Parliament that the people might not be deprived of their ancient and undoubted right of appeal in criminal cases. In this session, the question of Parliamentary Reform was again agitated by sir Francis Burdett. He proposed that, early in the next session, the House should take into its consideration the state of the representation. The occasion was remarkable for the first declaration of the opinions of lord John Russell, who had entered the House of Commons in 1813, at the age of twenty-one. Lord John did not agree with those who opposed all and every system of Reform. He agreed in the propriety of disfranchising such boroughs as were notoriously corrupt; he would restrict the duration of Parliament to three years. "He could not, however, pledge himself to support a measure that went the length of proposing an inquiry into the general state of the representation, because such an inquiry was calculated to throw a slur upon the representation of the country, and to fill the minds of the people with vague and indefinite alarms." + At the close of the session, lord John Russell announced his intention, on the next meeting of Parliament, to propose the disfranchisement of Grampound, the corruption of which borough had become notorious. He intimated that he should propose also to adopt the principle which had not yet been recognized by the House-the principle of admitting the unrepresented large towns into a share of the representation. In the session of 1820, these proposals were brought forward by him in certain resolutions, which were met in a conciliatory spirit by the government. Eventually Grampound was disfranchised in 1821, and it was agreed by the Commons that the two vacant seats should be given to the town of Leeds. The Lords, however, rejected this extension of the representation to great towns, and assigned two additional members to the county of York. The moderate Reformers had become hopeful, when lord Castlereagh gave his assent to lord John Russell's motion in 1820. Sydney Smith writes to earl Grey, expressing his opinion that this assent "includes every thing that is important; that a disfranchised borough may be taken out of the surrounding hundred and conferred elsewhere; or rather, that it need not necessarily be thrown into the surrounding hundred."‡ On the 3rd of May, the fervid eloquence of Mr. Grattan was heard for the last time in the House of Commons in support of the measure nearest his heart, that of Catholic Emancipation. He moved, that the state of the laws by which oaths or declarations are required to be taken as qualifications for the exercise of civil functions, as far as affected His Majesty's Roman Catholic subjects, should be taken into consideration by a Committee of the * "Lives of the Chancellors," chap. 203. + Hansard, vol. xl. col. 1496. "Memoir," vol. ii. p. 192. 1819.] REVIVED AGITATION FOR REFORM. 103 whole House. After the speech of Grattan, the House was impatient to divide. The numbers were, 241 for the motion; 243 against it. In the new Parliament, on the 28th of April, 1820, sir Henry Parnell gave notice that Mr. Grattan would, on the 11th of May, submit to the House a motion for the removal of the Roman Catholic disabilities. The great Irish orator had arrived in London in a state of much debility, and his friends remonstrated that the exertion that he contemplated would be attended with serious injury to his feeble health. His answer was, "I should be happy to die in the discharge of my duty." He died on the 14th of May, at the age of seventy. On the 13th of July, Parliament was prorogued by the Prince Regent in person. There was a passage in the Royal Speech calculated to renew the alarm that appears to have subsided at the beginning of the year, when the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act had been deemed no longer necessary. The Prince Regent now said, "I have observed with great concern the attempts which have recently been made in some of the manufacturing districts to take advantage of circumstances of local distress, to excite a spirit of disaffection to the institutions and government of the country." There had been considerable interruption to the prosperous state of trade from February to July. The number of bankruptcies was unusually great; credit was very generally impaired; the demand for labour was of course proportionably affected, and the rate of wages was necessarily lower. At the same time the price of food had been steadily advancing. There had been meetings of the operative classes in Lancashire and at Glasgow, to consider the low rate of wages, and to appeal to public sympathy upon their distressed condition. Gradually, however, at these meetings the peaceably disposed were borne down by the turbulent, and the speeches assumed that character of political violence that justified the terms of the Prince Regent's speech. Parliament, however, separated without any expectation that serious mischief was at hand. Many of the members of the Cabinet were seeking a temporary repose from their official labours. The Lord Chancellor, perplexed by events which we shall now have to describe, writes to his brother in August, "Your exhortations to the King's servants, I doubt, can't reach many of them, for, with exception of Liverpool, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Wellington, Van, and myself, they are all, eight in number, in different parts of Europe." At a great open-air meeting at Stockport on the 28th of June, sir Charles Wolseley, bart., was the chairman, there commencing a career which ended in the jail, and might have ended on the scaffold. He told his audience that he was one of those who had mounted the ramparts of the Bastille at the commencement of the French Revolution, and he would never shrink from attacking the Bastilles of his own country. On the 12th of July, at a meeting held at New Hall Hill, near Birmingham, sir Charles Wolseley was elected "legislatorial attorney and representative" for that town. The government naturally became alarmed, and caused sir Charles Wolseley, and a dissenting preacher, to be indicted for seditious words spoken by them at the meeting at Stockport. Wolseley was arrested at his own house, Wolseley Park, in Staffordshire. At a great assembly in Smithfield, where * "Life of Lord Eldon," vol. ii. p. 336. 104 SIR CHARLES WOLSELEY-MR. HUNT. [1819. Hunt presided, Harrison was arrested; and on being conveyed to Stockport, the constable who arrived there with him was attacked and shot. These events produced great alarm. Lord Sidmouth, in a private letter of the 15th of August, expressed his opinion that "the laws were not strong enough for the times, but that they must be made so." Nevertheless, he thought the plentiful season was unfavourable for sedition, and that at Manchester there was happily an increased demand for labour.* The attention of the Homeoffice had naturally been directed to Manchester with some anxiety, for a public meeting had been called by the Reformers, who had now taken the name of Radicals, for the 9th of August, to elect a "legislatorial attorney" as representative of that place. The magistrates, in consequence, issued a notice declaring such a meeting to be illegal, and requiring the people, at their peril, to abstain from attending it. The design was relinquished; and another meeting was advertised to be held in St. Peter's Field, in Manchester, for the purpose of petitioning for a Reform of Parliament. One great cause of alarm at the beginning of August was derived from representations made to the Lancashire magistrates, that in the neighbourhoods of Bury, of Bolton, and of Rochdale, there were nightly assemblies of great numbers of men, who met together for the purpose of learning and practising military training. There is no evidence that these meetings for drill had been long continued, or that there had been any attempt to conduct the drillings in secret. A very plausible reason for this practice, at this particular period, is given by one who was freely admitted to all the councils of the Reformers, and as freely differed from them when they contemplated any resort to physical force. Bamford says, that the Reformers had been frequently taunted by the press with their ragged dirty appearance at their assemblages, with the confusion of their proceedings, and the mob-like crowd in which their numbers were mustered. In preparation for the great meeting of the 16th of August, the Committees issued injunctions for a display of cleanliness, sobriety, and order. He adds, "order in our movements was obtained by drilling," and "peace," according to a subsequent injunction of the Committees, was to be secured "by a prohibition of all weapons of offence or defence; and by the strictest discipline of silence, steadiness, and obedience to the directions of the conductors." Nothing can look more harmless, and even poetical, than Bamford's description of the evening drills. They were, he says, " to our sedentary weavers and spinners, periods of healthful exercise and enjoyment; our drill masters were generally old soldiers of the line, or of militia or local militia regiments. They put the lads through their facings in quick time, and soon learned them to march with a steadiness and a regularity which would not have disgraced a regiment on parade. When dusk came, and we could no longer see to work, we jumped from our looms, and rushed to the sweet cool air of the fields, or the waste lands, or the green lane-sides. We mustered, we fell into rank, we faced, marched, halted, faced about, countermarched, halted again, dressed, and wheeled in quick succession, and without confusion; or, in the gray of a fine Sunday morn, we would saunter through the mists, fragrant with the night odour of flowers and of new hay, and ascending the Tandle hills, salute "Life of Lord Sidmouth," vol. iii. p. 249. |