Welling. Death of George IV. The Ministry. [1815 upon the suppression of the Association, but it anticipated him by dissolving. The religious scruples of the king nearly wrecked the Government, but he was forced, in the end, to ask Ministers to remain. Peel, who, rejected by Oxford University, with difficulty found a seat at Westbury, was at last free to carry his Bills. They admitted Catholics to Parliament and office with the exception of the Lord Chancellorship and Viceroyalty of Ireland, while, as a safeguard, the Irish franchise was raised to £10. After a final struggle with the king, they became law. But agitation had taken deep root in Ireland, and O'Connell promptly began to harangue the peasantry on the repeal of the Union. The duke was strongly in favour of non-intervention abroad. Hence he was rather unjustly accused of countenancing absolutism. He refused to interfere in Portugal, where Dom Miguel had, for the moment, succeeded in ousting his niece, and even prevented a loyalist expedition, fitted out in British ports, from landing on the Azores. His attitude was diplomatically correct, but it was liable to misconstruction. Even more damaging was his supposed dependence on the judgment of the Prince de Polignac, the reactionary Minister who was swept away by the French Revolution of July, 1830. George IV. ended his useless life on June 26th. He was succeeded by his brother William IV., whose eccentricity was counterbalanced by his honesty. He sympathised at the outset with the cry for reform which, under stress of the upheaval abroad, was ringing through the land. Wellington was the only politician who could deal with George IV., and his death removed the chief reason for the continuance of the Ministry. The duke made overtures to the Canningites, but the death of Huskisson, who was killed at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (p. 276), altered the situation, and they made common cause with the Whigs. On the opening of Parliament in November, 1830, the duke made an emphatic declaration in favour of the existing system of representation. After that the Government was hopelessly compromised; it was defeated on Sir Henry Parnell's motion for a select committee on the Civil List, and resigned. Lord Grey, though nearly seventy years old, was the inevitable Prime Minister. Several Whigs entered the Cabinet: 1832] Lord Lansdowne as President of the Council, Lord Althorp as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, eventually, Lord Brougham as Chancellor. Lord Durham, the Lord Privy Seal, called himself a Radical. The Canningites secured the secretaryships -Lord Melbourne (Lamb), Palmerston, and Goderich going to the Home, Foreign, and Colonial Offices respectively. The Ministry was strong in talent, but weak in administrative experience. Reform It was an anxious winter. There was rick-burning in the The agricultural districts of the South. The artisans were moving Agitation. in the North, and the violent language of the Birmingham Political Union was calculated to breed trouble. In Ireland one-fifth of the population was out of employment, and a tithe war was proceeding simultaneously with O'Connell's agitation for repeal. Melbourne, who as Home Secretary had control both of English and Irish affairs, behaved with firmness. The Birmingham League was left alone, but the rural rioters The First and The Final Its Provisions. [1815 were tried by a special commission. The Marquis of Anglesey, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, suppressed O'Connell's meetings, and finally arrested him, though the Act under which he was convicted expiring with the dissolution, he was never sentenced. On March 1st, Lord John Russell, the Paymaster of the Forces, brought in the Reform Bill. It proved too sweeping to please the House, and, after passing its second reading by a majority of one, suffered defeat in Committee on a proposal to reduce the number of members. Ministers decided not to resign, and induced the king to consent to a dissolution. They returned with a majority of over 130, and a new and still more thorough-going Bill was promptly introduced. Though the Opposition debated the measure at inordinate length, it passed through the Connons by large majorities. On October 8th the Lords rejected it on the first reading by 41. Rioting began immediately in the large towns, and at Bristol the weakness of Colonel Brereton gave the mob the upper hand for forty-eight hours. Supported, however, by a vote of confidence in the Lower House, Ministers decided to continue in office. In March, 1832, Lord John Russell carried a third Bill through the Commons. Through the influence of the "Waverers," led by Lord Wharncliffe and Lord Harrowby, it passed its second reading by a majority of nine. In Committee, however, Lord Lyndhurst persuaded the Peers to vote for his motion postponing the disfranchising clauses. The Prime Minister had no other course than to press on the king the necessity of creating a batch of Peers, and, on his refusal, resigned. Wellington undertook the desperate task of forming a Cabinet of resistance to revolution. He failed to secure the support of Peel, and retreated from an untenable position. The renewed activity of the "Waverers," and a circular letter of the king's praying the Peers to cease their opposition, put an end to the crisis. On June 4th the Bill was free of the House of Lords. In its final shape the Act disfranchised 56 boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants, returning 111 members, took a member from 30 boroughs with less than 4,000, and deprived one four-member constituency of two of its representatives. 1832] Of these 143 seats, 65 were given to the counties; 22 large towns, including Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, received two members, and 21 smaller places one. Of the remaining 13 seats ten were transferred to Scotland, the other three being reserved to increase the Welsh representation. Copyholders, leaseholders, and tenants-at-will paying a £50 rent received the county franchise. In the boroughs a uniform £10 household franchise was established, though the rights of resident freemen were respected. In the same session Reform Bills were passed for Scotland and Ireland. The first country received eight new members, while all owners of property, long leaseholders at £10 a year, and £50 tenants-at-will acquired the franchise. Ireland had five additional borough members, but the 40s. freeholders remained voteless. seamen. IN 1814, when the long Napoleonic war was, for the moment, terminated by the departure of Bonaparte for Elba, and by the return to France of Louis XVIII., Great Britain remained in hostilities with the United States of America, and was thus prevented from at once reducing her Navy to its ordinary peace establishment. She was enabled, however, to dispense almost immediately with the services of no fewer than 50,000 In the following year, although the fratricidal war with America was ended (Vol. V., p. 713), the reappearance of Napoleon in the field rendered any further reduction of armaments impossible, and during the greater part of that year 90,000 men had to be kept in readiness to serve their country at sea. But when 1815 was past and over, and when European peace seemed to be securely re-established by the banishment of the great disturber of it to a distant island, wholesale reductions were effected. The extent and nature of these will be clearly understood from the following comparative statement of the number of ships in commission, and of the number of seamen nominally in service, at the conclusion of each of the years 1813, 1814, 1815, 1816, and 1817:— ["By this provision. the power of the great landed proprietors over their tenantry is perpetuated: and thus arises a greater frustration of the purposes of the Act than from all other errors and faults together." Martineau, Europe since the Peace, I., 70. The clause was an amendment proposed by the Marquis of Chandos.] W. LAIRD CLOWES. The Navy. of the Peace. |