Kitabı oku: «The Political History of England – Vol XI», sayfa 28

CHAPTER XVII.
PEEL AND MELBOURNE

The general election which took place in January, 1835, was hotly contested, and in the second reformed parliament the conservatives mustered far stronger than in the first. The party now consisted of some 270 members, chiefly returned by the counties. But they were still outnumbered by the whigs, radicals, and Irish repealers combined, and it was certain that an occasion for such a combination would soon arise. It was found at once in the election of a speaker, when the house of commons met on February 9, 1835. Sutton, now Sir Charles Manners Sutton, was proposed for re-election by the government; the opposition candidate was Abercromby. The number of members who took part in the division was the largest ever assembled, being 622, and Abercromby was elected by a majority of ten. It would have been larger, had not the government been supported by some waverers, but its significance was appreciated by the ministers, and still more by the king. He expressed his displeasure in a very outspoken letter to Peel, declaring that, if the leaders "of the present factious opposition" should be forced upon him by a refusal of the supplies, he might, indeed, tolerate them, but could never give them his confidence or friendship. Two days later, the 24th, the king's speech was delivered, reflecting the spirit of the Tamworth manifesto.¹³⁰

PEEL'S POLICY.

The government was again defeated by seven on an amendment to the address, notwithstanding the loyal aid of Graham and Stanley, whose attitude during the general election had excited Peel's mistrust. In the course of this debate, the prime minister, abandoning his usual reserve, definitely pledged himself not only "to advance, soberly and cautiously, in the path of progressive improvement," but to bring forward specific measures. "I offer you," he said, "reduced estimates, improvements in civil jurisprudence, reform of ecclesiastical law, the settlement of the tithe question in Ireland, the commutation of tithe in England, the removal of any real abuse in the Church, the redress of those grievances of which the dissenters have any just ground to complain." Nor were these offers illusory or barren. On March 17, he brought in a bill to relieve dissenters from disabilities in respect of marriage, which met with general approval. It was founded on the simple principle, since adopted, of giving legal validity to civil marriages duly solemnised before a registrar, and leaving each communion to superadd a religious sanction in its own way. The marriages of Churchmen in a church were to be left on their old footing, but Churchmen were of course to be granted the same liberty as other citizens of contracting a purely civil marriage.

Still more important, as examples of conservative reform, were Peel's efforts to purge the established Church of abuses, and to introduce a voluntary commutation of tithes. His correspondence amply shows how large a space these remedial measures occupied in his mind, and one of his first acts was to appoint an ecclesiastical commission, with instructions to institute a most comprehensive inquiry into every subject affecting the distribution of church revenues. Compared with the petty squabbles over the appropriation of an imaginary surplus to be derived from Irish tithes which it was impossible to collect, the schemes of Peel for purifying and strengthening the Church of England assume heroic proportions. The report of the ecclesiastical commission originated by him, with its startling disclosures of pluralism and non-residence, became the basis of legislation which has wrought a veritable revolution in the financial and disciplinary administration of the church. His tithe bill, abortive as it was in 1835, was reproduced, with little alteration, in the tithe commutation act of 1836.

But the whig-radical allies of 1835 had not the smallest intention of giving Peel a fair trial; nor indeed had they any other object beyond the recovery of power. His appeals to his opponents, though by no means without effect in the country, fell upon deaf ears in the house of commons, and further humiliations followed rapidly. One of these was the successful outcry against the appointment of Londonderry, who had excited much hostility as an uncompromising enemy to reform, to the embassy at St. Petersburg, in consequence of which he, very honourably, relieved the government from obloquy by declining the post. A motion to repeal the malt tax was decisively defeated, and soon afterwards a motion in favour of granting a charter to the University of London was carried against the government by a large majority. Then came a defeat on a motion for adjournment, and the arts of obstruction were obstinately practised in debates on the estimates. At last the inevitable crisis arrived, and, as might be expected, the final issue was taken upon an Irish question.

The influence of O'Connell and his "tail," as his followers were called, had been neutralised, since the reform act, by the overwhelming strength of the whigs, and the public-spirited action of Peel, who, as leader of the conservative opposition, actually supported the whig government in sixteen out of twenty most important contests on domestic policy. A very different spirit was now shown by the whig opposition, and an evil precedent, pregnant with disastrous consequences, was set by the famous "Lichfield House compact". This was a close alliance between O'Connell and those whom he had so fiercely denounced as "the base, brutal, and bloody whigs". It bore immediate fruit in a motion of Russell for a committee of the whole house to consider the temporalities of the Irish Church. After a debate of four nights, the resolution was carried, on March 30, by a majority of thirty-three. On April 5, a further resolution was carried by a majority of twenty-five for applying any surplus-funds "to the general education of all classes of the people without religious distinction," and was more emphatically affirmed two days later by a majority of twenty-seven.

Peel had long been conscious of the hopelessness of his position and impatient of maintaining the struggle. He felt the constitutional danger of allowing the executive government to become a helpless instrument in the hands of a hostile majority in the house of commons. Nothing but the earnest remonstrances of the king and his tory friends, including Wellington, had induced him to retain office so long, and, after the division of the 7th, he firmly resolved to resign. On doing so, he received from the whole conservative party, of which he was the creator, a most cordial address of thanks and confidence. Though his short administration had consolidated the whig forces for the moment, and given them a new lease of power, it showed him to be the foremost statesman in the country, and paved the way for his triumphant return to office. As Guizot said, he had proved himself "the most liberal of conservatives, the most conservative of liberals, and the most capable man of all in both parties".

MELBOURNE'S SECOND MINISTRY.

The king now discovered the fatal mistake which he had made in "dismissing" his whig cabinet, as he boasted, instead of waiting for it to break down under the stress of internal dissensions. His first idea was to fall back on Grey, who had already betrayed his growing mistrust of radicalism, but Grey declined to enter the lists again. There was no resource but to recall Melbourne, whom the king personally liked, and to put up with the elevation of Russell to a position which all admitted him to have fairly earned. He became home secretary, as well as leader of the house of commons, and the new whig cabinet differed little from the old. Palmerston, Lansdowne, Auckland, Thompson, and Holland returned to their former offices. Grant was made secretary for war and the colonies, Duncannon became lord privy seal, Spring Rice chancellor of the exchequer, Hobhouse president of the board of control, and Viscount Howick, son of Earl Grey, was appointed secretary at war. Outside the cabinet, Viscount Morpeth, son of the Earl of Carlisle, became Irish secretary. The most significant difference between the two cabinets lay in the omission of Brougham, which was effected by the expedient of placing the great seal in commission. This negative act was, in reality, the boldest and most perilous in Melbourne's political life. A correspondence between Brougham and Melbourne in February must have made clear to the ex-chancellor that he would be excluded from office, and he reluctantly acquiesced in Melbourne's decision, hoping that it would be merely temporary, and that he would soon resume his place on the woolsack as the dominant member of the cabinet, but his exclusion was destined to be final, and the close of a career to which English history in the nineteenth century presents no parallel.¹³¹

BROUGHAM.

Brougham was called to the Scottish bar at the age of twenty-one, having already given proof of brilliant ability and rare versatility at the University of Edinburgh. He was the youngest and most prolific of the original writers in the Edinburgh Review, then a very powerful organ of whig opinion, and his contributions to it ranged over some thirty years after its first appearance in 1802. He was already twenty-nine when he joined the English bar in 1808, and though he never rivalled Eldon as a lawyer or Scarlett as a persuasive advocate, he soon became an acknowledged master of the highest forensic eloquence. His fame was already established by his argument before parliament against the orders in council when he entered the house of commons in 1810. There his passionate oratory and power of invective made him the most formidable of party speakers, and it was said that Canning alone could face him on equal terms in debate. Except during four years, 1812-16, when he was out of parliament, his prodigious energy and versatility were the greatest intellectual force on the liberal side throughout all the political conflicts under the regency and the reign of George IV. His speeches embraced every question of foreign, colonial, or domestic policy, and it may truly be said that no salutary reform was carried during that period of which he was not either the author or the active promoter. The suppression of the slave-trade which had revived after the great war, the liberty of the press, the cause of popular education – these were among the almost innumerable objects, outside the common run of politics, and largely philanthropic, to which he devoted his restless mind, before it was engrossed for a while by parliamentary reform. There, as we have seen, he showed a moderation which had not been expected of him, nor is it too much to say that, both as a leader of the bar and as chancellor, he made good his claim to be the greatest of law reformers.

His famous speech of February 7, 1828, had quickened the germs of many legal improvements carried out in a later age, and the four years of his chancellorship actually produced great constructive amendments of the law, such as the institution of the central criminal court and the judicial committee of the privy council. Other reforms, in bankruptcy, criminal law, and equity, were mainly due to his initiative, and it was he who originated the county courts, though his bill was recklessly thrown out by the house of lords on party grounds. His public life, up to the year 1835, was perhaps the most brilliant and the most useful of the century, yet it was hopelessly marred in the end by a certain eccentric vanity, and want of loyalty to colleagues, not inconsistent with the higher ambition of leaving the world better than he found it. For some years after his fall he retained his astounding energy, and even his ascendency in the house of lords, where Lyndhurst, his only possible rival, was astute enough to court his co-operation. Never was his fertility in debate more conspicuously shown than in the session of 1835, while he was still nominally a supporter of the whig government. The last stage of his life, extending over more than thirty years, belongs to another chapter of English history; it is enough here to notice that, whatever his political aberrations, he continued in his isolation and old age to work zealously for those social reforms which he sincerely had at heart. The popularity which had been to him as the breath of life never, indeed, returned to him, and his figure no longer occupies a foremost place in the gallery of our statesmen, but the results of his noble services to humanity remain, and the memory of them ought not to be obscured by the sad record of his failings.

The new Melbourne administration came in with unfavourable omens. Russell failed to secure his re-election in South Devon, but a seat was found for him at Stroud, and though the premier emphatically denied that he had made any bargain with O'Connell, the Irish people believed it. Accordingly, they received the whig lord-lieutenant, Mulgrave, with a tumultuous procession, as if his advent portended the repeal of the union and extinction of tithes. An attempt to solve the insoluble tithe question was, in fact, among the earliest efforts of the government, and Morpeth, as chief secretary, introduced a very reasonable measure, differing little, except in details, from that of his predecessor. Like other proposals for agrarian settlements in Ireland, it involved a certain sacrifice on the part of the tithe-owner for the sake of security, and a subsidy from the state to relieve of arrears the defaulting and rebellious tithe-payers. Peel stated his intention of supporting these provisions for commutation, if they could be separated from other provisions for "appropriation," coupled with them under the influence of political necessity rather than of sound policy. The proposals for appropriation were so moderate that little would have been lost by dropping or gained by carrying them, but, moderate as they were, they embodied a principle on which either party was resolved to stand or fall. The consequence might have been foreseen. The bill, as a whole, was passed in the house of commons, and even read a second time in the house of lords, after which the appropriation clauses were rejected in that assembly by a large majority. Thereupon Melbourne withdrew the scheme altogether. Thus a question of third-rate importance, having been the chronic difficulty of four Irish secretaries, was left to stand over for three years longer, and ultimately to be settled on the very basis which Stanley and Peel had accepted from the first. A greater waste of parliamentary time has perhaps never been recorded.

MUNICIPAL CORPORATIONS BILL.

The session of 1835, however, was rendered memorable by the enactment of one beneficent measure of the first magnitude. This measure – the municipal corporations act – was preceded, like the new poor law, by a thorough and exhaustive inquiry. A committee of the house of commons, followed by a commission, had been appointed in 1833. The commission prosecuted careful researches into the local conditions of each municipality, and did not conclude its labours until 1835. Its report laid bare not merely grotesque anomalies, but the grossest abuses of election and administration in boroughs ruled by small, corrupt, and irresponsible oligarchies which then abounded in England, and, still more, in Scotland.¹³² The reform act had paved the way for the purification of such urban communities, by disfranchising the smallest and most venal of them, by extending the boundaries of many others, by enfranchising great towns which had remained outside the pale of representation, and by conferring the suffrage, theretofore monopolised by freemen and other privileged classes, on the unprivileged mass of ten-pound householders.

The municipal corporations bill, in its ultimate form, rested on the same broad lines of policy. It imposed upon all boroughs, with the exception of the city of London and a few of minor importance, one constitutional form of government, identical in all its essential features with those which a few model boroughs already possessed. The governing body was to consist of a mayor, aldermen, and councillors, together forming a town council. The councillors were to be elected directly by ratepaying occupiers, with a saving for the prescriptive rights of existing freemen. They were to hold office for three years; the aldermen were to be elected by the councillors for six years, with a provision for retirement by rotation. The mayor was to be elected annually by the town council. The elementary powers of local government, such as the control of lighting and the constabulary force, were to be transferred (subject to certain exceptions) from the hands of committees into those of the one recognised and supreme municipal authority. Other clauses provided for a division of the larger boroughs into wards, for the abolition of exclusive trading privileges, for the public management of charity estates, and for the appointment, at the option of each borough, of a recorder, for the purposes of jurisdiction.

Such were the main outlines of the great measure introduced by Russell, to which Peel heartily gave his adhesion. It was a natural, and almost necessary, sequel of the reform act, which had already broken up many nests of jobbery, curtailed the lucrative exercise of the elective franchise by freemen, and undermined the influence of those self-elected rulers who, in the worst boroughs, had become gangs of public thieves. Supported by Peel, the bill was read a second time in the house of commons, on June 15, without a division. Several conservative amendments were defeated in committee by small majorities, and the bill was sent up to the lords on July 21. There its fate was far different. Though Wellington himself was not disposed to obstruct it, he entirely failed to check the obstructive tactics of Lyndhurst who, on this occasion, outdid himself in the deliberate mutilation of a bill approved by the late conservative premier. Lord Campbell, no partial judge of Brougham, has left on record his belief that, but for his faithful and vigorous support, the scheme of municipal reform must have been utterly wrecked.¹³³ It was allowed to be read a second time, but with the full concurrence of Eldon and all the ultra-tory peers, Lyndhurst succeeded in pulling it to pieces in committee. For instance, one of the amendments imported into it perpetuated proprietary rights which it was a chief object of the bill to abolish; another gave aldermen a life-tenure of their offices; a third retained a part of the old town councillors on the new town councils. Proud as he was of his destructive exploits, as a triumph of toryism over conservatism, Lyndhurst soon found that he could not so lightly override the wiser counsels of Peel. When the lords' amendments came to be considered in the commons, Russell prudently advised the acceptance of the less important, and the disallowance of those inconsistent with the principle of the bill. He was followed by Peel who, professing to uphold the independence of the upper house, declared against the more obnoxious amendments, and stickled only for points which the ministry was not unwilling to concede. His action proved decisive. The commons stood firm on the main issues, and the hostile party in the lords, who had vowed to mar this reform, flinched at the last moment. Many of them abstained from attendance. Wellington and even Lyndhurst recommended concession; conferences took place between the houses, at which Russell played the part of moderator, and on September 9 the corporation bill became law, not in its entirety, but in all its essential features.

In spite of this pacific compromise, popular feeling ran higher than ever against the house of lords which, under the evil influence of Lyndhurst, seemed bent on thwarting every liberal measure. John Roebuck, member for Bath, a prominent radical, who acted independently of party connexions, took a lead in denouncing their conduct, and went so far as to propose giving them a merely suspensory, instead of an absolute, veto on legislation. A sweeping reform in their constitution was loudly advocated in the press. O'Connell, exasperated by their wanton rejection of a Dublin police bill, spent a part of the parliamentary recess in a tour over the north of England and Scotland, exhausting the stores of his scurrilous invective in pouring contempt on the 170 tyrants who could dare to withstand the will of the people. But O'Connell's eloquence, marvellous as it was, never stirred British audiences as it stirred the Irish masses, and it happened that at this moment he was somewhat discredited by accusations of corruption afterwards proved to be false. The house of lords not only survived his attacks, but was instigated by Lyndhurst to further acts of obstruction in the following year.

COTTENHAM, LORD CHANCELLOR.

His most powerful opponent was about to disappear from the political scenes for the present, and in the future to be converted into an ally. When the great seal was entrusted to commissioners, Brougham had affected to regard the arrangement as a temporary makeshift to propitiate William IV., and hoped that he would inherit the reversion of the chancellorship. With this expectation he not only patronised but warmly supported the whig ministry in 1835. But his wayward and petulant egotism had set all his old colleagues against him, and Melbourne had made up his mind that "it was impossible to act with him". The interruption of legal business caused by the constant withdrawal of three judges from their proper duties, to act as commissioners, was severely criticised by the press, and Sir Edward Sugden, who had been lord chancellor of Ireland under Peel, published an effective pamphlet entitled, "What has become of the great seal?" It was thought necessary to appoint a new chancellor, and in January, 1836, Sir Charles Pepys, then master of the rolls, was raised to that dignity as Lord Cottenham. Foreseeing the implacable indignation of Brougham, the ministry decided to confer a peerage on Henry Bickersteth, the new master of the rolls, who became Lord Langdale, and who was supposed capable of confronting the ex-chancellor in debate. No expectation could have been more unfounded or delusive, but the sense of disappointment and desertion so preyed on the health and nerves of Brougham that he forsook the house of lords for a whole session. Campbell does not shrink from saying that he was "atrociously ill-used" on this occasion,¹³⁴ and assuredly he should not have been left to learn from a newspaper that he was thrust aside in favour of a man of vastly inferior gifts and services.

One other change was made in the cabinet during the recess. The Earl of Minto became first lord of the admiralty in succession to Auckland who had been appointed governor-general of India. When parliament met on February 4, 1836, the prospects of the whig government were more favourable than on their first accession to office. The factious conduct of the house of lords in the last session had disgusted the country, while the statesmanlike moderation of Peel secured them fair-play in the house of commons, though it was gradually building up a strong conservative party. Ireland again blocked the way for a while against useful legislation for Great Britain, and the first encounter of parties was on an amendment to the address condemning the anticipated reform of Irish corporations on the principles already adopted for England. This amendment, unwillingly moved by Peel, was defeated by a majority of forty-one, and the Irish municipal bill was introduced on the 16th. Like its English prototype, it was founded on the report of a commission which had disclosed the grossest possible abuses in Irish municipalities, chiefly dominated by protestant oligarchies. A similar measure substituting elective councils for these corrupt bodies had actually passed its third reading in the commons before the end of the last session, but the attempt to carry it further was then abandoned. The debates on the bill of 1836 for the same purpose inevitably turned on broad issues which continued to disturb Irish politics and to perplex English statesmen for the rest of the century. On the one hand, no one could justify "government by ascendency" in Ireland, or the shameful malpractices incident to an exercise of power under no sense of responsibility. On the other hand, no one acquainted with Irish history and Irish character could honestly regard the people as yet qualified for local self-government. In the social and some of the moral virtues they might be favourably compared with Englishmen and Scotchmen; in the political virtues, upon which civil institutions must rest, they were several generations behind their fellow-subjects in Great Britain.

IRISH BILLS.

All were agreed on the necessity of sweeping away or expurgating the existing Irish corporations, but the whole strength of the conservative party in both houses was enlisted against the experiment of elective town councils, especially after the evidence lately taken before the so-called "intimidation committee" in the house of commons. Peel's scheme was to vest the executive powers and property of Irish corporations, at least for the present, in officers appointed by the crown. An amendment framed in this sense was defeated by a large majority, and the bill passed the commons with little further opposition. When it reached the lords it was stoutly contested by Lyndhurst, now fortified by Peel's concurrence, on the not unreasonable ground that it would make the radicals and repealers predominant in every Irish municipality, and create "seats of agitation" for revolutionary purposes in the new town councils. Being converted into a bill "for the abolition of municipal corporations" in Ireland, it was returned in that form to the house of commons. Russell vainly attempted to meet the lords half-way by another compromise, and the measure was abandoned only to be adopted, in a very modified shape, after the lapse of four years. A like course was pursued by the upper house when a new Irish tithe bill, with an appropriation clause, was sent up to them. Had the whig government been well advised they would scarcely have challenged a needless collision between the two houses by reviving this burning question so early. It would have been possible to settle the Irish tithe system on equitable lines, without prejudicing the future application of superfluous Church revenues, and it was a somewhat perverse obstinacy which persisted in coupling the two objects year after year. The ingenuity of Lyndhurst in wrecking sound reforms should have been left without excuse; whereas, in this case, the peers could not have accepted what they regarded as a confiscation bill without a sacrifice of conviction and self-respect.

Happily the commutation of tithes in England presented no political difficulties of the same nature. The payment of tithes in kind, though founded on immemorial usage, had, indeed, produced constant discord between the parish clergyman and his flock, while landlords and farmers justly complained that it impeded the improvement of agriculture. In many localities the pressure of these evils had led to voluntary compositions between tithe-owners and tithe-payers, which, being temporary, lacked the force of law. The permissive tithe bills of Althorp and Peel were designed to render general a practice which already prevailed in a thousand parishes, and that now introduced by Russell was little more than an extension of the same principle. Its mainspring was the appointment of commissioners with compulsory powers in the last resort, and the provision of a self-acting machinery for assessing the reduced annual rent charge payable in lieu of tithes, so as to vary with the average price of wheat, barley, and oats in the seven preceding years. This practical solution of the question was adopted cheerfully by the wearied legislature, and the commissioners succeeded before long in effecting universal commutation. Amendments in detail have of course been found necessary, but the system established by 6 and 7 William IV., cap. 61, has stood the test of long experience, and although tithe-owners have been impoverished by the fall of prices, the payment of tithes in England has ceased to be a grievance, except with those who absolutely condemn the endowment of a Church.

REGISTRATION ACTS.

An equally valuable and permanent legacy of this session is contained in two cognate acts regulating marriages and registration in England. By the first of these acts two new modes of celebrating marriage were provided, without interfering with the old privileges of the established Church in regard to marriage by licence or banns. While the essential conditions of notice and publicity were carefully secured, the superintendent registrar of each district was empowered either to authorise the celebration of marriage in a duly registered place of worship, but in presence of a district registrar, or to solemnise the ceremony himself, without any religious service, in his own office. Clergymen of the Church of England were constituted registrars for marriages celebrated by themselves, and were bound to furnish the superintendent registrars with certified entries of such marriages. The act was complicated by a variety of safeguards, enforced by heavy penalties, against fraud and evasion, but its leading features were simple and have proved effectual for their purpose. It marked an advance on the earlier marriage bill of Russell, since it not only allowed dissenters to marry in their own chapels, but to marry without having their banns published in the parish church. It went beyond the marriage bill of Peel, since it not only recognised marriage as a civil contract, but utilised the new poor law organisation, and posted in each district a civil official before whom that contract could legally be solemnised.