Page 36 - History 2020

young German princess*. Pub road name signs with hers and Wellington’s names

were removed.

*In the evenings William would doze off, wake up and say to Queen Adelaide, “Exactly so, ma’am!”
and drop off again. When he heard his father George IV had died, he said to Adelaide, “I’ve never
been to bed with a queen before.” His risqué toast, which rhymed with “Honi soit qui mal y pense”
is too filthy to repeat; see Antonia Fraser “Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill
1832” 2016 p.134.

It is also clear that the ruling class, far from seeing 1832 as a first step towards
democracy, loathed democracy and still viewed it as a term of abuse. The 1832 Act
was to be the end of Parliamentary Reform, not the beginning. Lord John Russell,
then Whig Prime Minister, was quite explicit about this in a speech of 1837, which
opened the first parliament of Queen Victoria’s reign. A back-bench MP proposed
further extensions of the right to vote. Russell rejected this utterly. The Act had been

passed in the belief that “it was safer to make a large and extensive measure of
reform, for this reason, that we might be assured that we were bringing forward one
which might have a prospect of being a final measure.” To be fair, he continued that
obviously he wasn’t saying that it would never be reconsidered for all time. But
people got the message. From then on Russell was given the nickname “Finality
Jack.” Far from being a first step towards democracy, 1832 was viewed by its
architects as a way of averting democracy.

Those radicals who did favour democracy were profoundly disappointed by the 1832
Reform Act. In response the pro-democracy (for men) Chartist Movement grew up in
the 1830’s and 40’s; but the ruling classes did everything in their power to defeat
Chartism, and succeeded; it collapsed in 1848, the year when revolutions broke out
all over Europe, but also ended in failure. The pattern was repeated with the
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movement for women’s suffrage (votes) in the late 19 and early 20 centuries.
Suffragettes were ridiculed, imprisoned and force-fed. It took a bitter campaign of
civil disobedience and a World War to persuade the ruling class to concede.

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Yet historians speak of 19 century Britain as an “age of reform”; and so it was. The
Whigs in the 1830’s and the Tories under Peel in the 1840’s introduced wide-ranging
social reforms, all duly recounted in the text-books. But writers on the constitution
were clear that our parliamentary system might be government for the people but it
definitely wasn’t government by the people. One said, “In parliamentary

government, rule and authority must receive the sanction of popular consent, though
it does not necessarily emanate from the will of the people.”* The son of Earl Grey
said in 1858 that it was necessary to protect parliament from both despotism and
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democracy. These 19 century opinions echo Burke in the 18 : “no legislator, at any