Page 37 - History 2020

period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the

multitude. Because there it admits of no control, no regulation, no steady direction
whatsoever.” What then was the people’s role? “The people are the natural control
on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible”.

th
Thus to 19 century reforming Prime Ministers, including Peel, social reforms were
not part of a process that included further parliamentary reform; on the contrary,
they were designed to demonstrate to the working classes that further parliamentary
reform was unnecessary.

*Alpheus Todd “On Parliamentary Government in England: Its Origin, Development, and Practical
Operation” (1867)

The real significance of 1832 may be not the Reform Act itself but the manner of its
passing. As Victorian radical John Bright commented 30 years later, “It was not a
good Bill, but it was a great Bill when it was passed.” To many, the crisis over the

1832 Reform Act seemed to confirm the British genius for managing change and
maintaining stability. It had happened in 1688; it had happened under Walpole; it
had been celebrated and justified in Burke’s philosophy of conservatism; now it was
confirmed by 1832. One of the defenders of the Reform Act, the brilliant MP for the
pocket borough of Calne we met earlier, Lord Macaulay, turned this notion into a
new interpretation of British history. It came to be known as “the Whig Interpretation

of History” and it became the accepted narrative of our national history. So we come
to our last chapter in Britain’s “story of revolution”.

What was “the Whig Interpretation of history”?
This chapter begins with Thomas Macaulay who was both a successful politician and
a popular historian. He had a high forehead, piercing eyes and heavy brows, and
spoke “in a whirlwind of mixed passions, in a strange, wild key, like hissing words that
struggle to be free.” He spoke effectively in parliament in support of the Reform Bill.
His message to MP’s was “Reform, that you may preserve”. The British genius,

according to Macaulay, was to combine freedom with order. This was the key to
political stability. In the 1832 debates he argued that this was one of those historic
moments when freedom had to be extended a little to preserve order. Macaulay
applied Burke’s conservative philosophy to history.

In his “History of England from the Accession of James II” (published 1848) Macaulay

praised 1688 for its moderation: “Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the
whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House
of Stuart [James II]. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great
nations. Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a