The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820-1832 edited by DR Fisher
Cambridge University Press, seven volumes, £135
Famously, Tony Benn insisted that politics was “about issues, not personalities”. What he meant, reasonably enough, was that the conflicts of the late 1970s and early 1980s were not about Denis Healey versus Tony Benn. They earnestly concerned social democracy contested by full dress socialism. Reasonable enough, indeed, but the personalities made it interesting.
Go back to an exciting and vital period of history, the 1820s: the latter days of Captain Swing and Lord Castlereagh, William Huskisson edging the economy toward free trade, frame breaking and men hanged for frame breaking, the Irish crisis sprung by Daniel O’Connell which turned into the Catholic Emancipation crisis and, if we add a couple of years, the conclusion of the great running battle of the Reform Bill in 1832. The issues then were clear enough and profoundly important – and the personalities were still fascinating.
Bring on The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820-1832 edited by DR Fisher for the History of Parliament Trust. This is the ninth volume, sorry, set of volumes, of a still-continuing enterprise which first achieved publication (from Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke) in 1964 with three volumes covering 1754-1790. Two generations of historians have brought us to this point; nine down, five to come. The present offering is the result of work begun in 1986. One volume is an introduction, with England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland given detailed separate treatments. It takes us through the narrative of the period, defining in detail the inheritance, the established political and constitutional state of affairs in the years approaching Reform.
Largely the doing of the overworked general editor, David Fisher, the 500 page introduction alone is a formidable education about a great crossroads of British history – and a very good read. Two further volumes set out detailed accounts of every constituency, whilst four more yet contain detailed biographies of every member sitting in this period. This is serious scholarship’s definition of serious scholarship. Just how serious may be measured in footnote references. Among the biographies Joseph Planta, a useful Tory of the backstairs-organising sort, has 60 footnotes, the more vivid Whig diarist, Thomas Creevey, 117, and Sir Robert Peel, 367.
The constituencies are treated with quite as much detail – over 1,856 pages. Take Cornwall: first, the county division, very corrupt, two members, 24 quarto columns of print (two to a page – like Hansard) then 21 borough constituencies. These have two members each: St Ives (corrupt) gets eleven and a half columns, Penrhyn (super corrupt) 12 columns. The entire territory of Cornwall adds up to 22 constituencies, 44 MPs, 168 columns. And that’s just the width. The quality, trust me, is even better – and gets exciting as despotic grandees like the Duke of Buckingham conspire.
At St Mawes, “The duke anticipated a challenge from the Buller family of Morval, and before the election in 1826, he had a number of his Buckinghamshire and Hampshire toadies enrolled as St Mawes freemen.” In 1831, “John Cam Hobhouse presented and endorsed a petition from the inhabitants complaining of Buckingham’s domination and praying that if the borough were not to be reformed, it should be disfranchised.” So it should. The winning candidates in 1830, Carrington and Piggott, entered Parliament with 13 votes each! By instructive contrast, at a by-election six months later, Preston, with its freakishly democratic franchise, returned Henry Hunt, Orator Hunt, the great campaigning radical, with a gargantuan 3,730 votes.
Members come at all levels. In Volume VI, L-R, William Lamb, later Viscount Melbourne, seven constituencies, twice Prime Minister, is related and assessed. For Dr Fisher: “Lamb had a low estimate of mankind.” Greville’s diary concedes admiringly of this widely-read, sceptical man that: “He never was really fitted for public life… and still less was he fit to be the leader of a party and the head of a government… During his administration his great object seemed to be to keep a rickety concern together, less from political ambition than from his personal feelings for the queen.” Both quotations catch the spirit of the late 18th century – the one ending in the 1830s – dispassionate, low-key pessimistic, calm and desiring calm, so unBlair and unBrown – not new, nor exciting, nor vibrant – rather attractive.
Lamb’s politics has been comprehensively explored, his correspondence trawled, also the enjoyably disreputable private life. Judgments come from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord John Russell, Greville (inevitably), a couple of mistresses and a future Lord Chancellor. In about 12,500 words, a major minister has been anatomised by contemporary sources and dedicated modern academe – and the entry itself constituted a splendid source.
With a work of reference, the reader chooses. He can read in intense, condensed form, the doings over this period, of era-dominating figures like Sir Robert Peel. Just as readily, he can slip sinfully into the gossip columns of history. William Bankes, friend of Byron, accompanying him to Ravenna, art student, traveller, 1815-19, in the Middle East, High Churchman and High Tory, left Parliament after being acquitted in 1833 on charges involving a guardsman in St Margaret’s churchyard. Facing similar, stronger evidenced, charges in Green Park, eight years later, he jumped bail, to spend “his last years as an outlaw and died in Venice in 1855”.
Sex apart, there was fraud. Rowland Stephenson figures in Thomas Love Peacock’s superb anti-banking satire Crotchet Castle as Timothy Touchandgo. Lombard Street banker, Bach-lover and Member for Leominster, he was pursued in 1829 with his clerk James Lloyd for (probably overstated) embezzlement. Fleeing by fishing smack to Milford Haven, he boarded the Providence which took him beyond extradition to the United States. Settling on a 170 acre estate on the Delaware River, he would be buried there in 1856, a respected citizen receiving Episcopalian rites.
Then there are the eccentrics. Dr Fisher tells us in that incomparable introduction that “there was no shortage of eccentrics and buffoons in the House in this period”, then lists 19 of them – all documented! I recommend Sir Charles Wetherell, former Attorney General and careless dresser, of whom the Speaker remarked: “The only lucid interval he had was the one between his waistcoat and his breeches.” Wetherell was a florid, right-wing Tory, but a very good lawyer who, in 1817, defended the naive trainee revolutionary, James Watson, on treason charges – and got him off. Lord Brudenel, later Charge of the Light Brigade Earl of Cardigan, is here. So is Marmaduke Lawson, Member for Shropshire, “reportedly unhinged while at Cambridge University where he set his college on fire and walked naked in the afternoon”.
Living laboriously at his huge researches, Dr Fisher can incline to asperity. Poor Bankes is “a prattler” and Henry Grey Bennett “a bore”. John Calcraft, who committed suicide after changing sides on the Reform Bill, is reasonably described as “paranoid and miserable” but “twice a turncoat” is harsh. Turncoat, a word importing calculation and low motives, is rather rough on a man as muddled and unhappy as Calcraft. As brusquely, Henry Hunt makes “his unruly and ignorant presence felt”. Yet the diary of Charles Greville, a fairly conservative Whig, records an old-fashioned country gentleman. And Hunt was not ignorant of the Peterloo massacre, instigated by the Manchester Yeomanry while he was, however noisily, advocating peaceful measures. Hunt’s House of Commons speech about it, running over with sincere passion, is worth reading today.
These, however, are reviewer’s crotchets. This is a quite astonishing assembly of greater, lesser and intermediate facts, operational procedures, men and the measures they indentified, disputed and memorably enacted. The world at the eve of Reform has been re-created for us, a cathedral of political history.
Edward Pearce
