5) William IV (1830-37)

WILLIAM IV had not been educated for kingship. Born on 21 August 1765 he was the third son of George III and Queen Charlotte, and with two elder brothers in succession before him there seemed little likelihood that he would ever be called upon to rule. Accordingly a career was found for him: at the age of 13, William Henry, Duke of Clarence, joined the Royal Navy as midshipman.

It was a life which 'Sailor Billy' came to enjoy. Though he was no Nelson, he did well at sea, and he kept a nautical air and a liking for salty language even after he became King, at the age of 64. At the time of his accession, The Times commented on 'the blunt and unaffected – even should it be grotesque – cordiality of his demeanour', and in the first few days of his reign the new King could be seen moving informally about the streets of London, waving to the crowds and allowing himself to be kissed by street-women. William's delight in his new role was obvious; he had been practising his royal signature, 'William IV’several months before his brother's death. Yet he heartily disliked pomp and ostentation and he insisted that his coronation should take place with the minimum of expense and fuss.

In this, as in many decisions, he seemed eager to show how different he was from the late king. Whereas Prinney had 'put on a dramatic, royal, distant dignity to all', William IV was bluff, informal, and occasionally slightly embarrassing. As in his habit of cheerfully spitting in public. The extravagant innovations of the previous reign were, where possible, done away with: William had much of the Royal Lodge demolished, sent away the French cooks and the German band which his brother had enjoyed, and had the animals from the royal menagerie sent to form the nucleus of the new Zoological Garden in Regent's Park. Many of Prinney's cherished works of art were similarly made available to the nation; William IV could see little merit in them himself, as he jovially admitted.

An old nickname for William had been 'Silly Billy', and he was certainly not a man of great intellect: yet he did not lack courage, or, on occasion, common sense. Politically he was naive, and he had come out with some startling statements when making speeches in the House of Lords in his younger days; on one occasion, having declared himself firmly opposed to the abolition of the Slave Trade, he accused the great William Wllberforce of being either a fanatic or a hypocrite. Yet William IV was not always so reactionary. Against the advice of the Duke of Wellington, he took a liking to his first Prime Minister, Lord Grey, whose Whig government sought to undertake major Parliamentary reforms: in the spring of 1831, Grey required a general election to be called, so that his government could be returned to power with a large enough majority to permit them to carry out their extensive reforms. At short notice, Grey requested the King to dissolve Parliament. When officials demurred that there would be no time for proper ceremonial to be observed, no time even to prepare the royal coach, the king declared to Grey, 'My lord, I'll go if I go in a hackney coach!' Parliament was promptly dissolved, William was cheered in the streets, and in 1832 the historic Parliamentary Reform Act was passed. Though William's cordial relationship with the Whigs did not last, it had had important results.

In one unfortunate respect William resembled his brother George IV: neither had a legitimate child who survived him. William’s most famous liaison, with the blowsy, but amiable actress Mrs. Jordan, had produced a number of royal bastards, who took the surname Fitzclarence, but marriage to Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg-Meiningen was not so blessed. Adelaide, a pious woman with no claims to beauty, had several pregnancies which ended unhappily in children who did not live, and as King William's childless old age approached it became certain that the next British ruler would be a girl - his niece, Alexandrina Victoria, daughter of his brother the Duke of Kent. Even in this relationship the Hanoverian tradition of conflict between king and heir was continued: between the widowed Duchess of Kent and King William there was a cordial dislike, and each spread gossip about the other. According to the Duchess, William IV's court was a den of vice, where she would not permit her young daughter to be seen; the King countered with offensive accusations about the nature of the relation­ship between the sanctimonious Duchess and her mentor Sir John Conroy. For William, this enmity had one beneficial side-effect – it gave him the willpower to live until his niece should be 18 years old and of age to rule, so that her mother would not have the satisfaction of acting as Regent. When on 20 June 1837, 'Sailor Billy' died, at the age of 73, it was just one month after Victoria's 18^th birthday.(Ross)

Thomas Creevey, the Whig MP and political gossip, left a record of the scene when the news came of the King's death, and the appearance of William in the Palace. He referred affectionately, as many did, to the late King as 'Prinny' and to the new King as 'Billy'. Creevey was writing to his step-daughter from his club in St James's.

*Brooks's, June 26

So poor Prinny is really dead, I have just met our great Privy Councillors coming from the Palace (Warrender and Bob Adair included). I learnt from the former that the only observation he heard from his Sovereign was upon his going to write his name on parchment, when he said: 'You've damned bad pens here!' Here also is Tankerville, who was at the Palace likewise. He says the difference in manner between the late and present sovereign upon the occasion of swearing in the Privy Council was striking. Poor Prinny put on a dramatic, royal, distant dignity to all; Billy, who in addition to living out of the world has become rather blind was doing his best in a very natural way tо tаke out the face of every Privy Councillor as each kneeled down to kiss his hand. In Tankerville's own case, Billy put one hаnd over his eyes and at last said in a most familiar tone: 'Oh, Lord Tankerville is it you? I am very glad to see you. How d’ye do?’ It seemed quite a restraint to him not to shake hands with people. He said to Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer – the cock-eyed Goulboume – ‘D’ye know I'm grown so near-sighted that I can't make out who you are. You must tell me your name, if you please.’ He read his declaration to the Council, which is said to be very favourable to the present Ministry[the Government of Wellington].

After reading this production of the Government, he treated the Council with a little impromptu of his own, and great was the fear of Wellington, as they say visibly expressed on his face, lest Billy should take too excursive a view of things; instead of which ii was merely a little natural and pretty funeral oration over Prinny, who, he said, had always been best and most affectionate of brothers.

Wellington may have organized the approval of the new King. But he could not control the sentiments of the electorate and now the Constitutional law of the land took over. On the death of the Sovereign the Government was obliged to offer itself for election. At this period the total population was about twenty million people, but only 435,000 were allowed to vote, and many of Parliamentary seats were controlled by patrons who could more or less appoint a candidate at will - rather like a patron offering the living of a parish to a favoured clergyman.

And it was a big Parliament: 685 Members from the forty English count and 179 English boroughs, twenty-four Welsh counties and boroughs, the two universities, the twenty-four cities, and the Scottish and Irish constituent. But there was an imbalance between population and Members. Cornwall, for example, had a population of only 300,000 but had forty-two MPs. Lancashire had one million more people, but only fourteen Members. And for all of them the prospect of a new Parliament was complicated by a further distraction: rebellion in Paris.

C+The July revolution in France set up a constitutional monarchy under the house of Orleans. The new King, Louis Philippe, was the son of Revolutionary Philippe Egalite, who had voted for the death of his соusin Louis XVI, and had himself been guillotined later. Louis Philippe was wiser and more honourable man than his father. He was to keep his uneasy throne for eighteen years, and he also kept his head. Encouraged by events in Paris, the Belgians rebelled against the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in which they had been incorporated by the peace treaties of 1815 signed at end of the Napoleonic Wars. A wave of revolts spread across Germany into Poland. These agitations on the European continent, largely orderly in character and democratic in purpose, were much acclaimed in England, and their progress was closely and excitedly studied. The Tory Government and the Duke of Wellington alone seemed suspicious and hostile. With some reason the Government feared that France might annex Belgium or establish a French prince in Brussels upon a new throne. Wellington was even suspected of intending to restore the Kingdom of the Netherlands by armed force. This was not true. The preservation of peace was his chief care. But Opposition speakers were pleased to attribute to him an aim he did not profess, and the rumour was enough to inflame the hot tempers of the times.

It was said that these events influenced the outcome of the British general election. They certainly had an effect on what happened in Britain after the election.

Wellington's Ministry was defeated and the man asked to form the new government was the Whig leader, Earl Grey. The Revolution in France had aroused his interest. He had campaigned, unsuccessfully, for changes in Parliament since the 1790s and now he saw his chance. He agreed to be Prime Minister only if Parliament would accept a Reform Bill. It did.

It is often said that the Industrial Revolution created inequalities among the peoples of Britain. But the Industrial Revolution simply made the existing inequalities more obvious. In the 1830s almost everything in society was unequal. There were restrictions on the economic, social, educational, religious and democratic development of the people that made sure that one group remained in charge and another remained almost entirely without influence.

Charles Grey began his programme of reform by getting rid of the so-called rotten or pocket boroughs – the constituencies owned, and therefore controlled, by the wealthy. And then he gave the vote to more people. Grey was the natural leader of the Whigs. He was an aristocrat, to the right of the Whig party and he respected the old institutions. And although he was a Reformer, his instinct was to balance the relationship between the governing aristocracy and the general public. He believed reform was the way to stop the Radicals getting their hands on government.

C+It is given to few men to carry out late in life a great measure of reform which they have advocated without success for forty years. Such was to be Grey's achievement. He had held office briefly under Fox in the Ministry of 1806. For the rest, since the early years of the younger Pitt he had been not only continuously out of office, but almost without expectation or desire of ever winning it.

Radical leaders declared they would paralyse any Tory Government which came to power, and after a week the Duke of Wellington admitted defeat. On the afternoon of May 18, Grey and Brougham called at St James's Palace. The King authorized them to draw up a list of persons who would be made peers and could be counted on to vote for the Whigs. At the same time he sent his private secretary to tell the leading Tories of his decision and suggest that they could avoid such extremities by abstaining. When the Bill was again introduced the Opposition benches were practically empty. It was carried by an overwhelming majority, and became law on June 7, 1832.

The Act abolished many boroughs and handed over seats to the shires and, to a lesser extent, to the cities. But there were anomalies: 56% of the electorate lived in counties but they had only 31% of the seats, fifty-six boroughs were told they could no longer have Members, thirty boroughs were allowed just one Member each and twenty-two new boroughs could have two Members each.

The vote was given to men who were freeholders of property that was worth forty shillings a year, or those with land worth £ 10 annually, or who were leasing £50 properties.

In truth, the Reform Act didn't change people's lives and rights to the extent some had feared and others had hoped. Yet the preamble to the Act summed up the mood that had driven on Grey and his supporters.

In 1834 Charles Dickens was twenty-two and about to become Parliamentary reporter for the Whig journal, the Morning Chronicle, and in two years' time, the first episode of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club would appear.

Grey was Prime Minister, Palmerston was Foreign Secretary, but by the summer of 1834 Melbourne would replace Grey.

C+ The legislation and the commissions of these years were by no means unfruitful. The slaves in the West Indies were finally emancipated in 1833. For the first time in English history the Government made educational grants to religious societies. The Poor Law was reformed on lines that were considered highly advanced in administrative and intellectual circles, though they did not prove popular among those they were supposed to benefit. The first effective Factory Act was passed though the long hours of work it permitted would horrify the twentieth century and did not satisfy the humanitarians of the time. The whole system of local government was reconstructed and the old oligarchies abolished.

The Poor Law may have been considered an improvement by some, but it defied the evidence of a desperate need for something more liberal and less dogmatic. There had been a Poor Law since the 1530s; money came from voluntary payments in the parishes. By the end of the sixteenth century magistrates were allowed to raise money - in other words, funding poor relief was now compulsory.

By the eighteenth century, the impoverished who weren't able-bodied had to go to the workhouses. The parishes had to provide jobs outside the workhouses for the sound of limb. But agricultural workers in particular were more and more falling on harder times (England was very much a rural society) and the parishes couldn't, or wouldn't, support the poor.

And so, when the Poor Law Act was amended in 1834, boards of guardians were appointed to administer it. In theory, this was an improvement to the system; in practice it was not necessarily so. Instead of putting the able-bodied to work in the parishes and tending the less able in the workhouses, now all paupers were forced into the workhouses in which conditions were to be wretched – as a matter of policy.

On 16 October 1834 the Houses of Parliament burned down. By the following morning, the forum of the first prime minister, Walpole, of Charles James Fox, of the Pitts, of Edmund Burke, was little but dust and ashes. But this was no act of revolution. A janitor in the House was burning bundles of wooden tallies, sticks that for centuries had been used for accounting in the Treasury. He got carried away and the Palace of Westminster overheated and the ultimate result was the neo-Gothic building that exists today. That this inferno happened in the year of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, of the enactment of inadequate Poor Law reform, of an unsuccessful experiment in national trades unionism, and of three prime ministers, is coincidental; however, it's not hard to imagine the stir it caused in William IV’s England.

William was not one of the nation's finest monarchs. As Duke of Clarence, he had been considered a comical figure, often tiresome, oddly-shaped – but a loving father to his ten children by his actress mistress of twenty years. As a royal duke he had been a harmless enough figure; on the throne, he was liability. He'd wanted to be King so much that he took to gargling to keep away infection and any disease that might take him before his royal time was come. His habit of spitting out of the window of his coach, of wandering about London until rescued, and of making less than regal public statements, didn't endear him to his ministers. And he knew it.

But once he was on the throne, which it turned out he didn't like nearly as much as the thought of being on it, William imagined revolution, the rising of the people, the importing of the principles settled by the guillotine in France. He was comforted by his Home Secretary, Viscount Melbourne. But he didn't much like Melbourne, he found him too aristocratic.

Melbourne was a Whig, and the Hanoverians never quite trusted the stylish confidence of the Whigs. William had wanted to be King; Melbourne had never quite wanted to be Prime Minister. That was difficult for William to understand. As Melbourne remarked: 'He hasn't the feelings of a gentleman: he knows what they are, but he hasn't them'. However politicians in the 1830s could not ignore their monarch whatever they thought of him.

When Grey retired in 1834 and Melbourne became Prime Minister, he lasted only a few months, but by the following spring he was back in Number Ten. The change-about presented an interesting Constitutional decision. Towards the end of 1834, the Earl Spencer died. His heir, Lord Althorp, was the Whig leader in the Commons. But now he, the most important Whig in the Commons, had gone to the Lords and Melbourne didn't want to carry on. But he thought it best for the party that he should. The King had other ideas. Even though the Commons was against him doing so, he sacked Melbourne and so, for a few months, Peel was Prime Minister. William IV was the last King to appoint a Prime Minister against the wishes of the Commons.

Melbourne and the King had one thing in common, a wariness, of the growing trades union movement. Melbourne said that employers shouldn't sack men just because they were trades unionists, the danger lay in the taking of secret oaths. He, and William IV, believed that the move from simple bargaining for wages and conditions could lead to political, ideological and social groupings. The mass demonstration against the sentencing of the six Dorset labourers was not in principle wrong to Melbourne but it was the size that he could not accept. To bow to an argument was reasonable, to a crowd was unthinkable. However it was Melbourne's Government which, two years later, did pardon the six.

Melbourne was a member of what was generally called the Whig ruling claw: a world of people who could, and did, takе for granted their mansions in London and the country, their right to provide ambassadors abroad and political leaders at home, and the ease with which they achieved their purpose in life.

Melbourne's family name was Lamb. The Lambs revolved about his mother Elizabeth, Lady Melbourne, whose lover was the very influential George Wyndham, the third Lord Egremont. In fact, Egremont was probably Melbourne's father. Certainly Melbourne's brother George was fathered by the Prince of Wales.

If Melbourne's elder brother Houston hadn't died of consumption Melbourne would probably have become a writer rather than a statesman. But as heir to the title, his life took a different route. He became an MP and married Caroline Ponsonby. She, now Lady Caroline Lamb, was erratic, capricious and often unbalanced. She fell in and out of love. And then, most famously and then destructively, she fell in love with Byron – or perhaps in love with the idea of being in love with him. By 1825, Melbourne and Caroline were separated. She was dead by 1828.

By 1835 Melbourne was Prime Minister for the second time. It was hardly an ideal time to be leader. The Whigs were, as ever, split among themselves. They were disliked by the Lords and there never had been a Hanoverian who really trusted them. In Parliament they were more or less a minority and needed the Radical and Irish benches' support in the lobbies.

But important legislation did go through, including, in 1835, the Municipal Corporations Act. This set out to be the first reform of city and urban government. Councillors would be elected and therefore, indirectly, so would mayors and the city and town aldermen. But the biggest change in Melbourne's ru1е came not with political reform, but with the death of the King. William IV died in 1837.

In his journals Charles Greville left an uncompromising portrait of the King.

*King William IV, if he had been born in a private station, would have passed unobserved through life like millions of other men, looked upon as possessing a good natured and affectionate disposition, but without either elevation of mind or brightness of intellect. During many years of his life the Duke of Clarence was an obscure individual, without consideration, moving in a limited circle, and altogether forgotten by the great world… The King seemed to be more occupied with the pleasing novelty of his situation, providing for his children, and actively discharging the duties of his high function, than in giving effect to any political opinions... the roar of the mighty conflict which the Reform Bill brought on filled him with dismay, and very soon with detestation of the principles of which he had unwittingly permitted himself to be the professor and the promoter.

Greville believed the King's name was used without his understanding in the promotion of the Reform Bill.

*But although King William was sometimes weak, sometimes obstinate, and miserably deficient in penetration and judgment, he was manly, sincere, honest, and straightforward. The most remarkable foible of the late King was his passion for speechifying. He had considerable facility in expressing himself, but what he said was generally useless or improper. He never received the homage of a bishop without giving him a lecture; and the custom he introduced of giving toasts and making speeches at all his dinners was more suitable to a tavern than to a palace.

He was totally deficient in dignity or refinement, and neither his elevation to the throne nor his association with people of the most distinguished manners could give him any tincture of the one or the other

Twenty years earlier, the Duke of Kent (the fourth son of George III) had married simply because any child of the marriage was likely to be the future monarch. The Duke married a widow, Princess Mary Louisa Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1819, a daughter, Alexandrina Victoria, was born. She became fifth in line to the throne, after her father and her uncles, and in the early hours of 20 June 1837, she became Queen Victoria.(Lee)

Part 2. VICTORIAN BRITAIN (1837-1901)