Parliament had voted £243,000 for the expenses of
George IV's coronation-perhaps the effect of a
newly-extended franchise may be traced in the more
economical figure of £70,000, which sufficed for
that of our present Queen.
The
battle of Reform had been fought out in the country
and in Parliament five years before the accession,
and there were, as yet, no signs - to quote Sir
Robert Peel's famous expression at Tamworth - of the
Constitution being " trampled under the hoof of a
ruthless democracy." On the whole, life - its
business and pleasures - seemed to be going forward
on much the same lines as before the great Act,
dreaded, as it had been, as intensely by one party,
as it had been pressed forward and welcomed by the
other. Lord Melbourne was the head of a Whig
Administration, of which, as everybody knows, the
late King had waited impatiently for the first
decent opportunity to get rid. But Melbourne and
Lord John Russell (who, with the office of Home
Secretary, was leader of the House of Commons) had
to reckon with an advance wing of their own party,
already known as Radicals, and were at least as
profoundly averse from their projects as they were
from the Tory policy. Melbourne and Russell desired
to put down Radicalism and proceed with moderate and
safe reforms, above all in Ireland, where the
chronic discontent was being fanned to eruption by
the exertions of Daniel O'Connell. The King's death
had relieved the Whig Cabinet from the adverse
influence of the Court ; moreover, the reliance
placed from the first by the young Queen upon Lord
Melbourne, and the intimate relations between them,
brought about by the circumstances of the case,
enabled the Whigs to assume the peculiar role of
their opponents - that of the special supporters of
the throne.
The
Tories, on the other hand, approached with much
misgiving the General Election, which, according to
the law as it then stood, followed of necessity on
the demise of the monarch. They knew that the
Duchess of Kent had favoured Whig principles in the
education of the Queen ; they saw that Melbourne's
personal charm had secured for him complete
ascendancy in the councils of the new Sovereign, and
they had nothing to expect in the country but
reverse. However, the unpopularity of the new Poor
Law told against Ministers in the rural
constituencies, and the elections left parties
almost unchanged. When the first Parliament of Queen
Victoria assembled on November 20, 1837, the Whig
Government reckoned a majority of about thirty in
the House of Commons. " Of power," wrote the
contemporary compiler of the Annual Register, " in a
political sense, they had none. They could carry no
measure of any kind but by the sufferance of Sir
Robert Peel."
One
incident in the short winter session of 1837, often
as it has been recorded, retains a lasting interest
because of the subsequent celebrity of the
individual who gave rise to it. Mr. Benjamin
Disraeli, the son of a distinguished man of letters,
had just entered Parliament for the first time as
Member for Maidstone. He chose a debate on Irish
Election Petitions as the opportunity for his maiden
speech. " A bottle-green frock coat," writes an
eye-witness, " and a waistcoat of white, of the Dick
Swiveller pattern, the front of which exhibited a
network of glittering chains ; large, fancy pattern
pantaloons, and a black tie, above which no
shirt-collar was visible, completed the outward man.
A countenance lividly pale, set out by a pair of
intensely black eyes, and a broad but not very high
forehead, overhung by clustering ringlets of
coal-black hair, which, combed away from the right
temple, fell in bunches of well-oiled ringlets over
his left cheek."
Not a
prepossessing personality in the eyes of the British
House of Commons, and when the young orator
proceeded to launch into profuse and florid
metaphor, accompanied by exaggerated theatrical
gestures, the forbearance usually shown towards a
new member's first appearance was overborne by
impatience at Disraeli's ludicrous affectation. He
spoke amid incessant interruption and laughter. " At
last, losing his temper, which until now he had
preserved in a wonderful manner, he paused in the
midst of a sentence, and looking the Liberals
indignantly in the face, raised his hands, and
opening his mouth as widely as its dimensions would
admit, said in a remarkably loud and almost terrific
tone, "I have begun several times many things, and I
have often succeeded at last ; ay, sir, and though I
sit down now, the time will come when you will hear
me.' " The contrast between the early manner of this
statesman, and his peculiarly quiet and leisurely
bearing in the debates of later years, betrays the
close study which he devoted to outward effect.
The
Prime Minister, William Lamb, second Viscount
Melbourne, was a typical Whig, genuinely
disposed to moderate reform, but in the habit of
meeting Radical suggestions with the discouraging
question, " Why not leave it alone ? " Of similar
political temperament was his lieutenant in the
Commons, Lord John Russell. It very soon became
evident that the Radicals, though diminished in
numbers by the result of the elections, were likely
to give Ministers trouble in the new Parliament. In
the Upper Chamber, Lord Brougham, who had conceived
a violent dislike to Melbourne, began to employ his
fiery energy and power of acrid invective against
the Government, and showed himself ready to place
himself at the head of the Radicals. In his first
serious attack on Ministers he allied himself with
the Tory Lord Lyndhurst. The opportunity arose out
of events in Canada.
SIR
ROBERT PEEL (1788-185o).
Was
appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1812, Home
Secretary in 1822, and again in 1828-30 under the
Duke of Wellington. In 183o he reconstructed the
Metropolitan Police. He was Prime Minister in
1834-5, and again from 1841 to 1846. His second.
Administration was distinguished by the total
abolition of the Duty on Corn.
The
Tory Party had by this time adopted the title of
Conservatives, a term first applied to them by
Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review for January
1830, wherein he mentions his attachment to " what
is called the Tory, but which might, with more
propriety, be called the Conservative Party." The
Charter of Conservatism was never more clearly
defined than by Sir Robert Peel, who, speaking at
Merchant Taylors' Hall in 1838, said : " My object
for some years past has been to lay the foundations
of a great party which, existing in the House of
Commons, and deriving its strength from the popular
will, should diminish the risk and deaden the shock
of collisions between the two branches of the
legislature."
