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Home Politics and Parties from the Reform Bill of 1832 to that of 1867 The Whig Ministries of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, 1830-1841 |
The Whig Ministries of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, 1830-1841We took as the first period in our political history since 1815 the seventeen years that elapsed between the battle of Waterloo and the reform of Parliament. We may take as a second period the thirty-five years between the first and the second Reform Acts, the years between 1832 and 1867, sometimes known as the period of the £10 Householder, because it was on his vote that the Government of the day depended. Party politics during this period are hard to disentangle. The tenets of parties were, it has been said, " shifting, equivocal, and fluid ", Statesmen were found first upon one side and then upon another. Lord Stanley held high office in Lord Grey's Whig cabinet of 1830, and subsequently when Earl of Derby formed three Conservative cabinets (Curiously enough his son, after being foreign secretary in Disraeli's Conservative Government of 1874, became ten years later colonial secretary in Gladstone's Liberal Government). Lord Melbourne was in Wellington's Tory ministry of 1828, and became a few years later the prime minister of a Whig ministry. Gladstone started his political career, in Macaulay's phrase, as "the rising hope of the stern, unbending Tories", and ended it as an advanced Liberal. Peel was the great leader of the Tories, and yet his chief measures were those to which the Tory party had always been most strenuously opposed. While the extremes of the two British parties, Macaulay once said, are separated by a wide chasm, there is a frontier line where they almost blend. Many of the chief statesmen during these years were near the frontier line, and found it easy to cross over. The two extremes - the ultra-Tories on the one hand, and the Radicals on the other - had nothing in common; but then they did not possess much influence.For eleven years, from 1830-41, the Whigs - or Liberals as they now began to be called - were in power, They had at first, under the leadership of Lord Grey, all the fresh energy of a party long exiled from office. As has been narrated, they reformed the system of election to the House of Commons in 1832. They reorganized, in 1834, the whole of our Poor Law system. They abolished slavery in the British dominions. They passed the first really effective factory law for remedying the grave abuses in cotton mills, and made the first State grant towards education. But disagreements about Irish policy led to the resignation, first of Lord Stanley, and later of Lord Althorp; and upon the resignation of the latter, Lord Grey, already over seventy years of age, insisted upon retiring from office (1834). Lord Melbourne succeeded as prime minister in 1834. Lord Palmerston remained foreign secretary, and Lord John Russell became leader of the House; but Lord Brougham's services as lord chancellor were soon dispensed with. The Melbourne ministry succeeded in remaining in office almost continuously for seven years. There were, however, two ministerial crises. In the very year of its formation, in 1834, William IV dismissed it because he objected to its policy - interesting as being the last occasion on which the Crown, on its own initiative, has thus acted. Peel was summoned from Rome to form a ministry, and at once dissolved Parliament; but, finding himself in a minority in the newly elected House of Commons, he resigned after four months of power, and Melbourne returned. 1830-1841; Part 2 |
Chronology |
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