STILL THE REIGN OF REFORM.
[Sidenote: 1836--The Universities of London]
The movement for the diffusion of education among the people had been
making steady progress during the reign of William the Fourth, and some
of the most distinct and lasting memorials of that movement have come
to be associated with the history of the reign. One of these was the
granting of a charter for the establishment of a great university which
was to bear the name of the capital, and was to confer its degrees, its
honors, and its offices without any conditions as to the religious
profession of those whom it educated, and whom it taught and qualified
by appointment to conduct the education of others. The old
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were then directly associated with
the State Church, and only gave the stamp of their approval and the
right to teach to those who professed the religion established by law.
There had been growing up, for some time, a feeling in the community
that there was need for a system of university teaching which should be
open alike to the members of all creeds and denominations, and even to
those who did not profess to subscribe to the doctrines of any
particular creed, or to enroll themselves in the ranks of any
particular denomination. The institutions which are now known as
University College, London, and the University of London are among the
most remarkable growths of this movement. After years of effort the
charters for these institutions were granted by King William in 1836,
and it is needless to say that University College has played a great
part in the spreading of education among the middle and poorer classes
throughout the country. Henry Brougham was one of the most active
promoters of the effort to bring the higher education and {262} its
honors within the reach of all classes and creeds, and his name will
always be distinctly associated with the rapid progress made in the
spread of knowledge during the earlier part of the nineteenth century.
Brougham was one of the founders and promoters of the "Penny
Cyclopaedia for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," which delighted
some of our grandfathers, amazed and bewildered others, and filled yet
others with a holy horror at the daring effort to upset all the
wholesome distinctions of ranks and classes by cramming the lower
orders with an amount of knowledge wholly unsuited to their subordinate
condition, and unfitting them for the proper discharge of the duties
associated with that station in life to which it had pleased Providence
to call them.
Brougham also took a leading part in the founding of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, which was established by
Sir David Brewster, Sir Roderick Murchison, and many other men famous
in science and in letters in 1831. It has been holding its annual
meetings in all the great cities and towns of these islands ever since,
and is not likely to be interrupted in the continuance of its work.
The British Association was the subject of a good deal of cheap
ridicule in its early days, and caricaturists, most of them long since
forgotten, delighted in humorous illustrations of the oddities by which
social life was to be profusely diversified when science was taught at
popular meetings, and not merely men, but even women and young women,
could sit in the public hall and listen to great professors discoursing
on the construction of the earth and the laws which regulate the
movements of the heavenly bodies. The present generation has almost
completely forgotten even the fact that the British Association was
once a familiar and favorite subject for the pen and pencil of
satirists. "The schoolmaster is abroad" was an expression used by
Brougham to illustrate the educational movement which was going on in
his time, and which he did as much as any man could have done to set
and to keep in motion. King William himself, we may be sure, took only
a very moderate interest in all these goings {263} on, but, at all
events, he did not stand in the way of the general educational
movement; and indeed he gave it a kindly word of patronage and
encouragement whenever it seemed a part of his State functions to
sanction the progress of science by his royal recognition.
[Sidenote: 1831--The press-gang]
Among the many reforms accomplished in this reign of reform was that
which effected the practical abolition of the system of impressment for
the Navy, that system which had so long worked its purposes through the
action of what was familiarly known as the press-gang. The press-gang
system had been in force from very remote days indeed, for it is shown
by statute and by record to have been in operation before 1378. In
1641 the practice was declared illegal by Parliament; but Parliament
might just as well not have troubled itself upon the subject, for the
impressment of seamen went on just as if nothing had happened.
Whenever seamen were required to man the royal fleet in time of war,
the press-gang instantly came into operation. Its mode of action was
simple and straight-forward, and consisted of the forcible arrest and
complete capture of merchant seamen and fishermen, or stalwart young
men of any kind, in seaport towns, who looked as if they had seen
service on some kind of sailing craft. The ordinary practice was that
an officer and a party of seamen and marines landed from some ships of
war in the harbor, and seized and carried off any number of men who
seemed to them suitable for their purpose, and dragged them as
prisoners on board war vessels, where they were compelled to serve
until such time as their help might be no longer needed.
The literature of England, almost down to our own times, is diversified
here and there by illustrations of the scenes which were created in our
seaport towns by this practice. Smollett has more than one animated
picture of this kind. The sea stories of Captain Marryat's days abound
in such illustrations, and even romance of the higher order, and poetry
itself, have found subjects for picturesque and pathetic narrative in
the stories of young men thus torn from their families without a
moment's {264} notice, and compelled to go on a ship of war and fight
the foreign enemy at sea. The pay of an able seaman in a ship of war
was, in those times, very poor; the life was one of hardship, and there
was little to tempt a young man of ordinary ways and temperament to
enter the naval service of his sovereign. The seaport towns and the
towns on the great rivers were called upon by royal authority to supply
a certain proportionate number of men for service in the Navy, and the
local governing bodies did their best, we may be sure, by the offer of
bounties and other encouragements, to induce young men to volunteer for
the sea. In times of war, however, when sudden demands were made on
the part of the Crown for the efficient manning of the Navy, these
encouragements and temptations often failed to procure anything like
the required amount of voluntary service, and then it was that the
press-gang came into work to meet the demand by force.
[Sidenote: 1835--Resisting the press-gang]
During the long wars which followed the outbreak of the French
Revolution the press-gang had a busy time of it. Vessels of war were
in the constant habit of summoning merchant vessels to hand over a
certain number of their seamen, and the merchant vessels were brought
to just as if they had been the cruisers of the enemy, and were boarded
by force, whenever force seemed necessary, and compelled to supply the
requisite number. It sometimes happened that the captain of a vessel
failed to understand the meaning of the peremptory summons issued to
him, and he was then promptly brought to an understanding of the
situation by the shot of the war vessel and the appearance of an armed
boarding party on his own decks. Nor was it even a very unusual event
for the captain of the merchant vessel to offer a resistance, and then
there was a regular sea-fight between the British war ship and the
British merchantman, in which, of course, the latter was very soon
compelled to acknowledge the validity of the royal warrant.
In the ordinary course of things, however, the captain of the war
vessel sent an officer and a party of men on shore, and their business
was to make any captures they {265} pleased, in that part of the town
where men fit for service at sea were most likely to be found. There
are stories told, and told on historic evidence as truth, about young
husbands thus captured and thrown into prison to await their removal to
some war vessel off the coast, and whose wives or mothers could devise
no better means for their rescue than to obtain an interview with them
in the prison, and there contrive so to mutilate the hands of the
captives through the bars of the cell as to render them unfit for
service in the Royal Navy. Sometimes, when it became known that the
press-gang was about to visit that part of the town where seafaring men
were likely to be found, the population of the quarter rallied in
defence of their townsmen, and offered just such resistance to the
emissaries of the naval authorities as they would have offered to an
invading enemy. Streets were barricaded; from the high windows of
houses stones were hurled down and volleys of musketry were fired;
crowds of armed men, and even sometimes of armed women, met the
invaders in the street itself and disputed their progress inch by inch.
In the lower quarters of Portsmouth and other seaport towns such scenes
were of frequent occurrence. The whole system had among its other
harmful effects a very damaging influence on the Navy itself and on its
discipline. The press-gang was not very choice in making up its
contributions of recruits for the fleet. No great pains were taken
with a view to obtain certificates as to character and conduct. Those
who formed the recruiting expedition were only too ready to seize any
strapping young men whom they found loitering about the streets and
lanes of the lower quarters in a seaport town. These strapping young
men often turned out to be rising young men of the criminal classes,
but their limbs and muscles made them like some of Falstaff's recruits,
"good enough to toss--food for powder," and they were promptly swooped
upon and carried off to serve in his Majesty's Navy. Such captives as
these, when put on board a vessel of war and compelled to serve as
seamen there, had the influence which might have been expected from
them over the habits of the whole crew. {266} The severest and even
the most savage methods of discipline were often found necessary to
force such men into habits of obedience and into anything like decent
conduct. Flogging then, and for long after, prevailed in the Navy and
in the Army, and one of the most familiar arguments in favor of keeping
up that form of discipline was found in the fact that in many cases the
new recruits might have corrupted the habits of a whole ship's company
if they had not been compelled by frequent floggings to obey orders,
submit themselves to rules, and conduct themselves with decency.
For a long time a strong feeling had been growing up among
philanthropists and reformers of all kinds against the practice of
impressment and against the discipline of the "cat," as the flogging
instrument was commonly termed. The philanthropists and the reformers
generally were met by the old sort of familiar argument. They were
told that it would be utterly impossible to man a navy if the
press-gang were to be abolished, and equally impossible to keep the
Navy up to its work and in decent condition if seamen were no longer
liable to the punishment of the lash. The innovators were asked
whether they knew better how to raise and maintain an efficient Navy
than did the naval authorities, on whose shoulders rested the
responsibility of defending the shores of England from foreign
invasion. Those who made themselves conspicuous by their advocacy of
what were then beginning to be called humanitarian principles were
roundly accused of want of patriotism, and it was often suggested that
they were anti-English in their sentiments and their instincts, and
were persons who would probably, on the whole, rather welcome the
foreign invader than lend a hand to drive him back. The spirit of
humanity and of reform was in the air, however, and in the reformed
Parliament there were many men who had as good a gift of eloquence as
the best of their opponents, and who could not be frightened out of any
purpose on which they had set their minds and hearts. In 1835 the
Government of Lord Melbourne brought in a measure for the abolition of
the press-gang {267} system and for limitation of compulsory service in
the Navy to a period of five years. This measure not only had its own
direct and immediate beneficial effects, but it also did much to
prepare the way for the abolition of flogging. Many years, indeed, had
to pass before this latter reform could be accomplished, but it was
clear that, when the manning of the Navy no longer brought with it its
captures from the criminal classes, the time was coming for the gradual
adoption of a system of discipline more in accordance with the
principles of humanity and the character of a noble service. As we
have seen in all previous experiences of reform, the forebodings of the
anti-reformers proved to be utterly false alarms in regard to the
manning and the discipline of the Navy. We have seen some foreign wars
since the days of William the Fourth, and we have heard alarms of
foreign invasion again and again. But the Navy, under its improved
conditions, has never been in want of volunteers to man it, and the
greatest lovers of peace have always proclaimed it to be the surest and
best defence of the country. There were many leading men in the House
of Commons since those days who persistently demanded a reduction in
the Army on the very ground that England could safely defy any foreign
foe so long as she had the bulwark of such a Navy.
[Sidenote: 1840--The new Houses of Parliament]
One great, solid, and picturesque memorial is destined to associate the
reign of William the Fourth with the history of English architecture.
We speak of the Houses of Parliament which stand on the banks of the
river, and thus have the Thames on one side and Westminster Abbey on
the other. The great range of halls, towers, and terraces, arches,
squares, and court-yards, which, until comparatively recent days, were
often described in common phrase as the New Houses of Parliament, owe
their origin and their plan, although not their complete construction,
to the reign of William the Fourth. On the evening of October 16,
1834, the old buildings in which the Lords and the Commons used to
assemble were completely destroyed by fire. The fire broke out so
suddenly on that evening and spread with such extraordinary rapidity
that many of those {268} who were engaged in occupations of one kind or
another in various parts of the buildings had much difficulty in
escaping with their lives. The flames spread so fast that in an almost
incredibly short space of time the two Houses of Parliament, and almost
all the offices, residences, and other buildings attached to them, were
seen to be devoted to hopeless ruin. For a while it seemed almost
certain that Westminster Hall itself must be involved in the common
destruction, and even the noble Abbey, with its priceless memorial
treasures, appeared destined to become a mere ruin of shattered stones.
The arrangements for the extinguishing of fires were rude and poor and
inefficient in those days when compared with the systematized service
which is employed in our own, and for a considerable time those who
hurried to the spot, charged with the duty of combating the
conflagration, appeared to do little better than get in each other's
way and only give new chances to each fresh eruption. The tide in the
river was very low, too, when the destroying work began, and it was
hard indeed to bring any great body of water to bear upon the flames.
As the tide rose, however, it became easy to make more effective
efforts. At last it was found that Westminster Abbey might be
considered perfectly safe. So was Westminster Hall, that noble
historical enclosure, the Hall which saw the trial of William Wallace,
of Charles the First, of Somers, and of Warren Hastings, the hall which
celebrated the coronation of so many kings, which boasts of being the
oldest chamber in Europe held in continuous occupation up to the
present day, the largest hall in Europe unsupported by pillars. It was
preserved, to be the grand entrance and vestibule to both the Houses of
Parliament. But the chambers in which, up to that day, the Lords and
Commons had conducted their legislative work were utterly destroyed.
[Sidenote: 1834--Burning of the old Parliament Houses]
At first it was assumed, as is almost always the assumption in the case
of any great conflagration, that the work of destruction had been the
outcome of an incendiary plot, and for a while a wild idea spread
abroad that some modern Guy Fawkes had succeeded where his predecessor
had {269} completely failed. But it was soon made clear and certain
that the whole calamity, if indeed it can be called much of a calamity,
had been the result of a mere accident. A careless workman, aspiring
to nothing more than a quick release from his labor, and not destined
to the fame of the aspiring youth who fired the Ephesian dome, had
brought about the ruin which bequeathed to England and to the world the
vast and noble structure of Westminster Palace. The workman was
engaged in burning up a number of the old, disused wooden tallies which
once used to be employed in the Court of Exchequer, and he heaped too
large a bundle of them on the fire. At an unlucky moment a flame
suddenly blazed up which caught hold of the furniture in the room, and
in another moment set the whole building on fire, and then created the
vast conflagration which wrought so much destruction.
We have expressed a certain doubt as to whether the burning of the old
Houses of Parliament is really to be regarded as a national calamity,
and the doubt is founded partly on the admitted fact that the chambers
which existed before the fire were quite unequal in size and in
accommodation to the purposes for which they were designed, and partly
on the architectural magnificence of the buildings which succeeded
them. The Lords and Commons found accommodation where they could while
preparations were in progress for the building of new and better
chambers, and a Parliamentary committee was soon appointed to consider
and report upon the best means of providing the country with more
commodious and more stately Houses of Parliament. The committee
ventured on a recommendation which was considered, at the time, a most
daring piece of advice. The recommendation was that the contract for
the erection of the new Houses of Parliament should be thrown
absolutely open to public competition. Nothing like that proposal had
ever been heard of under similar conditions in English affairs up to
that time. What seemed to most persons the most natural and proper
plan--the seemly, becoming, and orderly plan--would have been to allow
the sovereign or some great State {270} personage to select the Court
architect who might be thought most fitting to be intrusted with so
great a task, and let him work out, as best he could, the pleasure of
his illustrious patron. The committee, however, were able to carry
their point, and the contract for the great work was thrown open to
unrestricted competition. Out of a vast number of designs submitted
for approval, the committee selected the design sent in by Mr. Barry
(afterwards Sir Charles Barry), the famous architect, who has left many
other monuments of his genius to the nation, but whose most conspicuous
monument, assuredly, is found in the pile of buildings which ornament
the Thames at Westminster.
[Sidenote: 1840--The seating capacity of the Commons]
Only the mere fact that the selection of the design for the new
building was made during the lifetime of William the Fourth connects
the reign of that monarch with the history of Westminster Palace. It
was not until the reign of Queen Victoria had made some way that the
towers of the palace began to show themselves above the river; but the
new principle which offered the design for the work to public
competition, and the fact that Mr. Barry's design was chosen from all
others, oblige us to associate the building of the new chambers with
the reign of a sovereign whose name otherwise was not likely to be
identified with any triumph of artistic genius. We must not set down
to any defects in the architect's constructive skill the fact that the
new House of Commons was almost as inadequate to the proper
accommodation of its members as the old House had been. The present
House of Commons does not provide sitting accommodation for anything
like the number of members who are entitled to have seats on its
benches. Even if the galleries set apart for the use of members only,
galleries that are practically useless for the purposes of debate, were
to be filled to their utmost, there still would not be room for nearly
all the members of the House of Commons. But at the time when the new
House was built, the general impression of statesmen on both sides
seemed to be that, if the chamber were made spacious enough to give a
seat to every member, the result would be {271} that the room would be
too large for anything like practical, easy, and satisfactory
discussion, and that the chamber would become a mere hall of
declamation.
At that time almost all the business of the House, even to its most
minute details of legislation, was done in the debating-chamber itself.
The scheme which was adopted a great many years later, and by means of
which the shaping of the details of legislative measures is commonly
relegated to Grand Committees, as the Parliamentary phrase goes, had
not then found any favor with statesmen. The daily work of the House
was left, for the most part, in the hands of the members of the
Administration and the leading members of the Opposition, or, in cases
where the interests of a particular class, or trade, or district were
concerned, to the men who had special knowledge of each subject of
legislation. It was therefore argued, and with much plausibility, that
to construct a chamber large enough to hold seats for all the members
would be to impose an insupportable, and at the same time a quite
unnecessary, strain upon the energies and the lungs of the
comparatively small number of men by whom the actual business of the
House had to be carried on. This argument was used with much effect,
not many years before his death, by Mr. Gladstone himself, and there
can be no doubt that it maintained itself against the many successive
proposals which have been made from time to time for the enlargement of
the representative chamber. In most other legislative halls, on the
Continent or in the United States or in Canada, each member has his own
seat, and finds it ready for his occupation at any time; but in the
House of Commons on great occasions the ordinary member has to come to
the House at the earliest moment when its doors are open, hours and
hours before the business begins, in order to have even a chance of
obtaining a seat during the debate, and a large number of members are
fated, whatever their energy and their early rising, to sigh for a seat
in vain. The question has been raised again and again in the House of
Commons, and all manner of propositions have been brought forward and
plans suggested for the {272} enlargement of the debating-chamber, but
up to the present the condition of things remains just as it was when
the new Houses of Parliament were opened in the reign of Queen Victoria.
[Sidenote: 1840--Ladies in the House of Commons]
Sir Charles Barry's design has the great advantage that it renders an
increase in the size of the House of Commons possible and practicable
without a complete reconstruction of all that part of the vast building
which belongs to the representative chamber and its various offices.
In the opinion of many leading members of the House of Commons the
number of representatives is needlessly large for the purposes demanded
by an adequate and proportionate system of representation, and it is
not difficult to foresee changes which might lead, with universal
satisfaction, to a reduction in the number of members in the House of
Commons. It may also be anticipated that the system that relegates the
details of legislative measures to the consideration of Grand
Committees may be gradually extended as time goes on, and that thus the
committee work of the House of Commons itself may grow less and less by
degrees. In either case, or in both cases together, it might easily
come to pass that the present debating-chamber would supply ample
sitting room to all its members on every ordinary occasion, although it
is hardly possible to understand how, on a night of great debate, with
a momentous division impending, the present chamber could be expected
to accommodate the full number of members entitled to claim seats
there. At all events, it is hardly possible to imagine any condition
of things arising which could call for any alteration in the
construction of the representative chamber which would be likely to
affect, in the slightest degree, the general character of that palace
of legislation which was planned and founded during the reign of
William the Fourth, was opened in the reign of Queen Victoria, and will
bear down to posterity the name of its architect, Sir Charles Barry.
Before leaving this subject it is of interest to note that the question
of providing accommodation for ladies desiring to listen to the debates
in the House of Commons {273} was brought up more than once during the
reign of William the Fourth. Miss Martineau, in her "History of the
Thirty Years' Peace," makes grave complaint of the manner in which the
proposal for the admission of ladies to hear the debates was treated
alike by the legislators who favored and by those who resisted the
proposition. The whole subject, she appears to think, was treated as a
huge joke. One set of members advocated the admission of ladies on the
ground, among other reasons, that their presence in the House of
Commons would tend to keep the legislators sober, and prevent them from
garnishing their speeches with unseemly expressions. Another set stood
out against the proposal on the ground that if ladies were allowed to
sit in a gallery in sight of the members, the result would be that the
representatives would cease to pay any real attention to the business
of debate, and would occupy themselves chiefly in studying the faces
and the dresses of the fair visitors, and trying to interchange glances
with the newly admitted spectators.
The conditions under which ladies may be permitted to listen to the
debates in the House of Commons form a subject of something like
periodical discussion up to the present day. There is, as everybody
knows, a certain number of seats set apart behind the Press gallery in
the House of Commons for the accommodation of women, who are admitted
by orders which members can obtain who are successful in a balloting
process which takes place a week in advance. About twenty members only
out of more than six hundred can win two seats each for any one sitting
of the House, and no member can approach the ballot for at least a week
after he has accomplished a success. The Ladies' Gallery holds only a
very small number of women, and it is jealously screened by a gilded
grating something like that through which the women of an Eastern
potentate's household are permitted to gaze upon the stage from their
box in the theatre.
It will perhaps be news to some readers to hear that this ladies'
gallery, such as it is, is technically not within the precincts of the
House of Commons at all. It is not an {274} institution of the House,
nor does it come under the rules of the House, nor is it recognized by
the authorities of the House. It is there, as a matter of fact, but it
is not supposed to be there, and the Speaker of the House, who is
omnipotent over all other parts of the chamber, has no control over the
occupants of that gilded cage, and is technically assumed to be
ignorant of their presence. The Speaker can, on proper occasions,
order strangers "to withdraw" from all the other galleries set apart
for the use of outsiders, but he has no power over the ladies who sit
in the gallery high above his chair. It has even happened that when
subjects had, as a matter of necessity, to be discussed in the House of
Commons which the Speaker did not consider quite suitable for an
audience of both sexes, he has sent a private and unofficial intimation
to the Ladies' Gallery that it would, in his opinion, be more seemly if
its occupants were to withdraw. But on some occasions a few of the
ladies declined to withdraw, and the Speaker had no power to enforce
his advice, seeing that, technically, there was no Ladies' Gallery
within his jurisdiction. Some time, no doubt, the House of Commons
will adopt more reasonable regulations, and will recognize the right of
women to be treated as rational creatures, as members of the community,
as citizens, and allowed to sit, as men do, in an open gallery, and
listen to the debates which must always more or less concern their own
interests. It is a curious fact that the galleries and other parts of
the House of Lords to which women have admission are open to the public
gaze just as are those parts of the House in which male strangers are
permitted to listen to the debates of the peers.
[Sidenote: 1835--The Orange Associations]
In the year 1835 the public mind of these countries was much surprised,
and even startled, by the discovery, or what at least seemed to be the
discovery, of a great and portentous plot against the established order
of succession to the throne. This plot was declared to be carried on
by the Orange societies which had for many years been growing up in
Great Britain and Ireland, and throughout many of the colonies and
dependencies. This Orange {275} organization began in the North of
Ireland, and was originally intended to crush out the Catholic
associations which were then coming into existence all over Ireland for
the political and religious emancipation of the Roman Catholics, and
for strengthening the national cause in the Irish Parliament. There is
so little to be said in defence, or even in excuse, of the Orange
organization in its earlier years that it seems only fair to admit the
possibility of its having been seriously intended, in the beginning,
for the defence of Great Britain against an Irish rebellion fomented
and supported by France.
The Orange associations took their title from the name of the royal
house which had given William the Third as a sovereign to England, and
the name of Orange was understood to illustrate its hostility to all
Jacobite plots and schemes, which were naturally assumed to have the
countenance and the favor of England's foreign enemies. We have seen
already, in the course of this history, how the Orange societies acted
before the rebellion of '98 in Ireland, and how orange and green became
the rival colors of those who denounced and those who supported every
Irish national movement. When the rebellion was suppressed, and
Grattan's Parliament was extinguished, the Orange associations were not
in the least disposed to admit that their work had been accomplished
and that there was no further need for their active existence. On the
contrary, they increased their efforts to spread their power all over
the country, and, claiming for themselves the credit of having been a
main influence in the suppression of the Irish rebellion, they appealed
for the support of all loyal Englishmen to increase their numbers and
strengthen their hands. Orangeism, which had at first only been known
in Ireland, began to spread widely throughout Great Britain. Orange
Lodges were everywhere formed; Orange Grand Masters were appointed; a
whole vocabulary of Orange titles, passwords, and phrases was invented;
a complete hierarchy of Orange officialism was created, and an
invisible network of Orangeism held the members of the organization
together. The Orange conspiracy, if {276} we may call it so, had been
spreading its ramifications energetically during the later years of
George the Fourth's reign, and had succeeded in obtaining the
countenance, and indeed the active support, of many peers, of at least
some bishops, and even of certain members of the royal family. The
Duke of York, who at that time stood nearest in the succession to the
throne, was a patron of the societies, and was invited to become Grand
Master of the whole organization. The invitation would in all
probability have been accepted if the Duke had not been assured, on the
most authoritative advice, that a secret organization of such a nature
was distinctly an illegal body. When the Duke died, and it seemed all
but certain that the next King of England must be his brother William,
Duke of Clarence, the Orange lodges transferred their allegiance to the
Duke of Cumberland, who consented to become their Grand Master.
[Sidenote: 1835--Wellington and the British Crown]
The Duke of Cumberland, as we have already seen, was a Tory of the most
extreme order; an inveterate enemy to every kind of reform and every
progressive movement, a man who was not merely unpopular but thoroughly
detested among all classes who valued political freedom, religious
liberty, and the spread of education. Soon after William the Fourth's
accession to the throne a new impulse was given to Orangeism by the
King's yielding to the demand for popular reform, and by the measures
and the movements which began to follow the passing of Lord Grey's
Reform Bill. The Orangemen all over these countries then began to look
upon the Duke of Cumberland as their natural leader, and there can be
little doubt that in the minds of many of them, in the minds of some of
the most influential among them, there was growing up the wild hope
that the Duke of Cumberland might become King of England. The Orange
lodges became a vast secret organization with signs and passwords, a
mysterious political confraternity, the Grand Master of which was a
sort of head centre, to adopt a phrase belonging to a more modern
conspiracy, and performing, indeed, something like the part which
Continental Freemasonry at one time {277} aspired to play. The Orange
lodges in Great Britain and Ireland swelled in numbers until they had
more than three hundred thousand members solemnly and secretly sworn to
obey all the orders of the leaders. More than that, the emissaries of
the Orange lodges contrived to make their influence widely felt in the
Army, and it became clear afterwards that a large number of soldiers
were sworn confederates of the association.
Some of the explanations which were afterwards given to account for the
sudden spread of Orangeism might well appear incredible at first to an
intelligent reader of our day not acquainted with this singular chapter
of history. But it was afterwards made perfectly certain that a large
number of credulous persons were prevailed upon to join the Orange
ranks by the positive assurance that the Duke of Wellington had formed
the determination to seize the crown of England and to put it on his
own head, and that the Duke of Cumberland was the only man who could
save the realm from this treasonable enterprise. It seems hardly
possible now to understand that there could have been one human
creature in England silly and ignorant enough to believe the Duke of
Wellington capable of so preposterous and so wicked a scheme. Lord
John Russell has left it on record that when he visited Napoleon in his
exile at Elba, the fallen Emperor, during the course of a long
conversation, expressed his strong belief that Wellington would seize
the crown of England. Lord John endeavored to convince him that such
an idea went entirely outside the limits of sober reality; but Napoleon
refused to be convinced, and blandly put the question aside with the
manner of one who knows better but does not particularly care to
impress his opinion on unwilling ears. One can easily understand how
such an idea might come into the mind of Napoleon, who knew little or
nothing about the actual conditions of English political and social
life, and who had experience of his own to demonstrate the possibility
of a great military conqueror becoming at once the ruler of a State.
But it seems hard indeed to understand how any sane Englishman could
have believed that {278} the simple, loyal, unselfish Duke of
Wellington could allow such an idea to enter his mind for a moment, or
could see his way to make it a reality even if he did entertain it.
Yet it cannot be doubted that numbers of Englishmen were induced to
join Orange lodges by the positive assurance that thus only could they
save the State from Wellington's daring ambition.
[Sidenote: 1836--Dissolution of the Orange lodges]
One of the principal instruments of the Orange organization was a
certain Colonel Fairman, who held an important position in what may be
called its military hierarchy, and was undoubtedly at one time
intrusted by the Duke of Cumberland with the fullest authority to act
as the emissary of the Grand Master to make known his will and convey
his orders. Whether the Duke of Cumberland ever really entertained the
project ascribed to him of seizing the crown for himself and shutting
out the Princess Victoria can, in all probability, never be known as a
certainty; but there can be no question that his actions often
justified such a belief, and that many of his most devoted Orange
followers looked up to him as the resolute hero of such a project to
save England from Whigs and Liberals, and Roman Catholics, and mob
orators, and petticoat government, and all other such enemies to the
good old state of things as established by the wisdom of our ancestors
and the Act of Settlement. The whole question was raised in the House
of Commons during the session of 1835 by Joseph Hume, the consistent
and persevering advocate of sound economic doctrine, of political
freedom, of peace, retrenchment, and reform. Hume obtained the
appointment of a committee to inquire into the whole subject, and the
committee had no great difficulty in finding out that Colonel Fairman
had been carrying on, with or without the consent or authority of his
Grand Master the Duke of Cumberland, what must be called a treasonable
conspiracy through the Orange lodges and even through Orangemen who
were actually serving in the King's Army. In 1836 Hume brought up the
question once again and obtained so much support from Lord John
Russell, then acting as Leader of the Government in the House of
Commons, that {279} an address was unanimously voted to the King
calling on him to proclaim the condemnation of the Orange conspiracy.
The Duke of Cumberland disclaimed all treasonable purposes, and
declared that many of the steps taken by Fairman and other Orange
emissaries had been taken without his orders and even without his
knowledge. Fairman disappeared from the scene when the crisis seemed
to become too serious for his personal convenience, and one of the
Orange emissaries, against whom a prosecution was to be instituted, was
removed by a sudden death from the reach of the criminal law. The Duke
of Cumberland announced that he had already, of his own inspiration,
ordered the dissolution of the Orange lodges. The King, in his reply
to the address in the House of Commons, declared himself entirely in
accordance with the resolutions of the House, and thus the whole
conspiracy came to an end, and the Government thought it well to allow
the subject to pass into obscurity without further action.
This was the end of the Orange organization, as it was known in the
days of William the Fourth. At a later date Orangeism was again
revived, but only in the form which it still maintains, by which it is
now known to us all as a political association, openly avowing
legitimate opinions and purposes, and as fairly entitled to existence
as any political club or other such organization recognized in the
movements of modern life. The treasonable conspiracy, like many
another evil, died when it was compelled to endure the light of day.
{280}