How the Scots Invented the Modern World (43 page)

But in other areas, Pitt had failed. His attempt to reform the electoral system had gone down to defeat; so had abolition of the slave trade. Despite the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801, legal emancipation for Roman Catholics seemed a long way off. The coming of war with France had forced Pitt to throw off his reformist clothes, and his crackdown on radical elements with the suspension of habeas corpus and the so-called Gagging Acts had an air of hysteria, even desperation, about them. Although Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 meant Britain was safe from invasion, the nation, and its political class, were at deadlock.

The temper of the times, and of the ruling Tories, was epitomized by the legacy of Edmund Burke. His impassioned defense of the English tradition of constitutional liberty, and his suggestion that 1688 was the only revolution England ever needed, had been turned into a justification for inertia. Any further changes, it was argued, would precipitate disaster, as they had in France, and a collapse of law and order. Parliament’s role was to keep the lid on the simmering pot of popular discontent, and if it occasionally boiled over, then the lid had to be pushed down harder.

Jeffrey, Horner, and Brougham were working to change the direction and terms of the national political conversation. They had started it in the pages of the
Edinburgh Review;
now they looked to Parliament itself. Horner was already contemplating taking a seat in Parliament when Henry Brougham arrived in London. He joined the Whigs’ exclusive social club, Brook’s, and then attended his first dinner party at Holland House, in the heart of fashionable London.

It was a glittering palace of London intellectual and artistic life, the center of Whig politics, and the hub of London’s “Scottish connection.” Lord Byron was poking fun, but also telling the truth, when he wrote:

Blest be the banquets spread at Holland House,
Where Scotchmen feed, and critics carouse.

The leading intellectual lights at Holland House were all Scotsmen. James Mackintosh was one. Another was John Millar, the brilliant and popular University of Glasgow professor, whose
Historical View of the
English Government
had been dedicated to the former leader of the Whigs, Charles James Fox.

Millar first introduced the notion of class conflict into the understanding of modern history. He was also one of the first scholars to discuss the history of women and the history of sex as part of the larger story of civilization, or “the rise of opulence and refinement.” Millar argued that the advent of commercial society brought sweeping changes in the lives of those who were otherwise excluded from a significant social role in prior stages of civilization. Women, children, servants, peasants, and the laboring class, even slaves (Millar cited Kames’s 1774 decision freeing the Jamaican Joseph Knight), all benefited from commercial society’s expansion of opportunity and the breakdown of the age-old patterns of rigid patriarchal authority.

As a society becomes economically more active and affluent, Millar explained, “the lower people, in general, become thereby more independent in their circumstances.” They “begin to exert those sentiments of liberty which are natural to the mind of man.” But here Millar warned of a looming collision, as the people rise up to demand their liberty and the rulers try desperately to hang on to their old position and power. The result must inevitably be revolution. It had happened in Britain once before, Millar argued, during the English Civil War. It had happened again in France, in 1789.

The people will not, indeed cannot, give up their struggle. Responsibility for avoiding revolution, then, belongs to the rulers and ruling class. And it was in order to avoid Millar’s dire prediction from coming true that Brougham wanted to turn the Whig Party into the self-conscious champions of reform.

Even for someone of Brougham’s ego and abilities, it was a daunting undertaking. Since their earliest beginnings the Whigs had been dominated by great landed English families, and their efforts to raise the fortunes of merchants, shopkeepers, and “the lower classes” always had an offhand air of
noblesse oblige.
Brougham set out to broaden their base and elevate their sense of purpose, first by reaching out to leading radical elements, then by orchestrating a steady public-relations campaign, to make his own progressive views appear as the official Whig view, and vice versa.

The battle began with Brougham making speeches, publishing articles in the
Edinburgh Review
(he wrote more than fifty-eight in the magazine’s first five years), and using his private legal practice to generate publicity for the cause. His very first speech in Parliament, even before becoming an MP, was as spokesman for Manchester and Liverpool merchants protesting new trade restrictions. The Whigs, not the Tories, now emerged as the champions of free trade. In court, he successfully defended against libel charges the author of a piece condemning flogging in the British army, pointing out that distinguished British officers had condemned the practice in print, in far stronger language. As a result, the Whigs “owned” the issue of army reform.

When Brougham finally entered Parliament in 1810, the year his teacher Dugald Stewart retired, he proved unstoppable, despite his testy temper and overbearing manner. He rose to the front rank of Whig orators, and forced the party into the lists as the champions of “the people” and the enemies of “privilege.” He acted as defense counsel to Queen Caroline in the trial for her divorce from the king, skillfully turning her into a symbolic victim of heartless tyranny and a heroine to ordinary people around the country. He made speeches and wrote a string of articles on slavery, preparing the nation not only for ending the slave trade (which the Whigs finally forced through in 1807), but for its final complete abolition.

But the real battle still loomed on the horizon: parliamentary reform.

Although the English political system had been expanded and elaborated after two revolutions and a century of empire, it had not modified its basic principles since the days of Henry VIII. It was still dominated by the personal patronage of powerful aristocrats, who not only sat in the House of Lords, but could virtually name their friends and relatives to the House of Commons, through their control of county seats and local constitutencies, or “boroughs.” There was no rhyme or reason for deciding who could vote, or where: although the numbers of voters had grown substantially over the eighteenth century, they still represented a tiny minority of adult male Englishmen and Welshmen, barely one in eight—and an even tinier minority of Scotsmen, scarcely one in twenty.

Even more seriously, it remained fixed in a feudal, premercantile mindset. The big agricultural counties, and their landlords, dominated Parliament. Britain’s urban population found itself virtually frozen out, especially the new industrial cities. One of Brougham’s followers, Thomas Macaulay, pointed out that northern London, “a city superior in size and in population to the capitals of many kingdoms,” was totally unrepresented. “It is needless to speak of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, with no representation,” he added, “or of Edinburgh or Glasgow, with a mock representation.” This was not government by property, as its defenders claimed, but government “by certain detached portions and fragments of property . . . on no rational principle whatever.” The issue was, Macaulay concluded, “not whether the constitution was better formerly, but whether we can make it better now.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay was an example of just how far a young man could go in those years, if he had talent, ambition, and wrote for the
Edinburgh Review.
He was the son of a Scottish abolitionist from Inverary who moved to London, where he became the prime mover in the evangelical reform- and abolition-minded circle known as the “Clapham sect.” Although Zachary Macaulay’s precocious son went to Cambridge instead of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and trained for the English rather than the Scottish bar, he knew the Scottish historians almost by heart, and automatically fit in with the
Edinburgh Review
set now living in London. It was Brougham who recommended him to Francis Jeffrey as a potential reviewer, and it was his essay on John Milton in the August 1825 issue that made Macaulay famous almost overnight. By defending Milton’s revolutionary politics in the English civil war, and his role in the execution of Charles I, Macaulay turned England’s most famous epic poet, the author of
Paradise Lost,
into a champion of the radical Whigs. He became the latest sensation at Holland House dinner parties, leaving guests agog at his eloquence and erudition. Four years later, Lord Lansdowne, another of Dugald Stewart’s English pupils and leading Whig, offered him one of the seats in Parliament under his control. In the election of February 1830, Thomas Macaulay entered the House of Commons.

By now the demands for reform had reached critical mass. The year before, the Tories, under the Duke of Wellington, had consented to another major topic in the Whig reform program, Catholic emancipation, but now they dug in their heels on making any further changes. The country was in a deep economic depression. In the Midlands of England, workers and businessmen joined together in the Birmingham Political Union; in the south, laborers rioted and burned farm machinery. After twenty-three years as the party in opposition, the Whigs sensed that their moment had come. On November 2, Wellington made his speech in the House of Lords denying any need for a reform bill. On the fifteenth the Tories lost their last vote and Wellington, the Iron Duke, went to Buckingham Palace to resign.

Five hundred miles away, in far-off Lothian, a team of day laborers were breaking stones in a seaside quarry when the news came that the Tories were out of power. One of them, Alexander Somerville, who later wrote
Autobiography of a Working Man,
remembered: “We took off our hats and caps, and loud above the north wind, and the roaring sea, shouted ‘Henry Brougham forever!’”

The Whigs were in. In the new cabinet were no less than four former Stewart pupils: Lansdowne, Palmerston, Sir John Russell—and, of course, Henry Brougham. In his explosive, mercurial way, Brougham was the driving force behind the Whig program for reform. It was not as radical as some wished (no vote for working-class Britons and no secret ballot), but it was far more advanced and comprehensive than anything that had ever been proposed by a sitting government.

Brougham would, however, play no role in promoting it in his former arena, the House of Commons. The only position available for him in the Whig cabinet was lord chancellor. The new prime minister, Lord Grey, distrusted Brougham, as many of his own party did; even the prospect of having him as chancellor, a politically minor post, made them uneasy. When the cabinet learned that Brougham had accepted, one of them murmured, “Then we shall never have another comfortable moment in this room.”

But taking his seat in the upper house as Lord Brougham, he made huge efforts to push the bill through. And sitting as England’s most important judicial figure, he also began reforming its legal system and the Court of Chancery. He abolished the abuses and bottlenecks that had tied up lawsuits for generations (and which are described in comic yet horrifying detail in Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House
) and pushed England’s common-law system forward to meet the modern age.

Instead of Brougham, the party’s leading orator in the Commons was the Scottish abolitionist’s son, and in the end Macaulay’s contribution was more far-reaching and profound. His speeches gave the Reform Bill a historical grounding, and therefore a legitimacy, that even its most fervent supporters had never imagined was there. Thirty-three years old, upright and motionless, “a little man of small voice, and affected utterance, clipping his words and hissing like a serpent,” Macaulay hammered away day after day and in speech after speech. Each time he came back to the same point. This was a decisive moment in English history, and the history of Britain, and that humanity’s political progress now required another turn of the wheel.

It was all, or virtually all, the Scottish school, evoked as justification for a new way to see political change: as reform, an action that preserves at the same time as it alters and improves. Macaulay was quite capable of playing the demagogue, as other Whigs did, warning listeners of the tumult and even bloodshed that could erupt if the bill failed to pass. “The danger is terrible,” he would say. “The time is short. If this bill should be rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social order.” He stressed, “The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still.”

But most of his oratory evoked a larger historical canvas, as depicted by the leading figures of the Scottish school from Kames and Hume to Ferguson and Millar. It told of man’s progress from barbarism to civilization, of which an essential part was the growth of political liberty, and participation in self-government. He packed into his speeches a wealth of historical detail and imagery, which he later reused in his classic
History of England
: “In listening to him,” said one spectator, “you seemed to be like a traveler passing through a rich and picturesque country by railroad.” He mentioned the great figures of the English past, and familiar moments in the securing of constitutional liberty: Magna Carta, the Petition of Right of 1628, the Glorious Revolution of 1688—moments sacred to Tories as well as Whigs. This was another, he said: parliamentary reform was another step “in one great progress” toward Englishmen securing their rights and the nation securing its freedom. In this sense, he suggested that the Reform Bill was a matter of historical inevitablity. “Good or bad, the thing must be done,” he said at one point, “a law as strong as the laws of attraction and motion [in physics] has decreed it.”