Perilous Question by Antonia Fraser

Author:Antonia Fraser
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781610393324
Publisher: PublicAffairs

In London, where accounts of countrywide violence were not slow in coming in, just as press reports of Parliament were rushed into the provinces, tension in the Government was still further racked up. No one could predict how and when the present effective deadlock would be resolved. On 15 October Sarah, Lady Lyttelton (née Spencer), went to see her brother Althorp: she told their father that he looked ‘fagged and ill’, adding ‘I could fancy myself admitted to the Captain’s cabin on the eve of a hurricane.’ As for her children –‘les petits’ – ironically enough, they had been terrified by crowds shouting and banging on the door of the house; although these were in fact amiable if boisterous salutations from those who admired Lyttelton’s reforming stand.28

Relations between the King and his Prime Minister were clearly entering a delicate stage. The question of creation of peers was so far the unspoken issue between them, although, as the obvious solution to what the Lords had done, it was being widely discussed in both political and Radical circles. John Doyle was not slow to seize upon the subject. In a cartoon issued on 12 October entitled ‘An After Dinner Scene (at Windsor)’ he showed a sinister-looking Brougham, whispering in the King’s ear as he sits with him on a sofa, while the Queen and other ladies and gentlemen are nattering in the background. The bubble of words coming out of Brougham’s mouth tails off with the unfinished phrase: ‘whether in the undoubted exercise of your R–y–l prerogative, you should not. . . .’ William however is stretched out on the sofa fast asleep.29

In real life the King was not able to practise avoidance so easily and was in fact concentrating on establishing his constitutional position (and rights). In correspondence on 17 October – handled as before by Sir Herbert Taylor – William IV chose to quote from Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King.30 * This work, originally published in 1738, which had not featured strongly in the concept of kingship in the late eighteenth century, was enjoying a new vogue; it was republished in 1831 after a gap of fifty years (quite apart from being used as the subtitle of that play at the time of the March division on the Reform Bill). It was felt that there was something peculiarly appropriate, even exhilarating in its message with regard to the reign which began in 1830 – or, as Bolingbroke had written, a new King meant a new people.

A royal biography by John Watkins, published in 1831, emphasized the point: ‘What the masterly hand of BOLINGBROKE sketched as an ideal character and a vision of virtuous excellence, this nation happily enjoys in the reign of William IV,’ he wrote.32 It was a flattering picture of a paternalistic monarch, standing above his Ministers in order to put the interests of his people first, and as such calculated to appeal to William’s image of himself, in contrast to that of his late brother.

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