SIR JAMES GRAHAM By the same author

The Factory Movement, 1830-1855 Sir James Graham §IR JAMES GRAHAM

J. T. WARD

Palgrave Macmillan

1 9 6 7 © J. T. Ward 1967 Softcover reprint of the hardcocver 1st edition 1967

MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED Little Essex Street London W02 also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbournt~

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Library of Congress catalog card no 67-18374 ISBN 978-1-349-00079-1 ISBN 978-1-349-00077-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00077-7 TO KAY Contents

List of I/Juatrati008 page ix Preface xi

.Acknowledgements XIX 1 The Formative Years 1 2 The Making of a Whig 24 s The Agricultural Reformer 46 4 The Political Reformer 71 5 The Reform Minister 97 6 The Break with Whiggism 130 7 The Move to Conservatism 158 8 A Condition of England Minister 184 9 The Policy-Maker 209 10 The Peelite 281 11 The Elder Statesman 259 12 Finale 283 Notes 318 Index 339 Index of .Authors 354 List of Illustrations

Sir James Graham frontispiece (from T. M. Torrens: Life and Times of the Rt. Hon. Sir James R. G. Graham) James Graham as a child. Portrait by Raeburn facing page 44 (By kind permission ofSir Fergus Graham and Country Life Ltd.) William Huskisson 61 (T.he Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London) Edward Stanley, Fourteenth Earl of Derby 156 (The Trustees ofthe National Portrait Gallery, London) Sir Robert Peel 173 (The Trustees ofthe National Portrait Gallery, London)

W.E. Gladstone ~~ (The Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

Sidney Herbert ~9 (The Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London) Preface

Sir James Graham has never been popular. Throughout a long and varied political career he incurred the suspicion and hostility of journalists, and his changes in party allegiance provoked attacks from assorted groups. To Cobbett, in 1826, he seemed •stupid ... empty-headed ... [and] insolent'; to the Manchester Guardian in 1837 he was a •turn-coat', to the Morning Chronicle in 1841 •a busybody', to Blackwood's Magazine in 1855 •wicked and shameless'. As his nominal affiliations altered so contem• poraries adjusted their views. For instance, Disraeli, who ha:l known him socially, found him •eloquent and patriotic' in 1837 and •bitter' in 1844. Graham obviously lacked the hack partisan• ship of a Tadpole and Taper, but he agreed with too many of their attitudes for Disraeli's taste. In 1834 Taper had suggested a party cry: 'Ancient institutions and modern improvements, I suppose, Mr. Tadpole?' 'Ameliorations is the better word; ameliorations. Nobody knows exactly what it means.' ' ... The time has gone by for Tory governments. What the country requires is a sound Conservative government.' 'A sound Conservative government,' said Taper, musingly. 'I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.' Suspicions of Graham were heightened by his often vague and sometimes ambiguous support of •amelioration', as well as by his party shortcomings. In 185~ Marx dismissed him and his allies as •perambulant Peel monuments ... nothing but [a] staff of bureaucrats which Robert Peel had schooled for himself'.1 Later historians - making at best imperfect use of his private papers -tended to accept the verdicts of contemporary critics. xii Sir James Graham Graham appears m many books as a cold, calculating man, ruthlessly efficient but devoid of humanity and perhaps of principle. He changed parties, disdained potential allies, haughtily offended opponents and lost some of his closest friends. He never sought popular acclaim and rarely obtained it. He appeared to fear the future and the responsibility of shaping it. His career lacked the dramatic attractions and even glamour of some of his colleagues. Historians, like contemporaries, have observed the contrast between his ability to predict long-term strategic dispositions and his weakness on immediate tactics. Recognition of his talents, however, has always been qualified by other considerations. "I begin to be interested for Aberdeen,' Croker told Herries in August 1853,2 for I see not who is to succeed him. Graham seems to me to stand the most forward for the succession, but what between his boldness of language and timidity in action, I should be afraid, for him and for us, of some great catastrophe; but he is, I think, the cleverest administrator in the Cabinet ... Such feelings sometimes prevented even ostensible friends from expressing sympathy during difficult periods; indeed, the sight of Graham in trouble must have brought vindictive pleasure to many who had suffered his verbal lashings in the House of Commons. In February 1845, when Graham was under bitter attack over the secret opening of letters, a young Yorkshire Conservative, Gathorne Hardy, recorded that3 The personality is extreme and the unfairness to Sir James Graham most abominable. However, there are exceptions on the Opposition side who do him justice. Charles Buller rightly enough said that he seemed to have a love for unpopularity, and certainly there is nothing conciliatory about him. Personal unpopularity dogged Graham through his life and after it. In recent years historians have been increasingly interested in the Victorian administrative revolution, the politics of the mid• century party desert and the manceuvres of clique and Cabinet now more fully documented with the opening of many family Preface xiii muniments. It may now be possible to see Graham in a new light, as a statesman who made a considerable contribution to the politics of the age of transformation, the period between Lord Liverpool's post-Napoleonic War regime and the era of Lord Palmerston's dominance. As a young \Vhig he opposed Liverpool's tired Ministry, and as an elder statesman (and •a man of peace') he condemned what he regarded as Palmerston's warlike pro• clivities. On both occasions, his views were probably unfair.4 But in virtually every political event for four decades Graham played some part, often an important part. Born into a well-connected but not particularly affluent landowning family, Graham never enjoyed the vast wealth of an Earl of Durham or Derby. He earned neither popularity nor notoriety by lavish hospitality or costly excesses. Youthful wild oats were sown rapidly; at 21 Graham regaled Lord William Bentinck with confessions about his romantic life. Thereafter, Graham did not even have the quality of providing scandalous material for the inquisitive, •liberal-minded' gossips of London society. His neglect of •society' played some part in creating his unpopular public image; the hostesses of the party salons were disappointed at the absence of a handsome politician. The family finances rarely allowed Graham to cut a great figure even in his native county. He was nevertheless prominent in public life, at a time when major changes in both political and constitutional arrangements were being made. As a member of the four-man planning committee, he helped to shape the first Reform Act. His role was at least controversial; Durham's first biographer commented that5

Graham was not exactly a man after Durham's heart, and it was probably in deference to Grey that he was appointed. He was certainly the least progressive member of the quartette, a fact which the political caricaturists of the hour were quick to seize, since they represented him as the man in charge of the brake on the new Reform Coach.

The brakeman was, however, highly discriminating in his appli• cation of pressure. XIV Sir James Graham Despite periodic •radical' outbursts, however, Graham was generally conservative. He supported the Church, as a patron, as a politician, as a member of the Church estates committee and as a practising Anglican. And he often dreaded the possibility of social revolution and subsequent anarchy. Consequently, working• class agitations aroused his immediate concern. During the 184~ riots, for instance, he told the Lord Chancellor that •treason was stalking abroad'; and he believed that •force alone could subdue this rebellious spirit'. He bitterly resented what he considered to be the cowardly inaction of some magistrates and even considered taking action against them. 6 •I am glad that you are residing on your property,' he told Kay-Shuttleworth at this time,7

and I am willing to hope that your influence, good advice and good example may contribute in your neighbourhood to win back the poor deluded workmen from the error of their ways ... I am sure that you will point out to your neighbours the madness of concessions made to threats and open violence.

The vision of the squire firmly administering his ancestral estate still attracted Graham; but the country gentry must, of course, be backed up during major troubles by soldiers, yeomanry and policemen. Graham introduced the first plain-clothes section in the Metropolitan Police.8 He supported decorum, tradition and moderation in Church and State, but was prepared strongly to oppose any factor disturbing them. Political Radicalism and religious Tractarianism were both anathema. •The Protestants, weary of abusing the Papists, are disposed to turn semi-Papists themselves,' he complained to Croker in 1844, •... and the Church, which has overcome her Enemies from without, is now in imminent danger from the Feuds within her Pale'.9 Graham was inclined to regret the signs, which he only too often suspected, of major changes in society. He tended to see a deep• laid conspiracy behind spontaneous, ill-organised protests against social grievances. The campaigns for legislative reform of factory conditions, symbolic as they were of a wide range of operative opinion, failed to rouse his sympathy; and he never professed to accept the varied panaceas for proletarian misery. In a negative Preface XV way, Graham's VIew on some industrial problems thus accord with those of some •liberal' historians. But Graham would not deny (as some later commentators did) the existence of widespread wretchedness and poverty: he accepted them as sadly natural and inevitable. Such features of society could no more be abolished than could sin; but Christians and the State had some duty in the line of•ameliorations'. While fearing and hating the possibility of revolutionary change - and despite his long, morose study of Burke - Graham sought no dramatic role in the Counter-Revolution. Indeed, he always disliked the Tory Right as much as the Radical Left. His answer to •extremist' demands through most of his life was moderate concession: he would lead no Vendee. In a sense, his whole career was a long rearguard action, consisting of sometimes hasty tactical retreats and of carefully-planned strategic with• drawals to prepared positions. To this eventually consistent but seemingly opportunist and certainly unheroic philosophy, Graham brought the service of brilliant administrative talents. He was allowed to demonstrate his ability most obviously as a Whig First Lord of the Admiralty in the early 1830s, a Conservative Home Secretary in the 1840s and a Peelite First Lord during the Crimean War. The political situations which allowed Graham to play his unique part were often strange and novel. From 1828 the time• honoured elements of the constitution were being shaken and modified. Reform of parliamentary representation, the •enact• ment' of religious toleration and the development of party organisation and tactics proceeded together with the dismantling of old Mercantilist controls on aspects of the economy and the growth of new administrative •interference'. The rural Britain from which most prominent politicians hailed was already paling before the industrial expansion of the world's workshop. During Graham's life, the •age of improvement' described by Professor Briggs gradually created the •age of equipoise' described by Professor Burn. Politically, a long Tory domination was followed from 1830 by a long period of liberal rule, which was only temporarily reversed by Peel in 1841. But the liberal age saw the xvi Sir James Graham decline of historic Whiggism and the growth of a new Liberalism compounded of many competing interests: the aristocratic hegemony was under challenge and eventually decayed. Simul• taneously, the other traditional grouping was undergoing at least equally important transformation. The Toryism of Mr. Pitt, of the new peerage, of the close mercantile corporations, of back• woods squires and boozy 'Church and King' mobs sacking 'Jacobin' houses or toasting intolerance at annual dinners could not last. And, in the new political and economic setting, a Toryism centred primarily on agricultural Protection could scarcely hope to achieve real power. Thus, at differing speeds, both party traditions were gradually reshaped. Such changes in party philosophies and attitudes were slow to develop. A division of seats which gave Thetford equal represen• tation with Leeds and which left intact the power of the Grosvenors at Chester and the Lawrences at Ripon to some extent hid the relative decline in the importance of the agricultural interests in politics. 'This will clip the aristocracy, but a good deal must be sacrificed to save the rest,' wrote the Whig Lady Belgrave of the 1831 Reform Bill, which cost her father-in-law (Lord Grosvenor) £150,000.1° The great national institutions soon emerged safely from their dangers. Perhaps the Monarchy changed with monarchs: while George IV 'stood by and let the country govern itself',11 ·william IV came to dislike his Ministers strongly enough to exercise his prerogative to dismiss them and the young Whiggish Victoria liked them too well to accept their opponents. Under the Prince Consort's influence, however, the Court turned increasingly towards the conception of a constitutional monarchy in a roughly modern sense. Again, the transition was slow. No Bagehot could yet venture to define the Monarch's powers and rights. But ostensibly there was little change in the strength of the Crown. Indeed, when Queen and Prince aided the workings of the developing party system, their political influence increased. They were undoubtedly aided by a change in social mores: the 'bourgeois' virtue of their family life was more attractive to much of society than the Royal dukes' siring of progenies of Fitzgeorges and Fitzclarences, collections of Preface xvii debts and rash political ventures. The House of Lords, hated by the Radical mob and humbled by Government coercion over Reform in 183~, was soon busily reasserting its powers and its hostility to continuing reform. Though subsequently the peers were quieter and more reserved• the Orange leader Cumberland became King of Hanover on Victoria's accession, and many partisan creations were inherited by moderate second-generation peers- the long-threatened 'reform' of their House never occurred in the nineteenth century. Indeed, while retaining its reserve of political power and continuing to provide politicians often of the first rank, the aristocracy was becoming more powerful socially. The attacks of old-fashioned urban Radicals on what they imagined to be semi-feudallanded tyrants were increasingly anachronistic; many landed proprietors prospered enormously as urban rents, mineral royalties and industrial profits were added to agricultural incomes. Even the Church emerged from the bitter attacks of Radical Dissent, organisationally reformed and theologically divided but still established, wealthy and powerful. The moderation of Reform in its ultimate result was largely due to the restraining influence of conservatives in all political groups. Among such conservatives Graham was prominent. He loyally supported the Church, even at the risk of strong Nonconformist Protestant opposition. The education clauses of his Factory Bill of 1843 seemed to one Dissenting publicist to be •a Declaration of \Var against all the Dissenters of the kingdom' and 'the greatest outrage on Civil and Religious Liberty attempted in modern times'.l2 Graham himself bluntly declared that 'the dissenting bodies were not, it appeared, satisfied with toleration, contending that the principle should be one of equality; but as long as there was an established Church in this country he was of opinion that that Church should enjoy the preference'. He thus earned some Anglican gratitude.13 A heated Nonconformist insisted that 'he knew that Graham took Lord Sidmouth for his model' .14 But in fact Graham was moderate on most theological and political subjects. Like Peel, he recognised that the Church must be aided with great caution; and he always distrusted Oxford Catholicism. B xviii Sir James Graham Even after his most liberal days in politics, he insisted that he had been elected to Parliament 'as a member of the old Whig party, pledged to Parliamentary Reform, but the avowed friend of the Protestant Church Establishment and the enemy of Ballot, short Parliaments and all the nostrums by which the regal and aristo• cratic power is assailed'. While far from 'exclusive', his conser• vatism was at least socially selective, resting (as he explained) on that section of society 'which claimed to itself a great prepon• derance of property, of learning, of decent manners and of pure religion' .15 Graham's many critics were not always wrong, but they were often unfair. He certainly and inevitably made mistakes, strategic, tactical and psychological. Privately, he was capable of great kindness to friends and relations and would on occasion take great care in helping even political opponents.16 But the difficulty in penetrating the haughty public mask led to suspicion. Closer acquaintance with Graham did not, in any case, cause approval or liking. His age produced too many attractive, immediately appeal• ing public men- 'sentimental' reformers, brave decision-makers, debonair gamblers in politics-for Graham, at his greatest an excel• lent adjutant and a supreme forecaster of consequences, to exert any magnetic draw. The coolly calculating politician, who might claim some political consistency of principle but who had been loyal to few individuals and to no party, remained unattractive. Yet, as the relationship develops, the most antagonistic cynic must surely come to admire the honest toil, the often sacrificial devotion to duty, the clear and often well-applied intellect and the real loyalty to principle which together constituted one part of Graham's complex character and varied achievement. Certainly, his career was not admirable, exciting, brave or even generally pleasing in the sense in which nineteenth-century semi-hagio• graphers painted their subjects. Indeed, no one ever pictured Graham without including his warts - and many artists highlighted them. But the hues and contours of the portraits of some of his contemporaries have subsequently been changed, by both extra knowledge and amended taste. And whatever shapes and colours may emerge, Graham deserves a new portrait. Acknowledgements

Many people helped, in a variety of ways, to write this book. My obligation to Sir Fergus Graham, Bt., K.B.E., who kindly allowed me to use the papers of Sir James Graham (largely reproduced on microfilm in Cambridge University Library) is primary. I am also very greatly indebted to ProfessorS. G. E. Lythe of the University of Strathclyde and Professor Asa Briggs of the University of Sussex, who read and greatly improved the script. With many other historians, I am under great obligations to a great teacher and a great librarian. Mr. F. R. Salter, o.B.E., of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from whom I first heard of Graham, gave me both valuable advice and liberal hospitality. Mr. Frank Beckwith of the Leeds Library allowed me to benefit from his erudite conversation and kindly loan of books. For help, suggestions, advice and comments on various problems I am indebted to Dr. D. G. Southgate of Queen's College, Dundee (who originally suggested the subject to me), Mr. Kenneth Carter of the Dorset County Library, Mr. F. C. Mather of the University of Southampton, Mr. R. G. Garnett of the Manchester College of Commerce, Mr. P. R. C. Ward, Miss G. Towers, Mr. Derick Mirfin, Mr. Godfrey Meynell, M.B.E., the late Colonel G. W. Ferrand, o.B.E., Mr. R. F. Drewery of the Hull Library, Mr. R. J. Marriott of the St. Ives Library, Miss D. Wood of the Ripon Library, Mr. H. J. P. Pafford of the Goldsmiths' Library in the University of London, Mr. Kenneth Smith of Carlisle Library and Mr. A. N. Cass of Queen's College, Dundee, Library. Access to library collections has been very important during the preparation of this book, and I must acknowledge with gratitude the courteous service provided by the Glasgow University Library and the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. XX Sir James Graham Miss Ann Marie McEleney, who typed the script, often at considerable inconvenience, played a vital role. My wife helped to check the text and compile the index. And our son, born during the writing of this book, permitted it to be completed. Neither he nor any of the people who have so generously aided me shares any responsibility for the following pages.