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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 988: DISTURBED STATE OF THE NATION.
By Edward Farr
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About This Book

The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

DISTURBED STATE OF THE NATION.

WILLIAM IV. 1832-1833

The interval which elapsed before the reassembling of parliament was a very memorable one in the annals of the country. Every association and political union, tremblingly alive for the fate of the bill, was on the alert, it being conceived that it was in imminent clanger of being lost in committee. At Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley, Dundee, as well as throughout the south of England, meetings were held, at all of which resolutions were passed expressing confidence in Earl Grey and his colleagues; and petitions were got up to the king and the house of lords, beseeching them to pass the bill unmutilated. In the counties of Warwick, Worcester, and Stafford, all the associations agreed to meet at the foot of Newhall Hill, and an immense assembly was collected on the day appointed, when a petition to the house of lords was carried, “imploring them not to drive to despair a high-minded, generous, and fearless people; nor to urge them on, by a rejection of their claims, to demands of a much more extensive nature; but rather to pass the reform bill into a law, unimpaired in any of its great parts and provisions, more especially uninjured in the clauses relating to the ten-pounds franchise.” At Birmingham, the council of the union declared its sittings permanent until the fate of the bill should be decided. In the metropolis, an extraordinary assembly of the national union took place. Mr. Hume was in the chair, and various resolutions were agreed to, all urging the necessity of the bill being passed without alterations; while a petition to the house of lords stated that, in case of its mutilation or rejection, “there was reason to expect that the payment of taxes would cease; that other obligations of society would be disregarded; and that the ultimate consequence might be the utter extinction of the privileged orders.”