In July 1830, the people of France rose up and removed their conservative and autocratic King,d establishing in his place a new constitutional monarchy. The July Revolution hit Europe like a thunderbolt, but it was not unique. Next door in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the French-speaking population rose up against the Dutch-speaking government because of, of all things, a particularly moving opera performance. Within a matter of days the people were armed, and there were barricades on the streets of Brussels. A month later, Belgium formally declared independence

from the Netherlands. It was civil war. The King of the Netherlands responded to the crisis by inviting the 5 Great Powers to intervene, but he received a tepid response. The Great Powers each had their own problems at home. Over in Northern Italy, there were significant Liberal revolts that were inspired by the July Revolution in France. Austria was genuinely afraid that their entire network of states in Northern Italy was about to collapse, so they invaded. Metternich, the Austrian architect of the post-war order, wrote at this time "my most secret thought is that old Europe is at the beginning of the end." In the German Confederation, internal divisions

between liberal and conservative states were growing, which led to confusion and dysfunction when trying to figure out how to respond to the Liberal revolts across Europe. Over in Poland, the Polish army sought to throw off their Russian occupiers and re-establish the Kingdom of Poland as a Liberal and independent power. Russia responded with overwhelming force. 120,000 Russian soldiers marched in and crushed the Polish resistance. To the complete horror of all of the other Great Powers, Poland was fully annexed into Russia.

Something was going on in Europe, and whatever it was, it was seeping into every Great Power. Russia was having Poland problems. Austria was having Northern Italy problems. Prussia was having German Confederation problems, France was obviously going through it, as they had just overthrown their government. Britain, much like France, was having its own internal problems. Revolution was in the air. Britain was the most powerful Great Power, but it was in a unique position because it was sitting atop a fragile empire spanning the entire

globe. An empire envied by every other Great and Non-Great Power. If Britain fell to civil war, the empire would be largely undefended, and every European state with a bit of ambition would feel compelled to make their big move. The prize was too great not to. You know what you call it when several Great Powers attack a bunch of overseas colonies at the same time? World War. If Britain fell to civil war, a World War or a Great Power Conflict would likely consume Europe. But we know that there was not a World War in the 1830s. How did Britain manage to escape this fate?

It's a long and complicated story, but to begin we have to talk about the death of the King. Britain's King George IV died on June 26th, 1830, just as France's Charles X was preparing to issue the Four Ordinances, which triggered the July Revolution. The greatest thing that George IV ever did was die at the exact right time. That's a mean thing to say, but the people at the time were way meaner. In their obituary, The Times described their dead King, "the character of which rose little higher than animal indulgence." The people hated him. He was a glutton and an ostentatious spender during bad economic times. A couple of days later,

the paper couldn't resist going back to get one last kick in, "there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King." Stop, he's already dead! George had 10 children, but none with his actual wife, (you had one job, idiot) and so the Crown passed to his 64 year old brother William. William IV was a Navy man, (boats!) energetic, charismatic, he liked mixing it up with people, which was a breath of fresh air after the long dark years under his out of touch brother and their father the mad King George III.

Paradoxically though, historian Edward Pearce describes him as "a man whose natural common sense was warped by an ignorant and irrational fear of the working class." He was, after all, a 19th century monarch. He liked people, but you know, the right kind of people. The Conservative Prime Minister Liverpool had died in office after almost 15 successful years at the helm, as did his successor Canning after only 118 days in the big chair, R.I.P. Now the Conservative Prime Minister was the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo. Yes the Conservatives had been remarkably successful in Britain ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution 41 years ago, but with peace,

the Conservatives were kinda losing their mojo. Historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that throughout the 1820s Britain was increasingly caught up in anti-Revolutionary hysteria. They were quite literally stuck fighting the last war, which was increasingly producing political paralysis. What does Hobsbawm mean by anti-Revolutionary hysteria? The most striking example of this was the Peterloo massacre of 1819, where the government completely overreacted to 60,000 peaceful protesters by ordering a cavalry charge. The carnage was horrific, 500, 700 were injured, over a dozen killed. The protesters were calling for Reform,

(more on this later,) but the Conservatives sensed revolution around every corner. There were incidents like this every year, peaceful protest met with an overwhelming military response. The Conservatives were losing touch. Upon the death of the King, it was standard practice in Britain to dissolve Parliament and call a new election. Voting began on July 29th, which coincidentally was the same day that the French Liberals were capturing Paris across the Channel. They would overthrow the government and have a new Liberal King within a few days. As the

British were voting, the remarkable bravery of the French Liberals were on their minds. The British election of 1830 returned the following results: 333 seats for the Conservative coalition 291 seats for the Liberal coalition 34 seats for other groups It was a disastrous result for the Conservatives. They lost 100 seats in the election, and barely held onto power with a majority of just 8. The Liberal coalition was led by a 66 year old aristocrat named Earl Grey. Yes, that Earl Grey, the tea guy. In November, King William IV opened Parliament. He addressed the political instability across Europe, and

in particular the ongoing situation in Belgium. The speech came off as unusually fearful and aggressive, and he made it sound like Britain might try to stabilize things by marching against Liberal Belgium. This was new information, and it alarmed every Liberal Whig in Parliament. Grey spoke up. He criticized the King for "language directly opposite to the principal of non-interference," by which he meant, you know, peace. He continued, "if danger is all around us… the way to go is by securing the affections of your fellow subjects, and by redeeming their grievances. And, my Lords, I will

pronounce the word - by reforming Parliament." He continued by warning the King that if they stayed on their present course, the instability in Belgium and France and beyond would eventually come home to Britain. The British people had learned one important lesson by watching the July Revolution play out across the Channel in France. They learned that the whole thing was entirely preventable. They learned that rampant authoritarianism makes the state more fragile, and that proactive reform can actually stave off Revolution. The Conservative Prime Minister Wellington responded to Grey's speech, and said that he disagreed with Grey's analysis. Referencing the domestic unrest of the last decade,

he accused the Whigs of whipping up the people for political gain. An insane thing to say. The Conservatives were in the habit of ordering the military to attack peaceful protesters, and that was the Whigs' fault? Insane. The protests were happening for a reason. The people were angry and demanding real reform after 40 years of mostly Conservative rule. The mood out in the country was real. But Wellington didn't want to see that. He said that Reform opened the door to Revolution, and that it was therefore his duty to resist Reform in any form. This was a radical position to take, even for a Conservative,

and many of his fellow Tories were surprised and worried at the government's rigidity. I need to explain what precisely I mean by "Reform." Obviously it meant modernization and liberalization, but in the context of the early 19th century it also had a much more specific meaning. Reform with a capital R meant reforming the British electoral system. We cannot proceed until you, dear viewer, have a foundational understanding of the British

electoral system as it existed in 1830. I know, I know. I'll make this as painless as possible. If I had to put it simply, I would say that their electoral system had not been meaningfully updated in 500 years. They were literally operating under a Medieval set of rules. To take the most egregious example, the constituency of Sarum, which was just an unbroken stretch of wilderness, sent 2 Members of Parliament to Westminster. The MPs represented by some counts literally 7 people. There had once been a Medieval city here, but it had been abandoned in the 1200s. But the British electoral system ignored that fact. City or not,

their political representation remained the same. Another example was Dunwich, which had once been a large Medieval town. Over the years, erosion had caused 90% of the town to fall into the sea. But because of Britain's Medieval electoral system, Dunwich still got to elect 2 Members of Parliament. This generated an astronomical amount of corruption. For example, just 21 voters on the Isle of Wight, elected 2 MPs. Every election, the local aristocrats collected huge bribes, and then would go around and tell the 21 voters who to vote for. After the election, the aristocrats would check the ballots and punish

anybody who did not vote as instructed. This was an extreme example, but versions of this happened all over the country. The corruption was so extreme in some cases that the right to vote was rendered meaningless. All of this was perfectly legal, by the way. Aristocrats openly bragged about how their electoral corruption generated a nice passive income. And there was another issue. The Industrial Revolution had fundamentally changed Britain. The great northern industrial cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, and others did not exist 500 years ago. Or if they did they were tiny. Now these cities were booming, they were the economic engine driving Britain into the

19th century. But they had nobody representing them at Parliament. The uninhabited wilderness around the abandoned city of Sarum had political representation. The sea that swallowed the town of Dunwich had political representation. But the million or so people in the great northern industrial cities did not. Everybody knew that the system was broken. That much was self-evident. The problem was that all of this corruption favoured the old Conservative aristocracy, and there was no incentive for the Conservatives to change it. This was the system that was being protested when the British military attacked 60,000 peaceful protesters at the Peterloo Massacre. Protests continued throughout 1820s. It was

the cause du jour, it was the popular issue that was alienating the poor and the young, turning them against the rich and the old. But the Conservatives couldn't see this. They couldn't see what was happening out in the country. They saw protests and only thought of Revolution. So when Lord Grey said that he had been a Reformer for his whole life, this is what he was talking about. Grey had been arguing for 40 years that Tory political power was built upon a foundation of corruption. He believed that if the electoral system was not Reformed,

the great northern industrial cities would rise up, July Revolution style, and demand a seat at the table. If that happened, the whole political order might be overthrown. It was an existential crisis for the country. Prime Minister Wellington, by resisting Reform in any form, was making a ridiculous argument. What, England's second largest city was just going to have no political representation at all not only today, but 100 years from now? Nonsense. Grey was right. It was only a matter of time. Either Parliament got their act

together and fixed this broken system, or the people would rise up and fix it for them. Wellington's inflammatory words in opposition to Reform elicited an immediate response from the public. There were widespread protests across London. Soldiers had to intervene to defend Wellington's home, which obviously became a focal point of the protests. But unlike the protests of the past decade, these crowds took up a new chant. "No Polignac," a reference to the French Prime Minister that had just been chased out of power by a Liberal uprising a few months ago. They were calling Wellington the British Polignac. Interesting.

Political insiders began to worry. Wellington's extreme unpopularity may endanger the monarchy. The July Revolution was on everybody's mind. About a third of the Tories in Parliament approached the Whigs, and came to a non-specific agreement that some form of incremental reform would be necessary in order to ensure the stability of the state. On November 15th, the Whigs and the moderate Tories brought forward an opposition motion to begin the process of studying what Reform in the United Kingdom would even look like. To everybody's surprise, the motion narrowly passed. Prime Minister Wellington had clearly lost control

of Parliament. He resigned the next day. Also, protesters got through the soldiers and set his house on fire. Not a good day for ol' Wellington. With the backing of the moderate Tories, it was clear that the Whigs under Lord Grey were the ones setting the legislative agenda. The King asked him to become the next Prime Minister, and he agreed. Grey knew that he had a monumental task ahead of him. He was already 66 years old, and not in terribly good health. From the very beginning of his term he complained of the immense burden of the office and of the physical toll that the stress took on his body.

Grey's first task as Prime Minister was not an easy one. He needed to get the King on board with what needed to be done. In the 1830s, the British King was still powerful enough to kill legislation if he chose to do so. It would probably provoke a constitutional crisis, but theoretically he could do it. If Grey was going to do something big and difficult and controversial like Reform, the Prime Minister and the King needed to be on the same page. Grey wrote to the King. "The perilous question is that of Parliamentary Reform, and as I approach

it, the more I feel all its difficulty. With the universal feeling that prevails on the subject, it is impossible to avoid doing something; and not to do enough to satisfy public expectation would be worse than to do nothing." The King wrote back. He spoke at length about the political chaos in France and Belgium, which clearly weighted heavily on his mind. He told Grey that even though he found the prospect of Reform disturbing, he would support "reasonable reforms." What did "reasonable reforms" mean? Who knows! But that wasn't a today problem,

that was a tomorrow problem. Today, Grey had the green light from the King to proceed. One thing that you need to know about the British Parliament is that it was and is bicameral, there's the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Prime Minister Grey was a member of the House of Lords, and so he needed somebody else to take the lead in the House of Commons. Grey selected rising star Whig politician John Russell to take lead on writing the Reform Bill.

On March 1st of 1831, Russell introduced his Reform Bill to the House of Commons. During his speech he took great pains to portray the Whigs as pragmatic centrists who were only doing the reasonable thing of introducing modest and limited reform. This was bull. Russell was like Grey, a lifelong Reformer. But as he continued, he sharpened the argument that he wanted to use against the Conservatives. He railed against at the vast stretches of wilderness that enjoyed more political representation than the great northern industrial cities. Not only did it make no sense, but it was

literally Medieval. It was embarrassing for the country, and it was embarrassing that the Conservatives would defend such a system. Russell was bending over backwards to portray his bill as, to quote the King, a set of "reasonable reforms," but as the contents of the bill began to be revealed to the House of Commons, eyewitnesses say that the Conservatives looked like they were going to puke. Some of the more radical Liberals let out surprised cheers. The truth was that Russell's Reform Bill was way more radical than anybody was expecting. Russell proposed a massive re-distribution of legislative seats across Britain.

All constituencies with less than 2,000 residents would lose both of their MPs. No more political representation for uninhabited stretches of wilderness. No more 21 voters on an island getting bullied by local aristocrats. All that stuff would be a thing of the past. These newly freed up seats would be distributed across the great northern industrial cities, finally giving the people in the booming north the right to vote. It sounds simple, but like I said, these changes were radical. These reforms alone would cause over 25% of the current MPs to lose their seats, mostly in the south of England, mostly Conservatives.

That's why the Conservatives looked so shaken, and it's why the radical Liberals were jumping for joy. It went way further than anybody expected. But it didn't stop there. One of the more annoying things about how the system worked now was that each individual constituency got to set its own rules for who did and didn't get to vote. In practice, this meant that in Conservative areas, rich people were generally the only ones allowed to vote. Russell proposed opening things up to the middle class by standardizing voting across the country with a modest wealth qualification.

The radical Liberals kinda threw a fit when they heard the part about the wealth qualification, because that would exclude the poor. But Russell and Grey insisted. After all, they were still 19th century aristocrats. They were interested in opening things up to the middle class, not so interested in the poor. Very un-groovy of them, but that's how it was. Russell had been speaking for over 2 hours, and when he finished, there was pandemonium in the House of Commons. The Tories accused him of pushing not for Reform, but Revolution! They

accused him of trying to dismantle the aristocracy. Russell defended himself. He was only trying to bring the British electoral system out of the Middle Ages. That was all. One Whig MP named Thomas Macaulay rose to speak in Russell's defence. He said, "our ancestors would have been amazed indeed if they had foreseen that a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants would be left without representation in the Nineteenth Century, merely because it stood on ground which in the Thirteenth Century, had been occupied by a few huts." He told the Conservatives that Russell

wasn't pushing Revolution, the status quo was inviting Revolution. He warned them that if no action was taken, the aristocracy, the country, and even the King himself would be in danger. Debate began in the House of Commons, and it dragged on for weeks. Day by day, Russell continued his fierce defence of the bill. He repeatedly pointed to the July Revolution in France, which was still fresh in everybody's memory. "How was it caused?", he asked, "were Charles X and his ministers too ready to come forward with plans of Reform?" No, obviously not. Russell continued, "If the people were properly represented, they would not make that Revolution." Hey look at that,

John Russell just made my argument for me! The lack of reform and the rising authoritarianism in France in the 1820s made the state increasingly brittle, and then in July of 1830, the state shattered. Russell was arguing, and I completely agree with him here, that Britain, by resisting Reform, was walking the same path. The Conservative Tories started to get worried that their opposition to the Bill wasn't getting through to the public. They changed tactics. Of course they supported "reasonable reform!" Who wouldn't!?! It's reasonable! But

why was Russell in such a rush? Why was he trying to shove this giant Bill down their throats without a robust debate? This is a classic tactic. Can't criticize the policy, criticize the process. You might ask yourself, if the Conservatives didn't like how Russell was doing things, where was the Conservative Reform Bill? My dear boy! It didn't exist of course! But you already knew that, didn't you? The Conservatives response to the Reform Bill was to introduce their own bill to pause all discussion of Reform for 6 months. They said that they wanted time to study the issue. A lie,

obviously. They could see that Russell's arguments were beginning to catch fire with the public, and wanted to put a stop to that. Hmm. Catch fire. Hmm. That's foreshadowing. The proposal to pause came up for a vote. For many minutes you could hear a pin drop in the House of Commons as the Speaker struggled to nail down an accurate tally. But finally, the results were announced. Those supporting a pause, 301. Those against a pause, 302. This is kinda getting ahead of ourselves, but based on how the British people would

respond to later events, there's no doubt in my mind that if the vote to pause had passed, somebody would have tried to overthrow the government. I don't know if they would have succeeded, but they would have tried. One vote from a completely different Britain, and therefore a completely different 19th century. Politics are so much fun, dude! The Tories were obviously disappointed at the setback, and so they adopted a new tactic. They proposed an amendment to Russell's bill that would prevent the destruction of any constituencies.

It sounded innocuous enough, but as we've already established it undermined the very foundation of Reform. The whole project was centred around destroying over-represented constituencies in the south and creating new ones in the booming industrial north. If they couldn't achieve this basic redistribution, then the entire Reform effort would be reduced to nibbling around the edges. The Conservatives argued that this amendment was a very minor compromise that would make everybody happy. What they weren't saying was that it would destroy Reform. On April 20th, the Conservative amendment came up for a vote. Everyone knew that it would be close. The final tally came in. 299 to 291. It passed. Russell, the mastermind behind the bill, was completely shattered.

Stinging with defeat, Grey met with his cabinet to consider their next move. They all agreed that without the ability to destroy seats in the south and create new ones in the north, Reform was dead. The Prime Minister had clearly lost control of Parliament, so he formally asked the King to dissolve Parliament and call a new election. Grey also used backchannels to privately inform the King that with the defeat of Reform, the cabinet was extremely concerned about public unrest. They felt that if they could immediately announce new elections, then maybe the people on the streets wouldn't resort to violence. If, on the other hand, there was no peaceful way for the people on the

streets to express their frustrations, then there was no predicting what they may do. Exhibit 582 of elections being a release valve. The King was on the fence. He was probably thinking that since a Conservative amendment had passed, then maybe there was no need for an election, maybe the next Prime Minister should just be one of the Conservatives. Ultimately, the King decided that the Whigs were probably right, nobody was in a position to lead this divided Parliament. He may have come to this decision because a group of Conservatives

tried to influence him in a way that he found annoying, but you know what, we count those. The King announced his final decision in a written proclamation, and said very explicitly that he hoped that this election would clarify the issue of Reform once and for all. The election campaign kicked off, and the Tories immediately got busy spreading rumours that thousands of poor labourers were refusing to work because the Reform Bill promised that they would never have to work again. Not true, obviously, it was a Conservative fantasy meant to scare middle class voters.

The election results were announced on June 1st, and they were decisive. Grey's Liberal pro-Reform faction gathered around 380 seats, while the Conservative anti-Reform faction got around 250 seats, maybe a little less. Before, Grey was trying to govern with a Liberal minority in the House of Commons. Now he would have a governing majority of 130 or 140 seats, a result that blew even the most optimistic estimates out of the water. A couple of months later, a massive crowd of protesters marched through the streets of London with the stated goal of presenting a pro-Reform petition to the King. The numbers

given for this are all over the place, I've seen as low as 70,000 and as high as 300,000, but either way, at the time it was probably the largest protest in British history. The King refused to meet with the petitioners out of a concern for his personal safety, a very legitimate concern I would argue, but the crowd took it as an insult and started to get restless. The police were instructed to pull back out of fear that their presence might antagonize them further. In an effort to defuse the tension, Prime Minister Grey reached out and offered to meet with the leaders of the protest. They agreed,

but they came in hot. They demanded that Grey force the King to create enough Liberal lords to pass the bill. Grey immediately got defensive and told them that the Prime Minister couldn't force the King to do anything. They accused Grey of deliberately watering down the Reform Bill in order to appeal to Conservatives, which Grey as a lifelong Reformer found personally offensive. They attacked Grey and the Whigs for coming to Reform late, only after it had become politically popular. This really upset Grey, who had been down in the trenches fighting for Reform for 40 years.

The meeting went late into the night, and both sides left angry. I would note, however, that Grey wanted to meet with the leaders because he was afraid that the protest was going to turn into a riot. There was no riot. Mission accomplished. Hot off of electoral success, Russell introduced his Reform Bill to the House of Commons for the second time. The Bill spent the entire summer snaking its way through committee, and by early September it emerged relatively unaltered thanks to the massive Liberal majority. This should have been a cause for celebration - the Bill was one step closer to passage - but the Reformers in the House were beginning to worry. They

had expected to pick up some Tory support going through the committee process, but they didn't, the he Conservatives were holding firm. They didn't even try to influence or water down the bill. That could only mean one thing. Grey began to have secret discussions with his fellow Liberals, brainstorming what they would do if the House of Lords simply refused to pass Reform. This was a tricky situation. They could win all the elections they liked, but if the House of Lords refused to pass the bill, the House of Lords refused to pass the bill. Together they

could only come up with one solution, and it was the same solution that the radical protesters had approached Grey with months earlier. The King had the power to appoint people to the House of Lords at will. Theoretically, he could appoint enough Liberals to assure the passage of the bill. There was one catch though, and it's what Grey told the protesters when they brought it to him the first time. Nobody could force the King to do this, he had to come to this decision on his own. Grey and his inner circle were still debating this issue when the Reform Bill finally made it

out of the House of Commons. 345 for Reform, 236 against. It was a decisive victory for the Whigs, but it was a party line vote. Bad sign. Grey and the Whigs were not at all sure how Reform would be received in the unelected House of Lords. This was uncharted territory. Surely the recent Whig election would count for something, right? The House of Lords scheduled a vote on Reform almost immediately. Uh oh. 199 against Reform, 158 for. It was exactly as the Whigs had feared. The House of Lords had unceremoniously taken the Reform Bill out back and shot it in the head. It's what the Conservatives had been planning to do all along. Reform was dead. The reaction was immediate. Crowds gathered

outside of Parliament, and as the lords left the building they were pelted with both objects and insults. Over the next 4 days the homes of several prominent lords were besieged by angry mobs, and some were even stormed and looted. Many members of the House of Lords chose to go into hiding. The unrest quickly spread. In Bristol, the homes of 45 wealthy families were stormed, looted, and burned, as was the Mayor's residence and the local prison. The riots only ended when the British military got involved. Dozens were killed, hundreds wounded.

The Bristol Riots were the most dramatic outburst of violence, but it was by no means an isolated incident. There were similar riots across the whole country. In Paris, the wife of the British ambassador wrote an ominous letter, saying that the British had just "made their own 25 July," which of course is a reference to France's July Revolution. The breadth of the riots were proving to be a real problem. There were only about 25,000 British soldiers on the entire island, and while that may sound like a lot, most of them were already busy protecting assets like government buildings and armories and ports, meaning that practically speaking they could only deploy to maybe 2 or 3 cities at once. Dozens and

dozens of cities and towns were just left to burn. You might recall that with the July Revolution, it only took 3 days for France to fall. A British Revolution was now firmly on the table. Back in London, the political class was deeply shaken by the violence. Wealthy aristocrats, thinking only of the public good, began stockpiling weapons and hiring private mercenaries to protect their homes. The same idiots that had campaigned against Reform were now preparing for civil war. Was it worth it, fellas? A radical left-wing London newspaper named Poor Man's Guardian, amazing name, ran a front page story titled "What will William Guelph do?" Guelph was the

family name of the King, they were being deliberately disrespectful. The article called on the King to create at least 100 Liberals in the House of Lords to ensure the passage of the Reform Bill. It went on to remind readers of the violence that Britain was seeing. It was only a matter of time before one of the lords was killed. The article went on to argue that the House of Lords and the King were intrinsically linked. As one went, so went the other. The paper was dancing around it, but they were saying that it was only a matter of time before the people rose up and killed the King.

The article concluded with this chilling statement about the British Monarch: "he cannot safe himself; he must go sooner or later [.] so let him do [.] some honest work before he goes." The Times, a much more mainstream paper, wrote the following. "What have the Lords done? [.] They have done what they can never undo. The House of Lords will never again be on the same foundations in the confidence of the people." Continuing later, "the nation willed it, the Lords forbade it. Will the nation give way or will the Lords?" Prime Minister Grey took some time to take the temperature of the country, and then informed the King that despite his defeat in the House of Lords,

he would not be resigning. He would continue to fight for Reform. Parliament re-opened about a month later, and in his speech, the King spoke of the riots that had briefly taken hold of the country, and then urged Parliament to take up the issue of Reform once more. On December 12th, Russell introduced his Reform Bill for the third time. Robert Peel, the heir apparent to the Conservative Tory faction, rose to speak. The rest of the Tories watched closely. He said that while he still opposed Russell's bill,

he no longer opposed it because he believed that Reform would bring about a Revolution in Britain. He said that he was not opposed to all Reform, and in fact many aspects of British life were in dire need of reform. But, he said, this specific bill went to far. Clearly the riots had spooked the Tories. Peel was now saying that unlike Wellington, he was flexible. And more importantly, he was telling his fellow Tories to back off. The Conservatives listened. The Bill sailed through its initial votes with even larger margins than before, with dozens of Conservative abstentions. Clearly

the experience of having angry mobs try to burn down their homes had an effect on them. The Reform Bill passed out of the House of Commons with no difficulty. 355 to 239, similar to what it got last time. But the problem remained with the House of Lords. Grey and his allies were very worried. If Reform went down in defeat again, there was no telling how the country might react. Grey felt that he had no choice but to urge the King to create enough new Liberal peers in the House of Lords to overwhelm the Conservative opposition.

Less than a year ago Grey was telling a group of protesters that the Prime Minister couldn't force the King to do this. Well, the riots had changed things. Everything was on the table now. Creating Liberal lords to pass legislation had been done before, but not in more than 100 years, and back then only 12 new lords were needed to stabilize the government. This time overriding Conservative opposition might require 40 or 50 lords. Grey knew that the King wasn't that keen on Reform to begin with, there's no way he would go for such a radical scheme.

At the beginning of the new year, the King and Prime Minister Grey got together for a lengthy meeting. Grey suggested that the King demonstrate his seriousness in the matter of Reform by creating 10 or so Liberal peers. You will notice Grey strategically picked slightly less than the 12 created more than 100 years ago. But obviously it was far less than the 40 or 50 needed. Grey was hoping that the Conservatives would take this threat seriously and there would be no need to go further. The King was reluctant to create any peers at all, but after talking it out with Grey, he agreed to appoint the sons of some existing Liberal lords. In the King's mind,

this would be less bad because it would be just a temporary thing. Over the years, as the sons inherited their father's titles, everything would return to normal. Grey eagerly agreed with all of this. Whatever you need to tell yourself, man. As the discussion went on, the King said that if they could agree to limit themselves to the sons of existing lords, then he would be comfortable appointing more than Grey's proposed 10. They agreed on up to 21, although the King had some conditions. First, no radicals, no agitators, no rabble rousers, Fine. Second, this was to be a one-time deal. The King didn't want Grey

coming back asking for more lords later. Not fine. Twenty-one was still far short of the 40 or 50 they would need to pass this thing. But Grey thought that it was a miracle that the King was agreeing to any of this, so he accepted his conditions and got to work. By April 4th, the Reform Bill was being hotly debated in the House of Lords. Grey went into the debate with those 21 Liberal appointments in his back pocket, but for now, he held off using them. He could only fire that gun once. Maybe the threat alone would be enough. But the public mood was shifting by the day. The Times, not a radical paper by any means, published a piece saying that if this attempt at Reform went down,

the King should create 70 or 80 Liberal lords. The riots had clearly spooked everybody. In the House of Lords, the former Prime Minister Wellington, as always with his finger on the pulse of public opinion, continued to stubbornly attack the Whigs, saying that if they continued down the path to Reform, then Revolution would become inevitable. But Wellington was wrong, he had it exactly backwards. The Conservatives in France spent 10 years killing any attempt at Reform, and the result was the July Revolution. The Conservatives in Britain had also spent 10 years killing any attempt at Reform,

and the result so far was rioting throughout the country. It's clear to me that Britain was stumbling blindly into Revolution, but Wellington couldn't see that. Or perhaps he chose not to. The Conservatives in the House of Lords tried every procedural trick in the book to delay sending the Bill to committee, but ultimately failed. In committee, the Conservative plan was to sabotage the bill by adding a bunch of garbage amendments to it. The Whigs were able to swat away most of the amendments, but to Grey's shock and surprise, a big one got through. The Conservatives appealed to some of the more cowardly Whigs that were worried about their jobs, and successfully

attached an amendment to the bill that would delay the redistribution of constituencies to the north for 2 years. Redistribution was the centrepiece of Reform, they needed it to empower the great northern industrial cities. Grey had been defeated for a third time. The next day, Grey resigned as Prime Minister. When the people learned of Reform's defeat and Grey's resignation, protests erupted all across the great northern industrial cities, including an estimated 200,000 protesting in Birmingham alone. These protests were unprecedented in scale. One prominent Reform pamphleteer wrote, "every man you met seemed to be convulsed with rage."

The Times wrote, of the undercurrent of Revolution that they were sensing out on the streets, "every man without exception of age or calling, asks his neighbour this question: what is to be done?" The King invited Wellington to serve as his next Prime Minister, but told him that for the sake of the country, he expected Wellington to push some version of Reform, Wellington told the King that this was one thing he would not do. For the time being, Britain had no Prime Minister. A couple of days later, when appearing in public, the previously popular King William was booed and

hissed. Public opinion was turning once more, and this time it would not spare the King. On the streets, a new slogan emerged from the protests. "Stop the Duke, Go for Gold!" They were talking about the Duke of Wellington obviously, the face of the opposition to Reform. The protesters advocated two actions. First, they told people not to pay their taxes until Reform was passed. Obviously this was illegal, but what were they going to do, arrest a million people? Second, they began telling people to protest the government by withdrawing their life savings from the bank of England. "Stop the Duke, Go for Gold." You're probably thinking what I was

thinking when I first read this. "Oh, symbolic gesture." No! Oh no. Within a matter of days, 25% of the total deposits in the Bank of England were withdrawn. The maniacs, they actually did it! They created a financial crisis! As the protests grew and the financial situation deteriorated, one Conservative Tory finally saw the writing on the wall. He said in a speech that the King was only left with two choices. Either let Grey come back as Prime Minister, or flee the country. They were on the brink of Revolution. Even the Conservatives could see it now. The King folded. He begged Grey to come back as Prime Minister.

Grey agreed to come back, but he had conditions. Either the King had to agree to create up to 50 Liberal lords, or the Conservatives had to agree to drop their opposition. They couldn't do this anymore. The survival of Britain was at stake. Reform had to pass. The King told Grey that he would try to convince the Conservatives to back off. But apparently this didn't go very well because within a few days he wrote to Grey to tell him that he would begin to work on a list of 50 potential Liberal lords. While all of this was going on, debate continued in the House of Lords. The Tories said all kinds of things about Grey. They accused him of personally orchestrating the violence on the streets. They accused him of advocating Revolution

in Britain. They accused him of seeking to abolish the monarchy. They accused him of trying to establish a democracy. Okay that last one was kinda true, but still. Grey took all of this in stride, but the man looked like death. The stress of trying to push Reform for these 19 months had taken a profound toll on his body. The man basically wasn't sleeping, and was suffering from chronic headaches. He rose to respond, but his voice was so weak that his fellow lords struggled to hear him. Half way into his speech his strength gave out and he had to sit down. At this crucial moment a rumour began to spread in the House of Lords that the King

was preparing to name 50 or 60 Liberal lords to the body. Who started this rumour? Unclear, but my guess is that Grey had something to do with it. The Conservatives believed the rumour, and were officially freaking out. Outside of the House of Lords, Robert Peel called an emergency meeting of moderate Conservatives. They agreed that 50 or 60 Liberal lords would spell disaster for their movement. They would lose control of the House of Lords for a generation. It wasn't worth it. The moderates all agreed to step out of the way of Reform.

On June 4th, Reform came up for a final vote in the House of Lords. On that day, the moderate Tories found various ways to be strategically absent from the chamber. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, many hard-line Conservatives decided to be strategically absent as well. Perhaps they were thinking back to when their homes had been targeted by rioters. The final vote came in. 106 in favour, 21 against. The Liberal Whigs won. Reform would become law. The British electoral system would leave the Middle Ages. The great northern industrial cities would

finally be represented in Parliament. British politics would fundamentally change forever. There were spontaneous public celebrations all across Britain. The Times publicly called on the King to come out and take part in the festivities, but the King was so humiliated by how things had gone down that he refused. In fact, he wouldn't even appear publicly to give his royal assent to the Bill. It's important to stop and recognize the bullet that Britain dodged here. There is no doubt in my mind that if Wellington had got his way, there would have been a Revolution in Britain.

Revolution probably would have meant civil war, and civil war probably would have meant World War, as other Great Powers would have found Britain's undefended colonies irresistible. They were that close. Reform saved the most powerful country on Earth from ripping itself apart. Historian Munro Price writes that "in Britain, the [unrepresentative electoral system] grew so unpopular that fear of Revolution induced the party in office to amend it. Whether or not Britain would actually have been plunged into Revolution if the reform bill had been rejected is imponderable," - I've pondered it plenty - "but it can certainly be strongly argued that it would have," - oh hey

that's me! - "and that this imminent peril was only averted by the bill's passage." Historian Eric Hobsbawm, who I always trust when it comes to stuff like this, says "something not unlike a revolutionary situation might have developed in 1831-2 but for the restraint of both Whig and Tory parties." He's being a little bit kinder to the moderate Conservatives than I would be, but sure, they get a tip of the cap for being strategically absent when it really mattered. On December 3rd, 1832, the first general election under the new reformed electoral system began. The first election with representation for Britain's great

northern industrial cities. The first election with representation for the middle class. Here were the results. 460 Liberal Whigs and allies of the Liberal Whigs, 159 Conservative Tories, and 38 Irish Nationalists. The Liberals won 70% of the seats in the House of Commons. The most one-sided election in British history. The 1830 July Revolution in France and the 1832 Reform Act in Britain were kind of twinned events, two sides of the same coin. One ended with the government being overthrown, the other ended with Reform, but both of them could be called Liberal Revolutions. Reform stabilized Britain, and then Britain in turn stabilized Europe. There was no World War

in the 1830s, and in fact Europe was allowed to peacefully transition into a new Liberal era. It was an historic achievement, and it would have been impossible without the leadership of Grey. In Newcastle upon Tyne, there's a monument to Prime Minister Grey, built only 6 years after the Reform Act. At its base it reads, "This column was erected in 1838 to commemorate the services rendered to his country by Charles, Earl Grey, K.G. who, during an active political career of nearly half a century was the constant advocate of peace and the fearless and consistent champion of civil and religious liberty. He first directed his

efforts to the amendment of the representation of the people in 1792, and was the minister by whose advice, and under whose guidance, the great measure of Parliamentary Reform was, after an arduous and protracted struggle safely and triumphantly achieved in the year 1832." Opposite this, there's a second inscription. "After a century of civil peace, the people renew their gratitude to the author of the Great Reform Bill. 1932." As I'm writing this today, we're approaching two centuries of civil peace in Britain. Not bad for a guy who by all accounts hated being Prime Minister.

Grey had taken an unstable Conservative country and transformed it into a stable Liberal one. No matter what happened next, he was already a significant figure in British political history. But in the aftermath of the crisis, Grey quickly found that Reform opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Certain moneyed and illiberal lobbying groups were powerless in the face actual democratic legitimacy. Now was the time for aggressive legislative action, long overdue. It was the beginning of a new era.

It was clear that the immediate danger had passed, but the question was how long could Britain remain a stable Liberal country? The island was at peace, but what about the colonies? The sad truth was that Britain's Liberal Revolution stopped at the water's edge. The colonies were still as authoritarian as ever, only held in check at the barrel of a gun. Most British colonies were just one uprising away from revolution, the status quo was not sustainable. Grey's job was only half done. If he could take the Liberal Revolution one step further and extend it out to the colonies, then Britain would be able to remain

a stable Liberal country not just today, not just tomorrow, but for the rest of the century. How could he do this? By fully eradicating slavery in the British Empire.