ABSTRACT
Earl Grey protested to a still sceptical House of Lords in November 1831: 'If any persons suppose that this Reform will lead to ulterior measures, they are mistaken; for there is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the ballot, than I am. My object is not to favour, but to put an end to such hopes and projects.' Grey, of course, needed to convert peers hostile to any extension of the franchise and still more averse to legislating away their patrimony in the form of managed parliamentary boroughs, but there is no reason to believe that he was being other than completely honest. The Prime Minister who carried reform in 1832 had not essentially changed from the young Whig who had so annoyed and embarrassed his leaders in the 1790s with talk of 'wild and speculative schemes' (Ch. 8). Grey believed, now as then, that the real interests of the aristocracy were best served by a cautiously constructive attitude to reform. He remembered in 1831-32 the words of his old antagonist, Edmund Burke, that a State without the means of correction was also without the means of its conservation. 'The principle of my reform is, to prevent the necessity for revolution ... reforming to preserve and not to overthrow,'! Grey aimed to keep power securely in the hands of the property owners and he believed, moreover, that landed property would continue to predominate despite the concessions he intended to make to the growing influence of commerce and industry The Whig remedy, it may be argued, was a far more conservative prescription than the last-ditch stand mounted by many Tories against change of any kind.
