ABSTRACT
The Whig government of Lord Grey called a General Election in the spring of 1832, in order to secure a majority in the House of Commons for its Parliamentary Reform Bill. The results were analysed by Sir John Walsh (1798–1881), the Conservative MP for Sudbury (1830–1834), in The Present Balance of Parties in the State (1832). Fraser’s published this commentary on the book in its April issue.
Fraser’s preferred method of commentary was in taking contemporary events and placing them in their long-term historical context to draw out conclusions. The article offers an analysis of the evolution of political parties during the eighteenth century in order to highlight the various challenges to which they have been subjected over time. Coming down to the present, the article observes, ‘The immediate effect of the introduction of the Reform Bill was the merging of all divisions and subdivisions into two parties – reformers and constitutionalists – the movement party, and the conservative party’.
The article also expresses its anxiety that the Reform Bill was the first step in a wider constitutional revolution encompassing the House of Lords, the monarchy, and the Church of England. ‘Fearful will be the predicament of the House of Lords’, the review observes, ‘for that will lay down a precedent for violation of existing interests and prescriptive rights, which in the eye of our common law have a most sacred character’. As to King William IV, ‘he sends and receives ambassadors, makes treaties, leagues, and alliances, peace and war – has a negative on the acts of the legislature, is generalissimo of the army and navy, is the fountain of justice and honour, the arbiter of commerce, the supreme governor of the church’. The magazine worried for the future of the monarchy, should his niece, Princess Victoria, inherit the throne as a minor. It also predicted that, unless they were stopped, ‘the rapacious harpies of reform, who know nothing of prescriptive rights and antiquity of possession, but everything of utility, in their application’ would engage in a second Reformation of Church property.
