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It passed the house of lords with little discussion on the 22nd, and was laid before the house of commons a few days later by Althorp, who had already brought in an Irish Church temporalities bill. The debate on the address had already given warning of the reception which the Irish members would accord to any coercion bill, and of their malignant hostility to Stanley.
Althorp commanded an extraordinary degree of confidence in the house of commons and the country, but his intellectual capacity was not of the highest order, and many expected that Peel might receive a summons from the king, whose sympathy with the whigs, never very deep, had given place to mistrust.
Lord Grey and Lord Althorp were not, it is hardly necessary to say, men who shared in the popular sentiment, which would, if it could, have abolished altogether the hereditary principle in legislation.
He had been Home Secretary under Grey, and Duncannon was now called to fill that post. The first Melbourne Administration was short-lived, for when it had existed four months Earl Spencer died, and Althorp, on his succession to the peerage, was compelled to relinquish his leadership of the House of Commons.
It was obvious that Lord Melbourne, Lord Althorp, and Lord John Russell would be invited to take office, but there was a certain difficulty about Brougham. The difficulty, however, was not about offering a place to Brougham; the only trouble was to find the place which would suit him, and his acceptance of which would also suit his leaders and his colleagues.
A great open-air meeting of the political union was held at Birmingham, while the bill was still before the house of lords, at which a refusal to pay taxes was openly recommended in the last resort, and votes of thanks were passed to Althorp and Russell.
Of this edition, now almost priceless, only two copies are known to exist, both of which are in private collections. One of these is in the United States, the other, slightly defective, is in the possession of Lord Spencer, who has also in his library at Althorp the only known copy of the second edition, printed in 1498 by Wynkyn de Worde, who took over Caxton's presses at his death.
It was long before the privileged classes began to recognise, except in platform heroics, that it was high time to awake out of sleep and to 'educate our masters; but the work began when Lord Althorp persuaded the House of Commons to vote a modest sum for the erection of school buildings in England; and that grant of 20,000l. in 1832 was the 'handful of corn on the top of the mountains' which has brought about the golden harvest of to-day.
The dissatisfaction with which the speech from the throne was received found its expression in no severer form, so far at least as Parliament was concerned, than a motion by Lord Grey in the one House, and Lord Althorp in the other, for a short delay to enable both Houses to consider the address in reply to the royal speech.
Both of these had been Grey's colleagues in the administration of "All the Talents". Althorp, who succeeded Goulburn at the exchequer, and Carlisle, who accepted a seat in the cabinet without office, were both whigs of tried fidelity.
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