One member of the Privy Council, who had left his party on the Bill, and whose vote, it was thought, had turned a division, shot himself. And many another, it was whispered, never recovered wholly from the strain of those days.
For far more hung upon the Lords’ decision than the mere fate of the Bill. If they threw it out, what would the Ministry do? And—more momentous still, and looming larger in the minds of men—what would the country do? What would Birmingham and Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds do? What would they do?
Lord Grey, strong in the King’s support, would persevere, said some. He would bring in the Bill again, and create peers in number sufficient to carry it. And Macaulay’s squib was flung from club to club, from meeting to meeting, until it reached the streets:
Ay, his Majesty’s Bill, God bless him! His Majesty’s own Bill! Hurrah for Lord Grey! Hurrah for Brougham! Hurrah for Lord John, and down with the Bishops! So the word flew from mouth to mouth, so errand boys yelled it under the windows of London House, in St. James’s Square, and wherever aproned legs might be supposed to meet under the mahogany.
But others maintained that Lord Grey would simply resign, and let the consequences fall on the heads of those who opposed the People’s will. Those consequences, it was whispered everywhere—and not by the timid and the rich only—spelled Revolution! Revolution, red and anarchical, was coming, said many. Was not Scotland ready to rise? Was not the Political Union of Birmingham threatening to pay no taxes? Were not the Political Unions everywhere growling and lashing their sides? The winter was coming, and there would be fires by night and drillings by day, as there had been during the previous autumn. Through the long dark nights there would be fear and trembling, and barring of doors, and waiting for the judgment to come. And then some morning the crackling sound of musketry would awaken Pall Mall and Mayfair, the mob would seize the Tower and Newgate, the streets would run blood and the guillotine would rise in Leicester Square or Finsbury Fields.
So widely were these fears spread—fostered as they were by both parties, by the Tories for the purpose of proving whither Reform was leading the country, by the Whigs to show to what the obstinacy of the borough-mongers was driving it—that few were proof against them. So few, that when the Bill was rejected in the early morning of Saturday, the 8th of October, the Tory peers, from Lord Eldon downwards, though they had not shrunk from doing their duty, could hardly be made to believe that they were at liberty to go to their homes unscathed.