BOOKS
`The most popular man in England'
Asa Briggs
HENRY BROUGHAM: 1778-1868 HIS PUBLIC CAREER by Robert Stewart The Bodley Head, f18 Few 19th-century politicians were so extravagantly praised or so irredeemably damned in their own time as Henry Brougham, who lived to the age of 89 but held office for only four years in the unlikely office of Lord Chancellor from 1830 to 1834. 'By God! Brougham is Chancellor' the Earl of Sefton told Thomas Creevey on the day Brougham accepted the woolsack. It is the perfect beginning for a biography of Brougham. His eccentric career seems to call more for exclamation marks than question marks, and Robert Stewart in his new biography does not hesitate to use them.
There was little, if any, extravagant praise after Brougham left the woolsack. Yet Macaulay who called him a dead nettle in 1856 knew from relatively recent experi- ence that he had been a nettle that could sting. He had once called him next to the King 'the most popular man in England'. The vagaries of Brougham's reputation are easy to dismiss in terms of deficiencies of character, but to explain them fully it is necessary to examine how they illuminate the persisting patterns of Whig culture and politics in an age of economic and social change. Macaulay's Whiggery was of an acceptable kind: Brougham's was unpre- dictable. Lord Holland at the centre of the Whig culture could call one of his speeches on the Reform Bill 'almost preternatural and miraculous', but these were not favourite Whig virtues. Grey, who knew him well and saw his uses, advised Mel- bourne not to exclude him from influence, if not office, in 1835, but Melbourne, the new Prime Minister, told Brougham can- didly — and in language of a curious topicality — that, while in office, 'you domineered too much, you interfered too much with other departments, you en- croached upon the province of the prime minister, you worked, as I believe, with the press in a manner unbecoming of the dignity of your station, and you formed political views of your own and pursued them by means which were unfair towards your colleagues.' After 1835, as King William put it simply to Holland, Brougham was 'dangerous no more'.
Much of Brougham's controversial poli- tical conduct would have been less con- troversial for future generations of talented politicians. They, after all, were to take it more or less for granted that they could and should seek 'popularity', make `itinerant speeches', whether or not kings or prime ministers liked them, trim their sails to catch the winds of 'public opinion', change their allies when it seemed expe- dient, and leak secrets of state to the press, not least at crucial moments. Brougham, unlike them, belongs to a period in British Henry Brougham by J. Lonsdale, courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery politics when what may still properly be described as Namierite assumptions about its structures and dynamics were breaking down but had not completely broken down. At the same time, there was a genuine eccentricity about Brougham's conduct which makes him a unique case in political history. Who else, for example, was so drunk that as Chancellor he could barely put the question in the Lords? Who else, for example, would have appeared at Edinburgh races in his full regalia of Chancellor's wig and gown? It is strange how a politician, who had gone to the Lords so reluctantly, made it a part of his life, and his last speech there in 1856 was delivered in opposition to the innovation of life peerages. In 1857 he founded the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science over which he presided until 1865, and in 1860 he published a collection of Tracts, Mathematical and Physical, which included a paper on porisms which he had written during the 1790s.
The most damning comment on Brougham and certainly the one that would have stung him most was John Morley's reference to his 'encyclopaedic ignorance'. Brougham cared less about attacks on his conduct than attacks on his intellect. It is easy to see what Morley meant. Brougham paraded his learning and, comprehensive though it was, much of it was superficial, even more of it boring. He was as prolix and rambling on paper as he was in most of his speeches, praised though many of these were. In 1859, when he was elected Chancellor of Edinburgh University, he confessed to Gladstone that he had written an inaugural address, in effect a valedictory, which was of 'formidable proportions'. All too often what seemed to Brougham formidable could become ridiculous to others. Nonetheless, as Robert Stewart rightly points out, his intellectual energies and concerns, which made him a zealous advo- cate of public education, elementary and higher, useful and ornamental, must be considered in the refracted light of the 18th-century Enlightenment. Boring though Brougham might be to the unen- lightened, it was possible for Samuel Rogers to say of him once just after he had left a house party in a country seat 'this morning Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Ches- terfield, and a great many more went away in one post chaise.'
It was not accidental that Brougham studied in Edinburgh, one of the centres of the Englightenment, and that he spent much of his time in France and even applied for French naturalisation in 1848 with the hope of becoming a candidate for the French constituent national assembly. There was, of course, a ridiculous side to this, in that while he was willing to surren- der all his titles and become plain 'citizen Brougham' he sought a kind of dual nationality and wanted to remain an En- glishman in England as well as a French- man in France. Yet he was something of a pioneer in wanting to escape from what he called 'Fogland', and he died not in Edin- burgh but in Cannes, where a central square was named after him and a statue erected to his memory. His French was of a kind that made a French wit exclaim that he had the gift of unknown tongues, but in a sense if anyone deserved dual nationality he did.
`Citizen Brougham', who might have been created for the benefit of Thomas Love Peacock, for all his quest for popu- larity had a deep distrust of the mob. It is when Robert Stewart turns to radical politics, including the fight for the un- stamped press, that his careful biography is least convincing; and more has recently been written on this subject than on any other. Any study of Brougham's life is both an antidote and a stimulant. There may be more question marks than exclamation marks after all.
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