ish their hereditary peerage was hailed as an omen of what was coming
in England. Riots broke out all over England. The return to Bristol of Sir
C. Wetherell, one of the chief opponents of the bill, was made the occasion
of ominous demonstrations. A riotous mob burned the mansion house over his
head. Next, the Bishop of Bristol was driven from his episcopal seat. The
mob fired the mansion house, the bishop's palace, the excise office, the
custom house, three prisons, four toll houses, and forty-two private houses
of prominent Tories.

No one was injured until the troops were called in to disperse the mob.
Then a number of rioters were sabred and shot. About the same time riots
broke out at Bath, Worcester, Coventry, Warwick, Lichfield, Nottingham and
Canterbury. With difficulty Archbishop Howley of Canterbury was rescued
from the hands of an infuriated mob. The Bishops of Winchester and Exeter
were burned in effigy before their very palaces. The Bishop of London did
not dare to hold services at Westminster. The news from France served to
increase the alarm. Disturbances of a far more serious character were
reported from Lyons.

[Sidenote: Reform Bill up again]

Late in the year, after another rejection of the Reform Bill by the Lords,
the bill was triumphantly reintroduced in the Commons. The question now was
no longer, "What will the Lords do?" but, "What will be done with the
Lords?" Rather than risk the threatening downfall of the House of Peers,
the Ministers reluctantly determined to pack the Upper House by the
creation of a sufficient number of new peers pledged to vote for the Reform
Bill. A verse attributed to Macaulay ran:

What though now opposed I be,
Twenty peers shall carry me,
If twenty won't, thirty will,
For I'm his Majesty's bouncing Bill.

"Thus," as Molesworth, the historian of the Reform Bill, has put it, "amid
the anxieties of the reformers on one hand, and the dread of revolution on
the other, amid incendiary fires and Asiatic cholera spreading throughout
the country, amid distress of trade and dread of coming bankruptcy, the
year 1831 went gloomily out."

1832

[Sidenote: English sedition trials]

[Sidenote: Fall of Grey's Cabinet]

[Sidenote: Wellington impotent]

[Sidenote: The King humiliated]

[Sidenote: Passage of Reform Bill]

[Sidenote: Changes effected]

The new year opened in England with a series of trials arising out of the
disturbances which followed t