Mansion
House, where Sir Charles Wetherell was supposed to have taken refuge,
was besieged, attacked, and almost demolished, and Sir Charles
Wetherell himself was rescued, more than once, with the utmost
difficulty from hostile crowds who seemed thirsting for his blood. All
these riots were atoned for dearly soon after by some who had taken
part in them. The stroke of the law was heavy and sharp in those days,
and many of the rioters in Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol, and other
places expiated on the scaffold their offences against peace and order.
Some of the cathedral cities became scenes of especial disturbance
because of the part so many of the prelates who were members of the
House of Lords had taken against the Reform Bill. The direct appeal
which Earl Grey had made to the archbishops and bishops in the House of
Lords to think long and well before opposing the Reform Bill was
delivered with the highest and sincerest motive, with the desire that
the Church should keep itself in harmony with the people; but the mere
fact that the appeal was made, and made in vain, seems to have aroused
in many parts of the country, and especially in the cathedral cities, a
stronger conviction than ever that the prelates were, for the most
part, the enemies of popular rights. Then, again, there was a more or
less general impression that the King himself, in his heart, was not in
favor of reform and would be glad to get rid of it if he could. Daniel
O'Connell, addressing a great popular meeting at Charing Cross in
London, pointed with his outstretched right arm towards Whitehall, and
awakened a tremendous outburst of applause from the vast crowd by
telling them that it was there Charles I. had lost his head {172}
because he had submitted to the dictation of his foreign wife. There
was a popular belief at the time that Queen Adelaide, the wife of King
William, cherished a strong hatred against reform such as Lord Grey and
his colleagues were pressing on, and that she was secretly influencing
the mind of her husband her own way, and so it was that O'Connell's
allusion got home to the feelings and the passions of the multitude who
listened to his words. Never, in the nineteenth century, had England
gone through such a period of internal storm. All over the Continent
observers were beginning to ask themselves whether the monarchy in
England was not on the verge of such a crisis as had just overtaken the
monarchy in France.

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