Chapter 2 - The Last Whigs

Summary

“What a ministry – Lord Liverpool has a fit and goes out.” Thus John Cam Hobhouse, reformist MP for the borough of Westminster, began an 1827 letter to radical organizer Francis Place referring to the departing prime minister. Hobhouse went on to catalogue the ailments that had recently incapacitated, or killed, various members of the Tory government, making his letter more like “a hospital return,” he wryly noted, “than a list of cabinet ministers.” Place replied in a state of simulated agitation. He echoed Hobhouse’s remarks about a vulnerable ministry afflicted by a wave of illness and misfortune. But his letter amplified them into exclamations about the future of the government and the fate of the country: “What a Ministry! aye! What a government!! What a nation!!! what a state of Society!!!!” Place’s mock-hysteria aside, this death and decline was, from his perspective, congruent with a wider shift.