By 1820 the saintly, sober, ‘cockeyed’ Goulburn had completed ten years as a junior minister in the Tory administrations of Perceval and Lord Liverpool.
At the general election of 1820 he was returned again for West Looe on the Buller interest. In the House (where he frequently acted as a government teller) he claimed ‘a very considerable diminution of the expense’ of the Ionian Islands staff, 2 June, and stated that the information requested by Lord John Russell would exonerate ministers from the charge that they had betrayed Parga by returning it to Turkey, 29 June. He believed that the king would get the better of Queen Caroline, ‘his worse half’, if he showed his face more; and in December 1820, explaining the government’s determination not to concede restoration of the ‘guilty’ queen’s name to the liturgy, he sounded the influential county Member Littleton for a hint of how the ‘country gentlemen’ felt.
In late November 1821 the cabinet decided, as part of the impending coalition with the Grenvillites and replacement of Lord Sidmouth as home secretary by Peel, to appoint the duke of Wellington’s pro-Catholic and mercurial brother Lord Wellesley lord lieutenant of Ireland, ‘provided a very capable secretary could be found’. After Huskisson had turned it down, Goulburn was reckoned to be the ‘best’ choice, with his staunch Protestantism seen as an additional recommendation in view of Wellesley’s bias. He agonized for more than 24 hours, ostensibly, as he told Bathurst, on account of financial worries, ‘considering my own circumstances and the little prospect of improvement in West Indian affairs’. Yet he also had severe reservations, which he kept to himself, about taking on ‘one of the most difficult and laborious offices under the government’ in harness with the ‘dilatory and inefficient’ Wellesley, who would take ‘the whole credit’ for any success, while ‘the whole labour of the administration must necessarily devolve upon me’. He fretted too that William Plunket*, who was to be made Irish attorney-general, ‘might occasion embarrassment’ by being so prominent a champion of Catholic claims. The entreaties of Liverpool and Lord Londonderry*, the offer of an annual pension of £1,000 (doubled in 1825) for long service at the colonial office and his confidence that he could rely on Peel for support and advice overcame his misgivings.
He possesses very good sense, great industry, considerable practice in business ... together with a clear and unaffected manner of explaining everything which belonged to his departments. His private character is excellent, and even exemplary, his habits of life temperate, orderly and becoming his circumstances, which were confined rather than affluent.
Add. 40322, f. 1; Dorset RO, D/BKL, Bankes jnl. 131 (Dec. 1821).
After briefing meetings with Peel and Liverpool, Goulburn arrived in Dublin on 20 Dec. 1821, to begin what proved to be over five years’ hard and harassing labour. One of his enduring problems was Wellesley’s idleness and inefficiency, as he later wrote:
It was very difficult to get an opinion or direction from him without on his part much previous deliberation and conference with others. Written papers sent to him were detained indefinitely and to obtain with respect to them any written authority was impossible. My whole official intercourse with him when I was in Dublin was by personal interviews, and those only occurred after repeated postponement on account of real or pretended indisposition and never except after waiting always one and not infrequently as many as three hours in his anteroom. The interviews generally resulted in my having permission to take the course which I might in conversation have suggested. When I was in London I rarely heard from him and I was compelled to take in Parliament in concert with ... [Peel] that line ... which I judged expedient ... To myself he was kind and considerate. He readily listened to the objections which I had ... occasion to offer to appointments ... and often sacrificed his personal feelings in deference to representations of which he admitted the justice.
Jenkins, 132-5; Buckingham, i. 255; Goulburn mss 68/1, pp. 61-64; Arbuthnot Jnl. i. 157-8.
On the other hand, he received steady support from Peel and got on famously with William Gregory, the experienced under-secretary at Dublin Castle.
I am ruined already by non-payment of rents, by the decay of my West India property and by an office which does not pay its expenses. But ... I do not think I could in fairness to the government say that I would have nothing to do with West Looe, which would be ... to put myself out of Parliament. I am therefore compelled to run into this new expense and can only endeavour to restrict it with in certain limits ... I think Arbuthnot* [the patronage secretary] ought to know how I am situated and whether if I fail at Looe I have any chance of being returned elsewhere; if not ... I shall retire into private life, and I hope before I am quite a bankrupt.
Add. 40328, ff. 14, 31.
He was opposed by and defeated a wealthy adventurer, whose subsequent petition was unsuccessful; he presumably got some assistance from the treasury. In his absence the Irish insurrection and habeas corpus suspension bills were pressed through the Commons by Londonderry.
Back in Ireland by 11 Aug., he remained fearful of ‘a renewal of insurrection’. He ended direct distress relief on 1 Sept., but continued the public works programme in the hardest-hit areas.
Goulburn saw off Newport’s motion for information on Catholic burials, 6 Feb., and Grattan’s for returns of Catholic office-holders, 19 Feb. 1824. Aiming to seize the initiative from opposition, he got leave on 16 Feb. to introduce a bill to enforce Irish clergy residence, which became law on 21 June, and on 26 Feb. a brief one to amend the previous year’s Church Rates Act, which reached the statute book on 16 Mar. He objected to the principle of the Catholic bishops’ petition for separate funding for education of the Irish Catholic poor, 9 Mar., defended the grant for Protestant charter schools, 16 Mar., and, acquiescing in Newport’s proposal for the establishment of a commission of inquiry into education, 25 Mar., paid lip service to the virtues of interdenominational instruction.
Later that summer he had private talks with Orange leaders in a bid to discourage lawlessness among the rank and file and made a tour of the supposedly distressed areas around Limerick, Killarney and Tralee, from which he returned to Dublin ‘very agreeably disappointed ... in ... the condition of the people’. He could not detect anything politically sinister behind the foreign secretary Canning’s visit to Ireland.
On another trip to Cambridge in early February 1826 Goulburn told Jane that he was ‘pretty sure’ that even if he could not defeat Bankes this time he could establish an impregnable position for the next. Anticipating a comparatively quiet session on Irish matters, he predicted a difficult time over the prevailing distress and the consequences of the recent financial crash, especially as ‘Hume, Hunt and Cobbett have like seagulls who portend a storm come from their ... hiding places and begun the one to talk of economy and retrenchment, the others to assemble and harangue the people’. Privately, he could not see why the cabinet ‘turned a deaf ear’ to agitation for an issue of exchequer bills to relieve commercial distress; he criticized Canning’s folly in staking the government’s existence on resistance to this and Liverpool’s ‘obstinacy’. The Bank’s intervention to advance money to businessmen on security of their goods ‘relieved’ him and enabled him to soothe Jane’s anxieties about his possible loss of office.
Goulburn was assured of a seat for Harwich on the treasury interest at the general election, but decided to persevere at Cambridge, even though he knew he had no chance. An invitation to contest Dublin did not seriously tempt him, but on 19 May 1826, a fortnight before the dissolution, he accepted the offer (which had been on the cards for almost a year) of the archbishop of Armagh, the primate of Ireland, to return him unconditionally for Armagh city in recognition of his ‘services’ to the Irish church. He ‘very readily’ accepted, reflecting that by placing Harwich at the government’s disposal he would give himself ‘a good claim another time’.
He had gone to Ireland expecting the worst, resigned to the continuance of Johnston’s bad influence over Wellesley and Plunket’s petulance, and filled with ‘forebodings as to the wretched state’ in which the country was likely to be placed by autumn famine, which ‘make me almost wish that I had nothing to do with it’. Peel authorized the expenditure of £4,000 to contain the current fever epidemic and £3,000 to relieve distress, but their worst fears about the harvest were not realized.
Goulburn returned to the Irish office on 10 Feb. 1827, but was rendered largely hors de combat for the best part of a fortnight by his customary cold, exacerbated by a deranged stomach. The news of Liverpool’s stroke and political death, which he received while discussing business at Peel’s on 17 Feb., initially filled him with gloom, as he anticipated the immediate ‘break-up’ of the ministry, the formation of a new one to concede Catholic emancipation and his own necessary resignation with Peel, as he told Jane:
That I shall regret office I cannot deny as it has enabled me to contribute more to your comforts and to those of my family and friends. Independently of those considerations, I shall not regret having more time to enjoy your company and to attend to the education of my boys.
Her hysterical reaction to the prospect of his loss of office and income led him to adopt a calmer tone, holding out renewed hope of things continuing as they were, but he entreated her to reconcile herself to a possible change of circumstances. He now reckoned on a likely Commons majority against Catholic relief, in which case he ‘saw no reason why the government might not go on’. Having failed to find anything new to say on the question, he spoke briefly against Burdett’s unsuccessful motion, 6 Mar., when he said that as Irish secretary he had been obliged to treat Catholics ‘in a more indulgent manner than he should otherwise have done’. He made himself so hoarse that he was speechless and distressed for three days.
Goulburn, who inevitably caught ‘a very severe cold’ before February was out, derided Hume’s notion of establishing a dozen separate finance committees on the 15th and outlined the aims of the recently appointed committee, on which he of course sat and where he narrowly failed to carry his proposal for a specific annual sum to be set aside for debt reduction’.
In September 1828 he obtained a Welsh judgeship for Edward.
On 13 and 20 Feb. 1829, when the Whig Lord Howick* thought he ‘cut a most laughable figure, clearly not knowing what to say’, he maintained under questioning that there was no need to reappoint the finance committee.
On the address, 4 Feb. 1830, he peddled the official line that distress was local and temporary. He upheld the currency settlement of 1819, 5, 11 Feb., when he opposed the transfer of East Retford’s seats to Birmingham, unable to see ‘any deficiency in the adequate representation of commerce or manufactures’. He defeated by 184-69 Hume’s demand for large tax remissions, an implied censure of himself, 15 Feb. Opposition observers were contemptuous of all these performances, especially the last two; and Lord Holland described him as ‘an encumbrance not an assistance’ to Peel in debate.
Thomas Creevey* heard that at the levee to kiss the new king’s hand, 26 June, the myopic William IV, when Goulburn’s turn came, said ‘"I can’t make out who you are. You must tell me your name, if you please"’.
I am by no means sorry for a change which has released me from a mental and bodily labour which was I felt beyond my strength to bear and which must necessarily have been increased by the determination of the opposition to use every mode of vexatious delay which the forms of the House permitted in order to wear out its opponents.
Alarmed by the ‘species of servile war raging in some parts of the country’, he organized farmers of the Betchworth area to deal with any ‘Swing’ disturbances, but also got neighbouring squires to make more generous contributions to poor relief. He continued his regime of domestic stringency, and to prepare Harry for Cambridge placed him with the leading Evangelical Henry Venn Elliott in Brighton.
He concerted with Herries and Sir George Murray, 3 Feb. 1831, on opposition tactics that evening in the Commons, where in the event ‘little or no business’ came up. He told his wife:
As to reform all that passed ... showed the difficulty in which ... [ministers] were in respect to it. The petitions mostly prayed for ballot, universal suffrage, etc., as a means of attaining other objects subversive of the present state of our society, and if the government mean not to go these lengths they will not gain anything in the opinion of those who now cry out boldly for reform and whom it is their object and interest to pacify. I rather apprehend that they will go as far as they can in accordance with popular opinion ... They are popular for the moment and they do not see that ultimately they must either resign ... or adopt every unjust measure which the people or rather the mob of England or Ireland may think fit to clamour for.
He had been persuaded by Wellington not to raise the question of British relations with France and subsequently prompted the duke to veto any Tory parliamentary initiative on foreign policy.
Goulburn’s first reaction to the government’s reform scheme, 1 Mar. 1831, was to write to Jane from the House:
Never was any measure conceived with greater wickedness. It is evident that the Whigs mean to leave office and to make it untenable for any successor; and to do this they leave a question which will be the foundation of perpetual agitation if rejected and of revolution if carried ... The cowardice of the representatives of populous places will prevent many who will vote against it afterwards from opposing the first introduction and under these circumstances we shall reserve our strength until the second reading.
‘Almost as tired as if I was in office’ as a result of attendance on committees and in the House, he continued to hope that the reform bill would be rejected at that stage, and was in any case sure that if it got through it could be emasculated in committee. He convinced himself that there was little popular enthusiasm for reform, despite ‘the government making every effort to have the mob on their side’, though he lamented that ‘the respectable classes of society’ were ‘cowardly as well as alarmed and unwilling to come forward’. He had ‘no fear of the bill passing even if the second reading be carried’, as there was ‘an incipient apprehension among some of the middling orders who have property’.
At the ensuing general election Goulburn stood for Cambridge University with Peel’s brother William, professing support for ‘temperate’ reform, as the culmination of a month-long campaign against Palmerston, the foreign secretary, and the other sitting Member, the Whig William Cavendish, organized by the resident anti-reformers. They won comfortably, inflicting on the ministry its only defeat in a large open constituency. Goulburn, who had been ready if beaten to ‘hail the tranquillity of private life and freedom from attendance in the House of Commons as a great blessing’, occupied the seat for the rest of his life. His friends opened a subscription to defray his £2,000 costs. Attacks on his ownership and alleged maltreatment of slaves, which he had prepared himself to refute, led to a protracted public dispute with Zachary Macaulay.
a perfect understanding and concert among all who are opposed to the government measure of reform. We must not be scrupulous as to little differences ... Without it, I much fear that the false opinion circulated by the government of your disinclination to combine with others in opposition to the bill will gain ground, that men will think the bill likely to be carried as it is and will be inclined to make good their individual interests and to secure a certain popularity under the new constitution rather than endeavour by patient and continued resistance to save the actual constitution ... We have a good force and I think may do a great deal if we can direct it properly and in a body.
Peel professed willingness to co-operate in opposition to reform, however futile, but refused to promote any alternative scheme or to countenance renewed ‘party connection with the Ultra Tory party’.
On 16 June 1831 Goulburn took his seat in the Commons, where he ‘saw many new faces, not very good looking nor yet so bad as I expected’, and concluded after a conversation with the radical Member John Maberly that ‘our best course undoubtedly will be to endeavour to break the connection between the radicals and the present government’, though he had ‘no hope’ of success, as the ministers were ‘more radical than the radicals’. Later that day he attended the small opposition meeting which decided to adopt Planta’s Charles Street house as a party headquarters.
Goulburn, who told Harry on 30 Nov. 1831 that the next session would be stormy, as ‘the state of the country and of all our concerns foreign and domestic is such as to call forth every latent feeling of bitterness and hostility’, pressed Peel to come to London for ‘consideration and concert’.
My view is ... to get the bill again rejected if possible. A second year’s consideration would be invaluable to the country ... I am daily more convinced that this reform is not desired except by those who are to gain by it, and I therefore think that all we can do in the way of encouraging resistance to it either in our House or in the Lords ought to be done ... It is ... bad policy in us to do anything which looks like encouraging an idea that we think the bill as it is must pass.
Add. 40333, ff. 118, 120; Parker, ii. 196-9.
On 17 Jan. 1832 he secured a return of income and expenditure designed to give Althorp ‘credit for a blunder in the arrangement of his budget, a deficiency of £1,000,000’.
very embarrassing to their future measures and still more embarrassing from the mode in which they were taken up by the radicals to those who like myself are disposed to give them real and effective assistance in tranquillizing the country. But they are weak and foolish in all their proceedings, doing what is right so as to make it appear wrong and raising resistance to themselves by a foolish desire of conciliating radical support. I have increased my cold.
Goulburn mss 67B, Goulburn to wife, 13-15 Feb., 7, 14 Mar 1832.
He divided with government against Hunt’s motion for information on military punishments, 16 Feb. He endorsed Althorp’s refusal to repeal the soap tax, 28 Feb., but supported Chandos’s call for a greater reduction in the sugar duties to relieve the West Indians, 7 Mar. He voted against the third reading of the reform bill, 22 Mar., and afterwards claimed ‘victory’ in argument for its opponents and urged the Lords to throw it out. He opposed the malt drawback bill, 30 Mar., 2 Apr., when he outlined his general but qualified support for the government’s tithes reform plans. He was a founder member of the Carlton Club in March. He spoke against the navy civil departments bill, 6 Apr., and continued to try to show up ministers’ financial incompetence, believing that ‘the more we damage them now the better’.
After the Lords had rejected the reform bill, 7 May 1832, he speculated about the ‘awful questions’ of peerage creations or ministerial resignation, but concluded that ‘the solution ... depends not on our will so much as on far higher powers’. He at first considered it ‘impossible’ that the Conservatives could ‘take office to carry such a reform bill as will satisfy the people and what is worse the king’s pledges on the subject’ and foresaw only ‘ruin’: ‘in the maze in which we are we have no hope but in God’s guidance and superintendence’. He doubted the wisdom of Wellington’s determination ‘not to desert’ the king if called on, for he could not imagine how he could form a viable government ‘with such a House of Commons and under such circumstances as those in which the Whigs have placed us’. He followed Peel’s example in refusing Wellington’s request to serve in a Conservative reform ministry, clear in his mind that moderate reform was now a chimera, that such an attempt could lead only to inflamed passions and ‘yet more violent measures’ and that ‘a united opposition to the bill’ led by Peel afforded a far better chance of modifying it. The notion that if Manners Sutton resigned from the Chair to lead the Commons or even head a government Goulburn could succeed him was dismissed by the reformers, who had no doubt that the House would not elect him as its Speaker.
Goulburn was named to the select committee on the Bank’s charter, 22 May 1832, and its proceedings occupied much of his time in the following three months. He voted silently against the second reading of the Irish reform bill, 25 May. He objected to details of the boundaries bill, 7, 8 June. He quizzed Althorp on the state of the finances, 4 June. On the 18th he got leave to introduce a bill to amend the 1827 Irish Union of Parishes Act, which became law on 17 July. He opposed the births registration bill, 20 June, voted for Baring’s measure to exclude insolvent debtors from Parliament, 27 June, defended the Irish Protestant clergy, 28 June, and stressed the importance of securing their entitlement from tithes when calling on Irish Catholics and Protestants to bury the hatchet, 29 June. He voted against government on the Russian-Dutch loan, 12 July, and spoke thus, 16 July. He divided against Harvey’s attempt to open the Inns of Court, 17 July. On the 23rd he spoke and voted against the Irish education plan, arguing that if the Protestant scriptures were jettisoned ‘we may have able talkers, able leaders of political unions and able agitators, but we shall not have good citizens, good subjects or good Christians’. Next day he opposed Hume’s motion to exclude the recorder of Dublin from the House. He mocked Althorp’s financial incompetence, 27 July. On 30 July 1832 he denounced the bribery at elections bill as ‘calculated to encourage conspiracies’ and seconded the motion of thanks to Manners Sutton on his supposed retirement from the Chair. Wellington wanted Goulburn to stand for the Speakership in the next Parliament, but when Peel, who had been solicited to support the better qualified Williams Wynn, sought his views but rather discouraged him, he gave up the idea, professing that ‘what feelings of ambition I may have had are gone and I only remain in public life because God has cast my lot there and because I consider it the duty of every man to use his best endeavours in the station in which he finds himself to arrest the progress of evil; in other words, to check the frantic career of the government’.
Goulburn, as Peel’s faithful lieutenant, remained a leading Conservative politician for almost 20 years. He was home secretary in Peel’s first administration and, having been narrowly defeated for the Speakership in 1839, an able and supportive chancellor of the exchequer in his second. The death of Harry from consumption in 1843 was a blow from which he never fully recovered. Peel’s death in 1850, when he acted as a pallbearer and executor, caused him great anguish.