With Perilous Question, the popular historian Antonia Fraser has crossed a similar divide. Until now her works have been in what old Oxford would have approved as proper history: biographies of Tudor queens and Stuart kings, of Cromwell and Gunpowder Plotters, of Louis XIV and his ladies. In moving to ‘current affairs’, she has imbued the first great struggle for electoral reform in Britain with an immediacy and contemporaneity that make it an exciting read.

Fraser begins her tale in June 1830 with the death of George IV, the accession of William IV, and the consequent general election. Between the peaceful transition in Britain and the October election, the July Revolution came to France. That event shadowed the whole reform debate. High Tories argued that any tampering with a sacrosanct constitution would open the floodgates of revolution; the Whigs claimed, to the contrary, that only through moderate reform could the floodgates be kept shut.

The crisis was initiated by the overthrow of the Wellington government in the new House of Commons, a defeat that ended nearly seventy years of Tory rule. The Tory ministry under the Iron Duke had been in no condition to face the challenge of reform. It had been wracked for some years by divisions between moderate Canningites and High Tories; much of the rank and file was disaffected by the leadership surrender on Catholic Emancipation in 1829; and Ultra Tories were mounting kamikaze attacks on the rotten boroughs, blaming the Tory élite which controlled them for the passage of Catholic Emancipation. Wellington, in a ‘starkly confrontational’ speech, repudiated any idea of reform: ‘He was not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of [reform] ... but he would always feel it his duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.’ A fortnight later, his government was defeated in the Commons, and Lord Grey, the leader of the Whigs, was summoned, committing the new government to reform.

Fraser’s well-paced and vivid narrative counterpoints the parliamentary battle inside, with the agitation outside, the halls of Westminster. The work is structured by the events of the fifteen-month struggle in the parliament: the introduction of the Whig bill so surprisingly ambitious as to arouse ‘wild ironical laughter‘ on the Tory benches; its passage on second reading in the Commons by a single vote in March 1831 and its inevitable defeat in the committee stage a month later; the struggle to persuade the king to dissolve the parliament (the second dissolution in eight months); the electoral triumph of the Whigs in June 1831 and the consequent passage of a virtually unchanged bill through the Commons in September, only for it to be thrown out by a ‘frightful majority’ in the Lords in October; the passage of a third bill (little changed) through the Commons in March 1832; its narrow second reading passage through the Lords in April, by a margin so slim as to guarantee trouble at the committee stage, which occurred on 3 May; and the final confrontation, with the government demanding the creation of sufficient peers to pass the legislation, the king’s refusal to do so, the resignation of the government, the inability of the monarch to find a replacement, and the ultimate surrender of the Lords on 4 June 1832.

The events in Westminster took place against a backdrop of anomic violence, spawned by severe winters and poor economic conditions, with more explicit outbreaks of public anger at each roadblock on the path to reform. The most violent of these occurred in Bristol in response to the defeat of the second bill in the Lords, in which the Mansion House was sacked, a hundred houses burnt down, and an estimated 400 rioters died, many of them drunk in the fires they created. Fraser’s particular admiration is reserved for the leaders of the political unions, who, whatever their more democratic ambitions, were prepared to fight ‘For the Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill’ and who imposed on their supporters discipline and non-violence.

Three major themes emerge around this narrative, each focused on personalities. The first is the surprising perseverance and resilience throughout all the reform vicissitudes of the heterogeneous coalition of Whigs, Canningites, Ultra Tories, and Radicals that made up the Grey ministry. Much of this Fraser attributes to Grey’s lieutenants: Lord John Russell of the ‘large head ... and notably short body’, who was the intellectual powerhouse behind reform; the irascible but ‘handsomely formed’ Lord Durham with ‘his jet black eyes’, who provided the spine, threatening at one point to vote against a proposed accommodation ‘so mutilated and the offspring of such compromise and contrivance’; and the ‘innately decent’ Viscount Althorp, ‘the quintessential Whig’ and leader of the House, whose easy mastery of the Commons guaranteed effective management. But it is the prime minister, Charles, 2nd Lord Grey, ‘[t]he best dressed, the handsomest ... man in all his royal master’s dominions’, who is Fraser’s hero. Adept at keeping his motley crew together, vacillating in order to secure cabinet consensus, making all the critical calls, and the key player in the delicate negotiations with the king, Grey is heaped with accolades.

The second focus is the Court. William IV, though wary of the ‘perilous question’ of reform, nevertheless accepted the full totality of the Whig bill. Again, while William, apprehensive of ‘a convulsion in this country’, was initially reluctant to grant his ministers a dissolution, an unwise Tory tactic to impugn his prerogative led the king to behave, in Grey’s words, ‘like an angel’. But this was the high point of ministerial–royal relations. William was surrounded by relatives, legitimate and illegitimate, who were instinctively Tory. Unusually uxorious, he was much influenced by his reactionary queen, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen. By late 1831 the king had ‘substantially soured’ on the whole business of reform. Prolonged negotiations between the king and Grey on the creation of peers ended in failure.

The inability of the Tories to profit from these vicissitudes is Fraser’s third theme. Wellington continued his adamantine stance, dismissive of all suggestions of compromise. In this he was backed by the Tory leader in the Commons, Sir Robert Peel, who, having abandoned his convictions against Catholic Emancipation, was not prepared for a second surrender to expediency. More subtle than his leader, Peel was not against reform as such but against this particular reform and any reform at this time. The obduracy of their leaders paralysed the Tories. When in May 1832 Wellington abandoned his principles to save the king and the Lords by offering a Tory administration committed to ‘limited reform’ it was Peel’s refusal to join the administration that killed the enterprise and forced the king to turn back to the Whigs.

Despite the exhilarating narrative, there remains a hollowness at the heart of this work. What was reform all about? – the redistribution of seats and the right to vote. On seats, Fraser describes the pre-1832 distribution as ‘a system of fiendish variety’, but we get no systematic account of either the pre-reform situation or of the outcome. She is even more cursory on the franchise, noting only ‘a byzantine system of qualifications for the vote’, and we learn little of who had the vote, who lost the vote, who got the vote, and who kept the vote. We do learn that there was a forty per cent increase in the numbers of voters enrolled, but not why this fell so short of the expectations of both proponents and opponents of the bill who had anticipated an increase at least double that figure.

Given the poverty of Fraser’s analysis of the immediate outcomes, it is not surprising that her general conclusions are disappointing. She notes the role of the reform in the electoral success of the Whigs in the general election of 1832–33, but does not examine the contribution of reform to the Whig hegemony over the following generation. She is content with the mundane observation that this reform inevitably opened the way to further electoral reform, and ventures some counterfactual speculations on the revolution avoided. Indeed, most of her conclusions are devoted to the fate of her characters. And here she makes one of the few factual errors in a solid book. Whatever his antecedents, Lord Palmerston would turn in his grave at being described as a Tory prime minister.