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Henry, Lord Brougham: The Later Years. 1830-1868: The Great Actor, by Ronald K. Huch; pp. iii + 273. Lewiston, Queenstown, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993, $69.95, L39.95.
For many historians that redoubtable Scot, Henry Brougham, is both a disappointment and a puzzle. Such a sturdy intellect! Such prodigious energies! And so passionate dedicated the great causes of the day--popular education, the end of slavery, free trade, legal reform, a free press, a reformed Parliament, and even, to the cheers of the masses, the right of the profligate Queen Caroline to share the throne with her profligate husband, George IV. With unmatched oratory he led in all these causes he had in 1812 in the defeat of the trade-crippling Orders in Council, a role that won him the support of the industrial North. In this biography, Ronald Huch quotes Thomas Macaulay's opinion that in 1832 Brougham was, "next to the King, the most popular man in England" (47). Yet after the great accomplishments of the 1810s and 1820s, appointment as Lord Chancellor took him to the House of Lords where this champion of the people grew more and more conservative, irascible, and impotent. A great career fell short of its promise. A man of gigantic stature, Brougham never became, like Sir Robert Peel or William Gladstone, a truly great Victorian, he thus remains a puzzle for historians.
Arthur Aspinall, in Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (1927) attempts to solve the puzzle by following out the Whig Lord Melbourne's insight that Lord Brougham was strong for both good and mischief. The mischief was anchored in a consuming ambition and a readiness to shift opinions to further that ambition. "Too eager for immediate applause," wrote Aspinall, quoting David Ricardo, and "steer every point of the political compass" (86, 206). He was also full of "jealousy of ... rivals," "faithlessness, and egotism," and...