The King took the strictly constitutional line of accepting their
resignation and intrusting the Duke of Wellington with the task of
forming a new administration, warning the Duke, at the same time, that
he considered himself now pledged to grant a large measure of Reform;
but the Duke found the task impracticable, and then, as the only means
of averting farther insurrectionary tumults, which bore no slight
resemblance to civil war, and might not impossibly end in it, the King
did at last consent to permit the creation of a sufficient number of
peers to insure the passing of the bill. But he could not overcome his
repugnance to the measure as a severe blow to the constitution--one
which would in effect be tantamount to the extinction of the
independence of the Upper House as a legislative body; and, thinking no
means unjustifiable that would avert the necessity of such a creation,
he conceived the idea of authorizing his private secretary, Sir Herbert
Taylor, to request the chief peers on the Opposition side to absent
themselves from the division on the third reading. It seemed to him, and
indeed to many of them, the only thing that could be done. Their
judgment of the character and eventual consequences of the ministerial
bill was unaltered; but they saw the violence of the public feeling on
the subject, and the danger to the state of too stubborn and
uncompromising a resistance to it, and, yielding loyal obedience to
their royal master's wish, they retired from the House without voting.
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