Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [571]
Twenty-eight of the prisoners were transported for life; one hundred and eighty-three were either sent to prison or transported for lesser terms.
It was while Ralph Shockley watched one group of prisoners being led out that he thought he recognised a face. He frowned. Then he remembered: it was the boy, Daniel Godfrey, the human scarecrow. He was a youth now. He had just been sentenced to transportation.
And so, although neither of them had the least idea of it, a descendant of Saxon Shockleys saw the last in the male line of the noble Norman family of Godefroi leave Sarum to which they had come seven centuries before.
But now, at last, it seemed to Ralph Shockley that a new age had begun.
For in 1830, not only had a new monarch, William IV the sailor king ascended the throne, but more important, having been forced by the great Irishman Daniel O’Connell at last to grant votes and full liberties to all British Catholics, the last of the reactionary prime ministers, the Duke of Wellington, fell from office and, after twenty years in the political wasteland, the reforming Whigs came in again.
“Lord Grey is prime minister,” Ralph cried, “and his programme is reform.”
The Great Reform Bill of 1831 was the greatest step towards democracy in England since Simon de Montfort’s parliament nearly six hundred years before. It was not intended to be, any more than Montfort’s was. The Whig aristocrats who fashioned it had no intention of encouraging so dangerous a notion as votes for the people. It was intended only to remove the pocket or rotten boroughs, to give representation to new communities who had none, and to allow the vote – though not a secret ballot – to substantial freeholders in the boroughs. True, the preposterous idea of allowing the vote to all householders, regardless of the value of their property, was suggested in the course of the debates. It was even voted upon. It received one vote.
“But,” as Porteus truly said, “if you allow the middle classes so many votes, then the lower classes will want them next. It must be opposed, sir, tooth and nail.”
It was. For a year the Bill was sent back and forth between Commons and Lords. The Government resigned and called a snap election which it resoundingly won.
“The Bill, the Bill and nothing but the Bill,” was the cry. And each time he walked out of the town, Ralph Shockley would look up at the old hillfort of Old Sarum, where under an elm tree the preposterous charade of holding an election had been carried on by a handful of bought electors for so long, and cry: “Old Sarum, you’ll soon be gone.”
“And after that,” he told his wife happily, “there’ll be reforms of the factories, child labour, and even education. Thank God I’ve lived to see these better times.”
It was Agnes who first noticed the change in Canon Porteus.
At first she thought nothing of it. They were all getting old, she supposed. Even Ralph, though he still sometimes had the enthusiasm of a boy when an idea like the Reform Bill excited him, was past sixty. Frances, as the years had passed, had grown more and more staid and withdrawn, and her one rebellion against her husband had not only never been repeated but, Agnes suspected, had even been forgotten. If, during the passage of the Reform Bill which signalled an attack upon everything he stood for, the canon seemed unusually silent, she supposed it was only natural.
“You have won your cause and he is old,” she said to Ralph. “Do not agitate him by referring to it now.”
For the best part of a year, Ralph hardly saw Canon Porteus.
“Ever since the election,” he joked, “poor old Porteus has hardly left his house.”
On June 26, 1832, the bells of Salisbury rang and every light in the city was lit to celebrate the passing into law of the Great Reform Act.
Ralph Shockley led his family in triumph the very next morning to stand upon the earth walls of Old Sarum.
“Just a pleasant old ruin again,” he said