to investigate
the character of the reforms which they demanded. They were not,
however, contented with peaceful modes of pressing their demands, but,
in the course of the summer of 1839, broke out in formidable riots in
different parts of the country. At Birmingham they set fire to different
parts of the town, carrying on their work of pillage and destruction to
such a pitch that the Duke of Wellington compared the condition of the
town to one taken by storm in regular warfare; and at Newport, in
Monmouthshire, they even planned and carried out an attack on the troops
quartered in the district. But this violence led for a time to the
suppression of the movement, the leaders in the Newport riots being
convicted of high-treason; and, though the government forbore to put the
extreme severities of the law in force against them, those who remained
unconvicted had been taught by their example the danger which they
incurred by such proceedings; and some years elapsed before a series of
revolutionary troubles on the Continent again gave a momentary
encouragement to those in this country who sympathized with the
revolutionists, and prompted them to another attempt to force their
views upon the government and the people.

It had nearly, however, been another ministry on whom the task of
quelling these riots had fallen. Though, as has been already said, Lord
Melbourne's cabinet derived a momentary strength from the accession of a
young Queen, the support it thus acquired did not last; and in May,
1839, having been defeated on a measure of colonial policy, which will
be mentioned hereafter, the cabinet resigned. The Queen intrusted the
task of forming a new administration to Sir Robert Peel, who undertook
it with a reasonable confidence that he should be able to hold his
ground better than formerly, now that the retirement of his predecessors
was their own act, and admitted by them to have been caused by a
consciousness of the divisions among their supporters and their own
consequent weakness. He had the greater reason for such confidence,
since two of the colleagues of Lord Grey who had refused his offers in
1834, Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham, were now willing to unite with
him; and he had almost completed his arrangements, when he was stopped
by an unexpected, though not altogether unprecedented, impediment. It
will be recollected that, in 1812, some of the arrangements for the
formation of a new administration on the deat