A crucial if elusive change in British constitutional politics occurred at the beginning of the 1820s. It was that kind of moment, notes John Cannon, when a movement – here, for parliamentary reform – ‘changes from a crusade to become an accepted creed’; a moment when ‘suddenly, often within a surprisingly short period, resistance crumbled’; a moment when the opposition, while still formidable, assumed the air of ‘fighting for a lost cause’ (see figure II). The popular agitations of the previous several years, whether culminating in the events of Peterloo which went out of control or in the support for Queen Caroline which – no less significantly – did not, were unmistakable writing on the wall. They served as catalysts for a fastspreading realization that some form of reform must be undertaken, if for no other reason than to prevent worse upheavals due to extraparliamentary pressures. ‘Do not you think’, wrote Robert Peel to John Croker in March 1820, ‘that there is a feeling, becoming daily more general and more confirmed … in favor of some undefined change in the mode of governing of this country?’ Croker himself, later a notorious opposer of the Reform Bill, could hardly fail to notice this recent change of mood: ‘at tables where ten years ago you would have no more heard reform advocated than treason’, he wrote in 1822, ‘you will now find half the company reformers’. Reform had ‘got into the people's marrow’, observed John Russell in a similar though less troubled vein, ‘and nothing will now take it out’.