The genesis of the Reform Act of 1832 is still not fully understood. It has become fashionable for historians to direct their attention toward two groups of Whigs who are seen as the ultimate arbiters of policy. The first, men of high visibility such as Lords Grey and Holland, was certainly of importance. The Reform Bill prime minister was the most brilliant political tactician the Whigs had produced since Walpole. But the senior leaders of the 1830s were already becoming rather antiquated in their ideas, and men of their type and generation were generally very moderate reformers. The other group to whom historians attribute the progressive elements of Whiggism, the Edinburgh Reviewers and especially Henry Brougham, are seen as the “new men,” the radicalizers and educators of Whiggery. Yet Brougham, for example, frequently worked against the efforts of advanced Whigs to unify and strengthen the party. Indeed, he actually regretted the liberal nature of the Reform Bill. The “new men” who might have played such a role in the House of Commons, Romilly, Horner, and Whitbread, were dead by 1818, the victims of disease and madness. Mackintosh and Macaulay contributed to the party's articulation of principles but did not shape them in the 1810s and 1820s.
No peaceful steps could have been taken toward actual constitutional change without the acquiescence, indeed the active cooperation, of the great Whig magnates. No Whig government could hope to survive for long or call itself Whig without support from the great families, most of them cousins by blood or marriage, whose surnames and titles were inextricably bound up with mythology anchored in the events of 1688–89.
