With Parliament itself full of believers in reform, the chief of the Cabinet, the Duke of Wellington, announced that the House of Commons did not need reform and that he would resist all proposals for a change. So great was the popular excitement at this announcement that the Duke could not venture to go forth to dine at the Guildhall for fear that he might be attacked.
Such were the chief episodes in the forward advance of the people up to the time of the presentation of the Reform Bill in Parliament. This important measure has been described as the greatest organic change in the British Constitution that had taken place since the revolution of 1688. When this bill was finally passed it meant a transference of governmental control from the upper classes to the middle classes, and was the inauguration of a policy which has constantly added to the prosperity and well-being of the English people. The agitation upon this bill, introduced in the House by Lord John Russell, under the Premiership of Earl Grey, and a ministry favorable to reform, was filling the attention of all Englishmen to the exclusion of every other subject just at the time when Browning was emerging into manhood, 1831 and 1832, and though he has not commemorated in his poetry this great step in the political progress of his own century, his first play, written in 1837, takes up a period of English history in which a momentous struggle for liberty on the part of the people was in progress.
Important as the Reform Bill was, it furnished no such picturesque episodes for a dramatist as did the struggle of Pym and Strafford under the despotic rule of King Charles I.
In choosing this period for his play the poet found not only material which furnished to his hand a series of wonderfully dramatic situations, but in the three men about whom the action moves is presented an individuality and a contrast in character full of those possibilities for analysis so attractive to Browning's mind.
Another point to be gained by taking this remote period of history was that his attitude could be supremely that of the philosopher of history. He could portray with fairness whatever worth of character he found to admire in the leaders upon either side, at the same time that he could show which possessed the winning principle--the principle of progress. In dealing with contemporary events a strong personal feeling is sure to gain the upper hand, and to be non-partisan and therefore truly dramatic is a difficult, if not an impossible, task. When we come to examine this play, we find that the character which unquestionably interested the poet most was Strafford's; not because of his political principles but because of his devotion to his King. Human love and loyalty in whomever manifested was always of the supremest interest to Browning, and, working upon any hints furnished by history, the poet has developed the character of Strafford in the light of his personal friendship for the King--a feeling so powerful that no fickle change of mood on the part of the King could alter it. Upon this fact of his personal relations to the King Strafford's actions in this great crisis have been interpreted and explained, though not defended, from the political point of view.