V. The success of rebellion with the pressure of hard times enabled the Whigs to carry England for parliamentary reform. Peel and Wellington hastened their fall by boasting that there could be no improvement of a Legislature which accepted members for places without any inhabitants, but not for Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, or some parts of London, and which actually enabled one Scotchman to elect himself as sole representative of fourteen thousand people, in a district where he was the only voter. The people were so discontented with the whole system of Church and State, that thousands of sympathisers gathered around Cobbett in July, 1831, when he was tried for printing a statement that riots of farm hands were doing good in forcing the clergy to reduce their tithes. Lord Brougham, who had been made Chancellor, was among the witnesses to the generally pacific tendency of Cobbett's writings. The jury did not agree; and the Government gave up the case. There was but little more political persecution of British authors. Reform triumphed that autumn in the House of Commons. The House of Lords would then have been conquered, if the bishops had acted like successors of the apostles; but twenty-one out of twenty-three voted for prolonging their own dominion. Their conduct made it unsafe for them to wear their peculiar costume in the streets. Bells tolled, and newspapers put on mourning. There were riots in all the cathedral towns. A duke's castle was burned, because he insisted that the votes of his tenants were his private property, and attempts to punish the incendiaries brought Bristol, one Sunday, into the hands of a mob which burned the bishop's palace, the custom-house, and many other buildings. It was agreed by a meeting of a hundred thousand people at Birmingham, that no more taxes should be paid until Parliament was reformed; and on very many houses, especially in London, there was the following notice: "To save the Collector unnecessary trouble, he is informed that No Taxes on this house will be paid, until the Reform Bill pass into a Law." It was at a meeting to encourage this course that Sydney Smith, who had done good service for Catholic emancipation, told how vainly Mrs. Partington tried to sweep back the Atlantic, during a great storm, and added: "Be quiet and steady. You will beat Mrs. Partington." The episcopal Partingtons continued to be even more hostile than the lay members of the House of Lords; but all finally yielded to the threat that there would be new peers enough created to vote them down. A popular song made the Reform Bill boast that, "Twenty peers shall carry me, If twenty won't, then forty will; For I 'm his Majesty's bouncing Bill."