The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (70 page)

Although the Concert of Europe was almost dead as a system of political co-operation, it lasted just long enough for Canning to achieve independence for Greece from the Ottoman Empire. It was with the Greek revolt against Turkish rule in 1821 that the first manifestation arose of what would be one of the great problems of the nineteenth century. Known to British diplomats as the Eastern Question, the issue was how far Russia should be allowed to expand into the power vacuum left by the declining Ottoman or Turkish Empire which stretched from the Balkans to Persia (Iran). Since the late eighteenth century the British had been alarmed by Russian ambitions to expand southwards, whether west into the Balkans or east into Persia, which directly threatened the route to India. Despite disapproval of Turkish rule which had given the country a bad name for centuries, the British Foreign Office believed that the Ottoman Empire was a bulwark against Russia. It had to be defended in its entirety because otherwise it would disintegrate.

The Greek Wars of Independence offered just the chance to move south that Russia desired, for Greece had warm-water ports and an outlet on to the trading lake of the Mediterranean. By treaty with Turkey Russia had some notional rights to defend the Christian populations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Russian interest in the fate of the Greeks had been quickened by the personality of the new tsar Nicholas I, who acceded to the throne in the autumn of 1825. He was keenly religious, and the Greeks who belonged to the Orthodox Church were not only useful potential empire material but his co-religionists. Posing as the champions of their Orthodox co-religionists the Russians might take over the Greek peninsula. This Canning was determined to prevent.

But though Britain’s official aim was to prop up the ailing Turkish Empire, as it would be for the next fifty years, in the case of the Greek Wars British public opinion and Canning were fervently on the side of the Greeks. Every cultivated Englishman in the early nineteenth century was classically educated, and Latin and Greek philosophy and literature were the main subjects at university. When the Greek war broke out, it immediately attracted a host of British volunteer fighters paid for by Philhellenic societies which had sprung up everywhere. Among them was the living embodiment of Romanticism, Lord Byron.

In 1827 after five years of war the Ottoman forces were joined by Egyptian troops and began to overrun Greece. Although Britain was officially neutral, British public opinion–outraged by Turkish massacres of Greeks–demanded in no uncertain terms that the government do something. As a responsive and modern politician Canning saw that he could not ignore this upsurge of feeling. He came to the conclusion that, if Russia was going to intervene, in this instance the best hope for the future was to work alongside her, in the old Concert of Europe. With the backing of France and Russia, he negotiated a deal that in reality obtained freedom for Greece from the murderous Turks while it nominally prevented the dismantling of an important section of the Ottoman Empire. Remaining in theory a part of the empire and having to pay Turkish taxes, Greece would in practice have self-government.

In 1827 Lord Liverpool had a stroke, and Canning took over as prime minister. However, the enlightened Canning believed in Catholic Emancipation and this prompted all members of the government who were against it–led by Wellington and Peel–to resign, because they believed it would be the end of the Union with Ireland. Canning was in any case never popular among many of the Tories, who tended to think he was too clever by half, and in order to carry on in government he was forced to bring into his Cabinet some Whigs, who had been a negligible force in politics for twenty years, headed by the youthful Lord John Russell. The price of their support was a bill that repealed the Test and Corporation Acts against Nonconformists.

But by 1828 the gifted Canning was dead, after a long period of very poor health. His place as prime minister was briefly taken by Frederick Robinson, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, now Lord Goderich. But in January 1828 Goderich had to resign because his Cabinet could not agree over the navy’s sinking of the Egyptian and Turkish fleet at the Battle of Navarino in support of the Greeks, Vice-Admiral Codrington having acted on his own initiative. George IV offered the premiership to the Duke of Wellington, who violently disapproved of this destruction of Turkish ships that could be useful in the future against the Russians. Wellington created a government of some liberal followers of Canning’s, such as Viscount Palmerston and Huskisson, and brought back the Tories who had resigned over Catholic Emancipation, including Peel.

Exceptional soldier though he was, Wellington was no diplomat and he quickly undid Canning’s delicate footwork in the east. Canning’s aim had been to contain the Russians by forcing them to act in concert, but when Wellington apologized to the Turks for the Battle of Navarino the Russians were disgusted that the allies had not finished off the job and invaded Turkey in 1828. The conservative Wellington’s fear of revolution made him the enemy of any kind of independence struggles. But he now saw that it was better to make sure that Greek independence was real independence with international guarantees, otherwise Russia would make Greece part of her own empire. He therefore led the way to a tripartite agreement between Britain, France and Russia which enabled Greece to become free in 1829. It was the first blow in the dismembering of what was to be called the Sick Man of Europe, but there was nothing else for it.

Meanwhile at home the liberal wing of the Tory party found the Iron duke too reactionary for them to stomach. He treated them like subalterns whose role was to get on with obeying his orders. Soon after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts all the liberals such as Huskisson, William Lamb (the future Lord Melbourne) and Palmerston resigned. Wellington was left to govern with Peel and the Ultra Tories. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts had been a sign of a growing desire to end religious discrimination, even if thanks to Walpole the Test Acts were honoured in the breach. Within the year a daring election campaign in Ireland forced Wellington to bring in Catholic Emancipation.

For some time a number of politicians had believed that Catholic Emancipation would have to take place. But the several bills introduced to give the Catholics the vote had been rejected by the House of Lords, a number of whose members had Irish estates. As there were very few Catholics in Britain by now, its importance lay in its application to Ireland. Pitt had given Irish Catholics the vote at the end of the eighteenth century, but as George III had prevented total Emancipation Catholics still could not hold any official positions. They might no longer be penalized for practising their religion, but they could not be magistrates, judges, county sheriffs or members of Parliament.

Politicians like Canning had believed that the only way to bring order to a country with a stupendous murder rate was to give the Catholics more of a stake in running it. With proper responsibilities, the Catholic community might give their backing to law-enforcement, but, excluded from power, they saw the magistracy as part of an alien system administered by the Protestant ascendancy. The problem was that most Irish Catholics were against the Union and were increasingly in favour of repealing it so that they could govern themselves.

By the late 1820s the Catholics in Ireland had become much more militant. This was partly the effect of a new kind of patriotic priest turned out at Maynooth in Kildare ever since the Napoleonic Wars had cut off the Irish from their usual seminaries on the continent. The anger and resentment which in the past had been damped down by an apolitical clergy were also being stirred up by a well-off barrister named Daniel O’Connell. A speaker of genius in a country renowned for persuasive tongues, he soon became, in the old cliché, the uncrowned King of Ireland.

O’Connell set out to create a situation in which it would be impossible to refuse the Catholics the vote. His organization, the Catholic Board, was publicized from every Catholic pulpit, becoming an extremely powerful pressure group which was funded by a ‘Catholic rent’ of a penny each month and orchestrated continuous agitation for Catholic Emancipation. When the Catholic Board was banned, as it had all the hallmarks of a political organization, O’Connell and his friends simply revived it under a different name, the Catholic Association.

Thanks to the work of the priests and O’Connell, at the next election in 1828 the forty-shilling Roman Catholic freeholders in the counties (the property qualification entitling them to vote) had the courage to rebel against their powerful Protestant landlords. They voted instead for Catholic candidates fielded by the Catholic Association. It had always been theoretically possible for Catholics to stand for Parliament, as long as they took the oath of supremacy when elected. Of course in practice it never happened because swearing in that way would mean denying their faith and acknowledging that the British monarch was head of the Church. But, argued O’Connell, who was to know whether the elected MP would or would not take the oath? He was gambling on the expectation that, once a Catholic had been elected to Parliament, it would be extremely embarrassing for the English if they were to prevent him taking his seat. After all, Parliament’s refusal to allow the legally elected John Wilkes to take his seat had created an uproar sixty years before.

To the government’s consternation O’Connell was returned as the MP for Clare, by an overwhelming majority. The Catholic Association warned that at the next election it would send back not just one but sixty Roman Catholic MPs. The system was in deadlock. Wellington was certain that Ireland would erupt in civil war if O’Connell was not allowed to take his seat at Westminster. Although only a year before the duke and Peel had both resigned office rather than serve under the pro-Emancipation Canning, Wellington now accepted that he had been outwitted–he had to support Catholic Emancipation and bow to
force majeure
. Wellington’s prestige as an upholder of the Protestant establishment and as an Irish Protestant grandee convinced the king that Emancipation had to be granted. Extremely reluctantly, for like his father he believed that his coronation vows bound him to uphold the Protestant religion, George IV agreed. O’Connell’s effrontery had won the day.

From 1829 onwards Roman Catholics could sit in Parliament, though they still could not become lord chancellor or prime minister. Wellington would not allow O’Connell to take his seat in the House of Commons this time round, however, as the Catholic Relief Act had not been passed when he was elected. To get his revenge Wellington also dramatically increased the property qualifications for freeholders to £10 a year, putting the vote out of reach of many of the peasants and small farmers who had returned O’Connell. Nevertheless quite enough supporters remained to get O’Connell returned as MP at the next election.

But not only did Catholic Emancipation mark the beginning of the end of the old establishment, it marked the end of Tory rule. The Ultra Tories were furious with Wellington because of what they considered his betrayal, and in 1830 they stabbed him in the back by voting with the Whigs to remove him and Peel from government. Their actions brought a Whig government to power for the first time since 1807.

The gathering sense in England in 1830 of the old order passing away was enhanced on 26 June by the death of George IV. The First Gentleman of Europe, as he was known, had epitomized the glittering rule of the aristocracy. A few months later the opening of the first long-distance steam railway line between Manchester and Liverpool was another indication that a clean break was about to be made with the past. The railway project was considered so exciting that the opening ceremony was attended by most of the Cabinet, including the prime minister the Duke of Wellington. They watched George Stevenson’s celebrated steam engine, the
Rocket
, inaugurate the line.

But England was not only about to be transformed by the different pace of rail travel. Her population in the next decades would have gadgets their ancestors could not have dreamed of. They would soon be using the electric telegraph, invented by the Englishmen Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke, and enjoying what its English pioneers William Fox-Talbot and J. B. Reade called the photograph, but which was known in France as the daguerreotype. In the first steamships they would be crossing the Atlantic in ten days rather than the three months it took by sail. They began to have the sort of plumbing not seen in England since the Romans, to the great benefit of their health. They read by the gas light created by William Murdock at Watt’s steam-engine factory in the late eighteenth century which had become commonplace in towns. And, now that they didn’t have to strain their eyes by candlelight, they devoured vast three-decker novels by popular writers such as Charles Dickens, who would become the figures of the age, as well as its harshest critics.

With all these changes went a dramatic alteration in the governing of Britain. The dynamic commercial classes responsible for her newfound wealth would no longer be denied a share in guiding her destiny. In 1832, despite opposition from Wellington and much of the aristocracy, the Reform Bill delayed for forty years was passed. It had been accompanied by unprecedented middle-class demonstrations directed by Radical political activists and the reanimated spectre of revolution. What’s more, there would be two more Reform Bills later in the century which extended the franchise further than that of any other European country. Only ninety years later every adult male, regardless of what he owned, would have the vote.

It was the beginning of a seismic shift in political consciousness. The population was no longer divided into gentry, lawyers, merchants, a few educators and farmers, as it had been for hundreds of years. There were many thousands of professionals participating in the new occupations thrust up by the ever increasing permutations of the industrial revolution. They were boiler makers, machine-tool makers and, as the steam age took hold, engineers of every description, from mining to civil. They might not have had what was considered to be a gentleman’s education based on the classics, but they were full of self-confidence, and highly opinionated. There were too many without a vote in the giant new conurbations of Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds to find it amusing that the rotten borough of Old Sarum had seven electors who between them returned two members of Parliament–though the ‘town’ consisted of no more than a ruined castle on a hill.

The principal towns were beginning to build populations of hundreds and thousands of people. The great leaps forward in the iron and steel industry made throughout the eighteenth century by generations of inventive ironmasters like the Darby family, who discovered that pit coal could smelt iron more effectively than charcoal, moved the iron trade permanently from the Weald of Sussex to the north. Towns like Derby, Birmingham, Sheffield and Glasgow which had a history of metalworking–small manufactured iron and steel items of all descriptions, from hooks and eyes to weapons–grew exponentially, boosted by the demands made by the war.

The political will for reform became inexorable. The Tories under Wellington returned to power in the new Parliament in August 1830 to mark the accession of George III’s third son, the sixty-five-year-old Duke of Clarence, as William IV. George IV’s only child, the virtuous Princess Charlotte, of whom much had been expected as she little resembled her raffish parents, had died at seventeen. But this Parliament was full of men who had been elected on the reform ticket. All over Europe the post-war attempts at reaction and repression had come to an end. A spirit of violent, visionary nationalism swept her populations, expressed in plays, operas and poetry. Revolutions broke out in France, Belgium, the southern provinces of the Netherlands, Poland, Italy and parts of northern Germany.

Even though the Polish and Italian revolts were suppressed by their Russian and Austrian masters, in France and Belgium the middle-class liberals triumphed. Charles X, the reactionary Bourbon French king, brother to both the ill-fated Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, who had tried to restrict the power of the emerging middle classes and the press, was overthrown. In his place was installed a cousin, the son of Philippe Egalité, as a king on constitutional lines restricted by Parliament. He became King Louis-Philippe, known as the citizen-king. Belgium successfully separated herself from Holland and became an independent kingdom.

The success of liberalism abroad made pro-reformers feel all the more strongly that they should not give up in Britain. Queen Caroline’s legal champion, the Radical Henry Brougham, showed the way opinion was flowing when he managed to get elected to one of the Yorkshire seats. For an outsider to be elected to a celebratedly xenophobic county was a sign of the desperation among its inhabitants that there should be a voice in Parliament for the huge industrial conurbations like Leeds, Sheffield and Huddersfield. It had become simply intolerable that not one of their inhabitants, however wealthy and important, had a vote between them.

Yet in the new Parliament’s first session the Iron Duke made it clear that as long as he was in power the people could wait for ever before they could participate in Parliament. When the veteran Whig reformer Lord Grey said he favoured change, Wellington responded that the Parliamentary system was so perfect that he could not imagine how a better one could be devised. It was the final straw for what was left of the liberal Tories. Abandoning party loyalty they voted with the Whigs to turn Wellington out of office, and Earl Grey formed the first Whig government in over twenty years.

Grey was not a frightening figure for people fearful that Britain was about to have her own revolution. He was a member of the House of Lords with large landed estates. But he had fought for parliamentary reform all his political life and it was appropriate that he should be the prime minister to take the country into a different epoch. He had waited many decades for this moment and under him a memorably reforming ministry came to power. It consisted of Whigs, a sprinkling of Radical or extremist Whig MPs like Henry Brougham, who became lord chancellor, and liberal Tories. Among the Canningite Tories who joined the ministry were Palmerston and Lord Melbourne.

Grey himself had been born in 1764, but most of his colleagues were young men determined to modernize the voting system–England was the Mother of Parliaments (in John Bright’s phrase of a generation later) and it was important to stop the model for all forward-looking countries becoming a laughing stock to its own citizens. On 31 March 1831 Lord John Russell, the young Whig who had successfully taken the Test and Corporation Acts off the statute book and opened state offices up to non-Anglicans, moved a first reading of a Reform Bill in the House of Commons. The reforms were sweeping: 168 members of Parliament were to lose their seats, sixty boroughs were to be removed. All boroughs with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants were to be disenfranchised and the thirty boroughs with fewer than 4,000 inhabitants were to lose a member. All the seats liberated by these measures were to be given to the unrepresented cities like Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield, to new London boroughs and to the large under-represented counties like Yorkshire.

To the existing electoral roll of 400,000 voters Russell had added around a quarter of a million adult males, not all of whom owned their own homes. It was a daring stroke. For previously only property-holders had been deemed responsible enough to vote–though a large property qualification remained necessary to stand for Parliament. By extending the franchise in towns to households which paid an annual rent of £10 Russell gave the vote to the middle classes, to shopkeepers, small businessmen, engineers, teachers. It was the end of Parliament as the exclusive fiefdom of the landed interest.

In the counties where the franchise had always been more democratic–freeholders whose property was worth only forty shillings a year had been allowed to vote–some of the more well-to-do tenant farmers were brought into the franchise, though there were still no poor working-class voters: thus £10 a year copyholders and leaseholders for twenty-one years or more to the value of £50 got the vote. From now on there was to be an electoral register, which would be proof enough of a man’s right to vote, and the actual voting, or poll, instead of stretching over weeks (which gave much leeway for abuse), was to take place in towns over the course of one day, and in the country over two, because distances were greater.

The Reform Bill passed its second reading in the Commons by just one vote. The looks on the faces of the amazed Tories were compared by an onlooker to those of the damned. But the Tories were not beaten yet. They managed to defeat the bill in committee–the stage in the passing of an act by Parliament when it is scrutinized in detail. The government resigned and called a general election.

In effect a referendum, the Reform Bill election took place amid scenes of tremendous excitement. A great many reformers were returned to Parliament. In Birmingham, under the direction of the Radical campaigner Thomas Attwood, soon to be MP for the city, a huge number of citizens joined the organization called the Political Union, which Attwood had created to persuade existing voters to support pro-reform candidates in the election. Backed by the rallying cry ‘The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill’, the Reform Bill now passed without too much difficulty through the House of Commons. But in October 1831 the House of Lords, true to its nature as a conservative landowning body, threw it out. Rioting broke out all over the country. Peers and bishops were attacked in the streets; in Bristol the bishop’s palace was fired. Nottingham Castle was razed to the ground because it belonged to the Duke of Newcastle. In many towns and cities the army had to be called out to restore order.

But much more alarming than the mob excesses was the rebellion of the middle classes. All across Britain, in town after town, her most respectable citizens–lawyers, teachers, doctors, the backbone of the country–rushed to join the Radicals’ newly formed Political Unions, copied from Birmingham, to signal their outrage at the vote being withheld from them. Their self-proclaimed object was ‘to defend the king and his ministers against borough mongers’. In Birmingham, where the church bells were specially muffled and tolled day and night to show the city’s fury, the 150,000 members of the Political Union announced that they were ready to march on London. As had happened under James II in the face of his attempt to turn the country Catholic, the British started to refuse to operate the great voluntary system of local government service on which the country’s wellbeing and orderliness depended. They would not act as JPs or as sheriffs. Courts could not sit. The public-service ethos which is an inestimable part of the fabric of Britain was effectively being suspended. It began to be disturbingly clear that the country was in real danger of falling apart if something was not done to appease the reformers.

Against this background the Whigs created a third version of the Reform Bill in December 1831. It got through the Commons and then through the Lords, because many peers, alarmed by what was happening in the country at large, were starting to see that the Reform Bill was unstoppable. But it was stymied at committee stage at the end of April 1832 when a number of peers tried to prevent some of the provisions being debated. Worse still the affable king refused to rescue Lord Grey, declining his request to create fifty new Whig peers to override the Tory majority in the Lords.

As the third of the many sons of George III, William IV had grown up believing himself to be of little consequence, as indeed he had been until his elder brother the Duke of York, the heir presumptive, died in 1827. As Duke of Clarence he had enjoyed a very cosy family life in Richmond, where he lived until 1811 with a jolly actress widow named Mrs Jordan, by whom he had ten children all without benefit of marriage. In 1818 he was persuaded to marry a more suitable royal personage, Princess Adelaide Saxe-Meiningen. She produced two daughters, but unfortunately they did not have the health of his illegitimate family, and died young. Having been educated at sea for the most part, very far from the grandeur of court ceremonial, William IV seemed completely unpretentious, with the decidedly unregal rolling gait of a sailor. After he became king he continued his amiable habit of giving lifts to friends in the street and, despite his new royal status he always moved up to give them room. Known as Silly Billy, supposedly behind his back, he is said to have muttered at his coronation, ‘Who’s the Silly Billy now?’

While the Reform Bill had been going through Parliament, the bluff, pop-eyed king had become extremely agitated and soon lost all his earlier democratic feeling. Grey had no option but to resign. Wellington was once more sent for and invited by the king to be prime minister, for William believed that the duke would manage to get through a modified and acceptable version of the bill.

The feeling in the country by now was at fever pitch. The Duke of Wellington, who fifteen years before had been venerated as the saviour of the nation, was the most unpopular figure in the country. His old home Apsley House at Hyde Park Gate still bears the iron shutters it was thought necessary to fit to his windows against the mob. When it was known that Wellington was trying to form an administration, in what are known as the Days of May giant placards appeared all over London with the slogan ‘Go for gold and stop the Duke!’ Obediently, in Manchester and Birmingham people started to take their money out of their accounts to destabilize the currency. The Political Unions advocated withholding taxes from the government. There is no doubt that had the duke been able to form a government there would have been civil war. The whole system was in a state of collapse; the middle-class Political Unions were drilling in companies, bringing in men with military training to organize them.