The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (72 page)

Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
was the first of a series of socially concerned novels which drastically changed the sensibility of the reading public. Instead of thrilling to the popular so-called ‘silver spoon’ romances of high life, as they had been wont to do, readers were brought face to face with the meaning of rank poverty. The miseries of the age were publicized through the circulating libraries. By the late 1840s novelists like Mrs Gaskell and Charles Kingsley with
Mary Barton
and
Alton Lock
had begun to rouse the British public to the same kind of anger about the lives of the poor and children in factories that they had felt about slavery. An informed public became a concerned public in nineteenth-century England. It was a uniquely high-minded period, where the national discourse was led by politicians, reformers and writers whose unquenchable desire to change the world for the better had a contagious effect. Lord Shaftesbury’s indignant revelations were the beginning of what became an ineluctable belief that it was morally wrong to wear out children in factories; by the end of the century compulsory elementary education at last brought child labour to a close.

But, despite a new awareness of the human cost of their prosperity, the British also revelled in their dramatic success abroad under the confident touch of the Melbourne government’s swaggering foreign secretary. This was Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, the racehorse-owning epitome of John Bull, who was in fact an Irish peer and thus allowed to sit in the House of Commons. The pugnacious Palmerston held up a flattering self-image to the British. The eloquent champion of liberalism and constitutionalism, he supported the lawful queens of Portugal and Spain and sent packing the reactionary pretenders to their thrones, Don Miguel and Don Carlos. He safeguarded Belgium from the Dutch king’s attacks and guaranteed her neutrality. Thanks to the fiery ‘Pam’, constitutional rule remained firmly established not only in the Iberian Peninsula but in all western Europe, in the teeth of opposition from the absolutist monarchies of Russia, Prussia and Austria.

At the same time Palmerston had no scruples about toppling sovereigns if they didn’t suit British interests, or using force to support British trade. The term ‘gunship diplomacy’ was invented for him. In 1838 fears about the danger to the north-west frontier of the Indian Empire presented by Russian intrigues in Afghanistan set off the First Afghan War. The British sent an expedition to replace the apparently pro-Russian Amir of Afghanistan Dost Mahomed with a British puppet. It was followed by the First China War a year later, when the Chinese destroyed contraband British opium belonging to British traders and closed their ports to the lethal but lucrative crop being pushed by Indian and British merchants.

It was a war easily won by Britain and the powerful Royal Navy. By the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, five Chinese ports were to be opened to British goods with tariffs which did not spoil British trade, while British traders were not to be subject to Chinese laws. In addition Britain became the owner of the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity, and of neighbouring Kowloon twenty years later. By 1898 the Crown Colony of Hong Kong also included the adjoining New Territories, acquired on a ninety-nine-year lease to Britain, expiring in June 1997. In the twentieth century Hong Kong would become the source of vast trading wealth. Although high-minded MPs like W. E. Gladstone objected to forcing the Chinese to import opium against their will, Palmerston ignored him, arguing that it was the local Chinese gangs controlling the local opium traffic that did not want the drug in China, not the Chinese people.

In 1839 Palmerston responded to the French-inspired revolt of the Pasha of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, against the Ottoman Empire and Egypt’s invasion of Syria by the swift despatch of the Royal Navy to Acre. With the added threat of the allied armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia the following year, the pasha was stopped dead in his tracks. Since the cornerstone of nineteenth-century British foreign policy was to maintain the Ottoman Empire in its entirety as a bulwark against Russia, Mehemet Ali’s rebellion could not be countenanced. Nor could France’s attempts to extend her influence in the Middle East. Both were quelled when Mehemet Ali submitted to the Turkish sultan in return for his rule in Egypt being made hereditary. And in a deft move at the peace conference which followed in London in 1841, Palmerston got the Bosphorus closed to all warships, including Russia’s. For ever since 1833, in return for aiding the Turks during an earlier revolt of Mehemet Ali, a worrying closeness had developed between the sultan and the tsar, and Russian ships had been freely issuing out of the Black Sea.

Palmerston’s bluff and rather brutal character appealed to the British. He was admired for the way his common sense prevented him getting too carried away by lost causes. It was his view that Britain had no eternal enemies or allies, only eternal interests which it was her duty to follow. Palmerston was debonair, xenophobic and famous for his love affairs, even being cited in a divorce case in his late seventies. He detested pomposity. There was one person, however, who did not share the widespread adulation of Pam, or Lord Cupid as he was also known. That was the new monarch, Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the throne in 1837. Strong-minded, modest and soon to be happily married, over the next thirty years she would be increasingly offended by his high-handed ways and his Regency-rake lovelife.

Corn Laws and Irish Famine (1837–1854)

Victoria was the eighteen-year-old niece of William IV. On the king’s death in June the throne passed to her as the only child of his next brother, the Duke of Kent, who had died when Victoria was eight months old. In contrast to the dissolute court life of her uncles, Victoria had been brought up extremely quietly at Kensington Palace by her widowed mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Thanks to her German mother’s serious nature the new queen had a strong sense of duty. She was to transform the monarchy into an object of great pride and affection after it had fallen into disrepute. Her reign, which ended sixty-four years later at the beginning of the next century, would be one of the most glorious, and the longest, in Britain’s history. At her accession Hanover became separated from the English crown because the so-called Salic Law operated to bar women from the throne. Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, became King of Hanover instead.

Until she married in 1840, Victoria was innocently infatuated with her first prime minister, the suave Lord Melbourne, on whom she entirely depended for comfort and information in her new position. She was a naïve young girl, as was emphasized by the long hair falling over her dressing gown when she greeted the Archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chamberlain on their arrival at Kensington Palace at five in the morning, straight from William IV’s deathbed. But, although she still slept in her mother’s room, Queen Victoria’s Journal reveals a determined character with a profound sense of what was owed the country: ‘I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things inexperienced, but I am sure, that very few have more real goodwill and more real desire to do what is fit and right than I have.’ The coronation took place in June 1838.

But, though Lord Melbourne had the favour of the queen, by the end of the 1830s he was running out of support in the country. Palmerston’s skilful footwork all over the globe had helped British interests to flourish as never before, but he was a very expensive foreign secretary. Britain was going into a slump which was hitting the working classes especially hard now that support from the rates had been withdrawn. By the early 1840s, the Hungry Forties as they were known, unemployment in northern textile towns was so bad that the poor in cities like Leeds were living on money raised by local citizens. The workhouses couldn’t contain them. In one town, 17,000 people were reported as starving to death. The lacklustre Whig government’s only solution to reining in the deficit occasioned by Palmerston’s adventures was to pile on indirect taxation. That took the price of living through the roof. Melbourne had quite the wrong temperament to be prime minister at this critical moment. Under his leadership the Whigs’ reforming zeal was slowing to a halt.

The Radicals, whose organizations had done so much to get the Reform Bill passed, were extremely dissatisfied. It had become clear that most of the Whigs saw the bill as the end of franchise reform rather than a starting point. They had little time for working-class organizations and were fearful of the potential power of the trade unions. In particular they were alarmed by Robert Owen’s plan for a Grand National Consolidated Trades Union to represent all the trades and craft unions in one body to make them a more formidable force. In 1834 six agricultural labourers from Dorset were sentenced to transportation to Australia, the so-called Tolpuddle Martyrs, for the ‘crime’ of being seen taking secret oaths. Because their Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers was affiliated to Owen’s, their harmless actions were assumed to have revolutionary significance. Despite the furore in the country provoked by the sentence, Melbourne who was then home secretary refused to commute it, though after two years’ lobbying the Martyrs were at last released.

Because there was no will for reform within Parliament, Radical MPs became involved in an out-of-doors lobbying movement. In 1838 a former Irish MP called Feargus O’Connor and a mechanic named William Lovett founded the London Workingmen’s Association to obtain what the Reform Bill had failed to achieve. Lovett drew up a petition consisting of six demands for constitutional reform which was presented to Parliament by Thomas Attwood, the Radical MP and founder of the Birmingham Political Union. It was known as the People’s Charter and its supporters were called the Chartists. The Charter insisted that there should be no property qualification for the suffrage: every man over twenty-one years of age, regardless of his wealth, should have the vote. MPs should be paid for their services, otherwise only those with independent fortunes could afford to stand for election. The vote should be secret, to make it harder to threaten voters. Constituencies should be of equal worth. Lastly the Charter demanded annual Parliaments. These would give MPs less independence and oblige them to listen to their electors.

Within seventy years other than annual parliaments all the Charter’s points would have been complied with. But in the 1830s and 1840s the Chartists encountered great opposition, not least because a section of their membership advocated violent revolution. In 1839 the branch known as the Physical Force Party planned a general insurrection, to be initiated by the seizure of the town hall at Newport in South Wales–only for the mayor and his supporters to defend it with such vigour that they prevented the Chartists from storming it. The rising never took place, and its leaders were transported to Australia. Though the majority of Chartists were in favour of using peaceful constitutional means to achieve their goals, they were tainted by the Newport affair. Acute distress inevitably meant that among Chartist members were machine-breakers and mill-burners, so a reputation as dangerous revolutionaries always hung over them. For ten years from 1838 the Chartists held huge, alarming rallies to try and persuade Parliament to agree to their aims, but without success.

Monster demonstrations and marches were not just employed by the Chartists, however. The most powerful and best-organized pressure group of the period was the Anti-Corn Law League, another out-of-doors movement, founded in 1838, which began to march on a daily basis in a campaign for the repeal of the laws against importing cheap corn. The poor suffered terribly through the late 1830s. Unemployment enabled employers to keep wages low, and the continued Tory majority in the House of Lords and the power of the landed interest kept the price of bread out of the reach of the impoverished. Until the corn laws were finally repealed in 1846 to feed an Ireland facing starvation after the failure of the potato crop, the League’s agitation to get rid of this last bastion of landed privilege was as violent as that of the Chartists. But it was much more effective, because among its supporters were the wealthy, respectable manufacturers of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The Anti-Corn Law League was headed by two superb orators–Richard Cobden, a calico printer, and John Bright, a Quaker manufacturer, both of whom became Radical MPs in the 1840s. Bright made formidable political capital out of Biblical references and the Lord’s Prayer. It was a sin, Bright said in a hundred speeches, a hundred newspaper articles, to stop the poor being able to eat their daily bread–a resonant phrase which was hard to counter. He cast the mantle of a religious crusade over the Anti-Corn Law League’s campaign for cheap bread. By public meetings and by making great use of the penny postage–the new campaigning technique–the League eventually created the same sort of groundswell which had brought about the Great Reform Bill, and it soon developed into support for free trade. If cheap foreign corn were imported, the country it came from would allow Britain to export there, thus establishing a new market for her finished goods. Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to curb the soaring National Debt, the Whigs sought to raise money by adding more and more import taxes to foodstuffs, a policy which neither raised money nor allowed the poor to eat.

A sign of the dissatisfaction with life at home can be detected in the expanding number of colonies settled by the British in this period. The year 1836 saw South Australia colonized and its capital Adelaide named after the wife of William IV, and three years later New Zealand was settled by Gibbon Wakefield. In South Africa the British were a growing presence. The original European settlers of Cape Colony, the Boers were antagonized by the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, because they depended on slavery for their farming, and the following year most of them began the Great Trek northwards out of Cape Colony to create the Republic of Natal on the north-east coast of South Africa. But the vigorous British settlers pursued them and took over Natal in 1843. In 1854 the Boers moved further north to create two more Boer republics, the Orange River Free State and the Transvaal, and there they were left in peace.

After the American rebellion, the British ruling authorities had no great expectations that colonies would remain tightly bound to the motherland. After a rebellion in 1837 by the French in Lower Canada against the English in the Upper Province, Canada was allowed self-government three years later, with an executive ministry directly accountable to the Canadian Parliament. This would form the basis for self-government in most of the colonies. In 1850 representative government would be given to South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania–just before the discovery of gold in Victoria caused a rapid increase in the Australian population.

In contrast to these advances, the home country herself was beginning to look ungovernable. The one hope for some kind of reconciliation between all the warring factions and for bringing the reform movement back to Parliament was provided by the impressive Sir Robert Peel, with whom most of the Radicals were now voting. In 1839 Melbourne’s majority fell to five and he resigned, leaving it to Peel to form a government. But the young queen caused a constitutional crisis when she refused to dismiss her Whig ladies-in-waiting. Under previous administrations the members of the royal household had tended to belong to the governing party, and they would resign when their party lost power. But to a queen who was scarcely more than a girl her ladies (who were part of the Melbourne set) were not just political symbols–they had become her intimate confidantes. Though Melbourne had quite properly advised her that she must have Conservative ladies-in-waiting, as Peel had requested, the young queen dug in her heels. She found Peel cold, awkward and stiff, a depressing contrast to the dashing gaiety of Lord Melbourne. The affair became known as the Bedchamber Crisis. Absurdly, as neither side would give way, and Peel insisted on Tory ladies-in-waiting, Melbourne and the Whigs resumed office again–as it was said, ‘behind the petticoats of the Ladies of the Bedchamber’.

But it was not for much longer. A combination of fears about the Whigs’ budget, which in a last-ditch attempt to curb the deficit had taken a step in the direction of free trade, and Peel’s support in the country enabled the Tory leader in 1841 to force an election and win a massive victory. Victoria had meanwhile married her first cousin Prince Albert, the younger son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whose calm, pious, loving nature and guidance greatly benefited his wife. One consequence was that the need for Lord Melbourne and the Whig ladies was removed. Prince Albert had studied British history and was anxious to be worthy of the position he found himself in. He had ambitions to do something for the arts, of which he was a considerable dilettante, and he got on well with Peel, for he shared his moral earnestness and exalted sense of public duty.

Peel himself and his fellow MPs, like the gifted W. E. Gladstone, the son of a Liverpool merchant, who became president of the Board of Trade, had been moving in the direction of free trade themselves, and Peel’s government decided to try a cunning experiment. Peel’s daring stroke was to bring back the abhorred income tax, invented to bear the burden of the Napoleonic Wars. Now its purpose was to lessen the burden of indirect taxation on the poor. By restoring income tax, though only as a three-year experiment, Peel and Gladstone believed that the tariff could be lowered on many ordinary items, including corn. Instead the money the deficit required would be raised from the comfortably off, who would scarcely feel it. Peel reduced or removed duties on over 600 consumer goods and raw materials, budgeting for a loss of £2 million which would be made up by the reintroduction of income tax. With income tax rated at sevenpence in the pound, and by exempting those whose annual incomes were less than £150–which meant the majority of people, since a curate earned only £100–the government would be left with a surplus of £500,000 to help reduce the deficit. Though the situation continued to be grave, gradually over the next few years prices began to come down to a more acceptable level.

To all aspects of government Peel’s businesslike mind brought sensible management. With his Bank Charter Act the money supply was stabilized. The entitlement of the many small private banks to issue notes above the actual reserves they held had led in the past few decades to a harmful series of failures. Such issuing was now forbidden. The late 1830s and 1840s was the time when the British railway experiment took off and to some extent alleviated unemployment in the textile industries. Lines crisscrossed the length and breadth of the country, much of it financed by share issues to speculation-crazy private citizens. The restriction of credit by the Bank Charter Act damped down the economy just when it was threatening to overheat.

Lord Aberdeen was Peel’s foreign minister. He made a dramatic contrast to Palmerston, aiming at peace abroad as part of the administration’s attempts to keep its costs down. War was expensive and did not allow tax cuts. The Afghan War had cost £15 million as well as thousands of British lives when the government was being suffocated by a £7 million deficit. It had also been quite pointless. In 1841, ignoring the British puppet, the tribesmen of Afghanistan rose up, massacred many of the British and put the amir Dost Mahomed back on his throne. Worse still, though a safe-conduct was given to the British troops to allow them to evacuate the country and return to India, they were ambushed as they tramped back through the mountains. Out of 15,000 troops only one man, a Dr Brydon, made it back alive over the Khyber Pass, the gateway to British India. The new governor-general of India Lord Ellenborough furiously ordered the Afghan capital Kabul to be sacked as punishment.