The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (74 page)

But in Britain herself the mid-century was faced with confidence and self-belief. After the repeal of the corn laws the Tory Protectionists were led by the Earl of Derby, after Lord George Bentinck’s death in 1848, and by Disraeli. With Peel’s death out riding in 1850, leadership of the forty Free Traders known as Peelites was taken over by Lord Aberdeen, the former foreign secretary. Despite their small numbers the Peelites had a great deal of weight in the House of Commons as they contained some of the ablest men in Parliament, such as Gladstone and Sidney Herbert. They frequently voted with the Whigs and Radicals, and would gradually over the next twenty years merge to form the Liberal party.

By 1852 free trade had so much been proved to be the most profitable way for Britain to function that it became national policy for all the parties; protectionism was quietly abandoned by Derby and Disraeli. The repeal of the corn laws had not destroyed British farming. Labourers had not been thrown out of work nor cornfields abandoned, as had been feared. It was only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that surplus wheat from the North American prairies ruined prices in Britain. The price of corn had not dropped as dramatically in 1846 as the Anti-Corn Law League had expected, but that was because the cost of all commodities rose over the next ten years, and repeal acted to offset that rise in the case of corn.

Britain in the period 1846 to 1852 was peaceful compared to the previous decade. It was felt that a great social injustice had been removed in the tax on bread. Times were more prosperous, and there were fewer people out of work. Thanks to Shaftesbury’s continued work, factory legislation regulated most places of manufacture–the bleaching and dyeing industries, the lace factories the match factories, the Potteries–the result of a slew of commissions to investigate the physical conditions in which children were employed. In the Potteries six-year-old children were found to be working fifteen hours a day. Inspectors made dreadful discoveries in match factories: there women developed a disease called ‘phossy jaw’ caused by phosphorus, which rotted away their faces.

In 1848 under the Public Health Act backed by Lord Shaftesbury, Sir Edwin Chadwick set up the Board of Health, which had powers to overrule local authorities. Towns thrust up by the industrial revolution were forced to put in proper buried sewerage systems, replacing the shallow troughs which had run down streets since the middle ages. Life expectancy in such towns, which had been up to 50 per cent less than in the countryside, rose dramatically as a result. Shaftesbury also helped abolish the practice of putting small boys up chimneys to sweep them, though it was not until 1875 that the system finally ceased when a sweep’s licence became conditional on his not having broken any of the laws on employing children. Public opinion was marshalled against such practices by Charles Kingsley’s novel
The Water Babies
, published in 1863. As Lunacy Commissioner, Shaftesbury exposed the treatment of the insane in institutions. Until his intervention many of the mentally ill spent their already unhappy lives chained to their beds in darkness.

Even 1848, the year of revolutions on the continent, passed in Britain without much notice. Although the presentation of what turned out to be the Chartists’ last petition was treated as if Napoleon was about to invade, with the eighty-year-old Duke of Wellington in charge of London’s defences and with cannon on every bridge, the expected mass demonstration never materialized. The petition was brought quietly to Downing Street in a cab. Although it was mocked when some of its signatures were found to be false (the Duke of Wellington, Mr Punch and Queen Victoria were all inscribed several times), it was an impressive demonstration of working-class British people’s faith in Parliament, even though they were excluded from it.

It was an era when the popular writer Samuel Smiles’s doctrine of ‘self-help’ became a watchword. The Friendly Societies started up just before mid-century, inviting workers to make a weekly payment as an insurance against illness or unemployment, and providing an income if those eventualities occurred. Some of the trade unions provided similar benefits to their members. The Co-op, still to be seen on certain high streets today, also sprang into being. It began with individuals getting together in a cooperative venture to buy foodstuffs in bulk–that is, at wholesale prices. As the years went by, Co-ops set up normal shops where food was sold at ordinary prices; the profit at the end of the year was divided between all the members of the co-operative.

At mid-century Britain was reaching the peak of her prosperity as leader of the industrial revolution. Her extraordinary success in international markets, particularly those of South America and India, encouraged Russell boldly to repeal what was left of the Navigation Acts. No country could stand comparison with Britain in cheap manufactured goods. The British carrying trade with the rest of the world was no longer to be restricted to designated countries–any country’s ship could carry British goods, and could man it with sailors of any nationality. This increased the volume of shipping available to British merchants and manufacturers. By 1850 a quarter of the world’s trade was going through British ports.

It was a measure of Britain’s overweening self-confidence that Palmerston, Russell’s foreign secretary, threatened to bombard Athens in 1847 when the Greek government refused to compensate a Gibraltarian merchant named Don Pacifico, whose house had been destroyed by riots. This sort of behaviour disgusted the Peelites and their allies the Radicals. To Palmerston and his followers, however, the British Empire had become like the Roman Empire of old; as Palmerston himself put it in one of his most grandiloquent speeches, ‘The Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say,
Civis Romanus sum
; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England shall protect him against injustice and wrong.’

In 1851, to symbolize what was hoped would be an era of peace and progress, Prince Albert organized the Great Exhibition to put on show the best goods the world could manufacture. Expected to be the first of many such international gatherings, it took place in Hyde Park in a specially built glass and iron structure designed by Joseph Paxton and nicknamed the Crystal Palace. Visitors came via cheap excursion tickets on the new railways. The Great Exhibition was visual proof that the British led the world in the superiority, the variety and the cheapness of their manufactures, 90 per cent of which were now exported. Out of it came the Victoria and Albert Museum, to provide a place of permanent exhibition for the arts and manufactures. Visitors to the Crystal Palace, like the novelist Charlotte Brontë, who remained enthralled by the Duke of Wellington, were able to spot him still strolling briskly about. His death in September 1852 marked the end of a triumphant era for the British that had begun with Waterloo.

Prosperity bred a new confidence everywhere, which in the female sex appeared as rebellion. Women, the silent majority who for centuries had been considered mentally and physically the weaker sex, suddenly became more visible. They wrote defiantly of subjects which hitherto they had been considered too ladylike to address. They refused to accept the limited role of virtuous wife and mother which British nineteenth-century society was keen to promote. The Woman Question, what was appropriate for women, became the subject of furious debate. By 1851 there were the first shoots of feminist organizations such as the Sheffield Women’s Political Association, which was set up to demand the vote.

The first novels of the Brontë sisters appeared in an extraordinary year, 1847–8. The Brontës outraged convention with their passion, their honesty and their realism, and so did writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mrs Gaskell and Harriet Martineau. Queen’s College school was set up in Harley Street in 1848, where it remains today, to equip women for the professional life many were demanding. There began to be a rash of schools for women, such as North London Collegiate (1853) and Cheltenham Ladies’ College (1858), founded by the redoubtable Frances Buss and Dorothea Beale. From there in theory it was a short step to demanding university degrees and the vote, though neither were granted until the second decade of the next century.

Britain congratulated herself on feeling scarcely a tremor during the revolutions of 1848, a consequence of her foresight in accepting social and Parliamentary reform before it was forced on her. Her stability and tolerance turned her into a magnet for political refugees, as she is today. In London salons at any one time might be encountered the exiled French citizen king Louis-Philippe, the architect of conservative reaction Metternich, as well as innumerable Italian revolutionary patriots in exile. In fact, so confident was Britain, so liberal in her thought, so unthreatened by inimical views, that within her ample bosom she even found room to shelter the sworn enemy of her capitalist way of life, Karl Marx.

Expelled from Paris and Brussels for his
Communist Manifesto
of 1848 (the first draft was written by Friedrich Engels), for forty years Marx laboured freely in the British Museum, employing statistics supplied by Engels, to provide a recipe for progress. They attacked capitalism, religion and culture and looked forward to what they believed would be the last stage of an inevitable historical process: after a dictatorship of the proletariat there would be a withering away of the state, and an idyll where all property would be owned communally. Their beliefs, which are also known as scientific socialism, would have a profound and often invigorating effect on politics for the next 150 years.

But in 1853 Marx and Engels were relatively unknown figures. The Radicals were still dedicated to the franchise reform. The chancellor of the Exchequer W. E. Gladstone’s intellectual obsessions were focused on producing both the conditions for free trade, which Richard Cobden continued to promote as the answer to the world’s ills, and the low taxation which he himself believed necessary for creating a self-reliant working man. In 1853 with his first budget Gladstone reduced duty on imports to the lowest levels ever seen, and announced that he intended steadily to reduce income tax until its complete abolition in 1860. Once the new scale of duties took effect and stimulated consumption, income tax would no longer be necessary. Gladstone’s budget expressed his confidence in Britain’s power as top trading nation and her ability to keep peace in the world. He also cut back on the army, for he felt no war threatened. As a fervent Christian he believed that most wars were morally wrong anyway, and that a Christian with money in his pocket would do more good than the government.

In India Britain directly governed an enormous part of the territories of the subcontinent. The empire stretched from Sind in the west to the southern tip of Burma in the Far East, where the ill-treatment of British merchants in Rangoon resulted in the annexation of Pegu in 1852; the Second Sikh War of 1848–9 led to Britain’s outright annexation of the Punjab. Yet the next two decades would reveal Britain’s rule in the east to be fragile, expose the state of her army as deplorable, and demonstrate that she was no longer the arbiter of international events. For on the continent France and the emerging countries of Italy and Germany were determined to destroy the 1815 Vienna peace settlement and remodel the map of Europe to their own liking, with incalculable results.

Palmerstonian Aggression (1854–1868)

The next twenty years of English life took place against an unprecedented amount of war and frontier alteration on the continent of Europe as the will to unify Italy and Germany became unstoppable. By 1871 these two countries were no longer mere ‘geographical expressions’ but nations united by political institutions, headed by a single ruler. The unification of Italy under the constitutional King of Sardinia-Piedmont had been passionately desired by the three leading liberal British statesmen of the period, Palmerston, Lord John Russell and Gladstone. Nevertheless the last pieces of the jigsaw of the Italian peninsula were fitted into place only with the aid of the militaristic Prussian state. Her own pursuit of German unification meant attacking her neighbours: first Denmark, then her fellow German Austria, finally France.

Prussia’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck had told his fellow countrymen that ‘the great questions of our time will not be decided by speeches and majority decisions’ but ‘by blood and iron’. And by 1871 the world order was utterly changed, signified by the Prussian king being crowned German emperor at the Palace of Versailles. Built by Louis XIV, it had symbolized the power of French civilization. Now the German presence there emphasized the humbling of French pride and the destruction of France’s Second Empire. Prussia’s superior army and lack of scruple about the use of force made her the dominant power on the continent. And a united Germany, under the aegis of the war-hungry Prussian state, became the unexpected big player on the world scene. Britain, one of the most active guarantors of the post-Waterloo settlement, had been confined to the sidelines, unable to influence most of these events or to rescue the balance of power.

From 1871 until the First World War broke out in 1914, the aggressive nature of the Prussian state alarmed contemporaries, but without a continental army there was little Britain could have done on her own to resist Prussia’s rise to power, with so many other European states bent on change. Her distrust of a new Napoleon across the Channel made the help of a French army out of the question. For in the 1850s and 1860s, though Russian expansion in Asia continued to be the threat to India, the real menace as far as the British were concerned was Napoleon’s unpredictable nephew Prince Louis Napoleon.

Prince Louis Napoleon–who had been elected president in 1848 but wished to prolong his term of office–seized power in 1851 on a programme to alter the humiliating frontiers of 1815 to France’s advantage, and a year later proclaimed himself the Emperor Napoleon III (his first cousin the King of Rome should have been Napoleon II). A restless dreamer, an idealist and by the end of his reign a seriously ill man, the new Napoleon was a catalyst of change in Europe, seeking glory in war and ready to exploit any situation to enhance his popularity with his people and restore France to the world status from which he believed she had been demoted. Although Napoleon III would periodically be Britain’s ally–indeed he had spent a period of exile in London, when he had enrolled as a special constable–the news that there was a new Napoleon in power across the Channel created a volunteer movement as it had in the days of Pitt the Younger. Throughout his twenty-year reign there were war scares in England when 150,000 men would drill on the south coast–commemorated in Tennyson’s poem ‘Riflemen form!’