The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  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 Pol
itical 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.

  In the face of such civil disorder, just as with Catholic Emancipation Wellington had the sense to realize that he had to bow to the will of the people. He gave up trying to form a government and, in a tense interview with the king at Windsor, told him to recall Earl Grey and accept the bill. To preserve the monarchy from the indignity of being forced to create peers against the king’s will, and save the peerage from being devalued, Wellington cajoled so many of his friends not to vote that on 4 June 1832 the bill went through the House of Lords with a large majority.

  The first reformed Parliament sat in 1833. Strangely and symbolically a year later the old House of Commons burned down. On its site arose the magnificent pseudo-Gothic pile we see today, designed by Charles Barry. Its medieval air rightly reminds us of Parliament’s origins at the end of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, the reformed House of Commons had a new and modern spirit. Power had finally passed away from the few whose ancestors had entitled them to shields and quarterings. The new MPs were commercially minded, progressive and urban. Even so, the gentry and aristocracy still had an inbuilt majority in the House of Lords and remained the leaders of the county constituencies for many years to come.

  What was immediately expressed by the House of Commons was what had become the most fervent belief of the newly enfranchised, religious middle classes: the wickedness of slavery. The trade had been abolished in 1807, but slavery itself had not come to an end–indeed it continued to underpin the economy of the West Indies. One of the Grey government’s first actions was to outlaw slavery throughout the British Empire, and the planters were compensated financially with the colossal sum of £20 million between them. William Wilberforce, the father of the anti-slavery movement, died that very year on the point of seeing his great work come to fruition.

  The spirit of the new Whig administration was to seek improvement and change, and many of the MPs wanted it to mark the end of aristocratic laissez-faire and the beginning of interventionist government. A large number of commissions were set up by Lord Grey to investigate the state of the country–whether in schools, factories, the Church or local government–and identify areas where it could be improved. And on paper the Whig reforms were impressive. This Parliament was responsible for the beginnings of a national system of education. Funds for school buildings were granted to the two Church organizations, the Anglican National Society and the Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society, which were the chief providers of schooling for the poor. By 1839 there was an Education Department for the control of elementary education.

  Under pressure from the Radicals and the Ten-Hour Movement, committees of local citizens dedicated to limiting the hours worked in factories, a new Factory Act was passed in 1833 which extended the cotton-mill legislation of 1819 and applied its provisions to all other textile factories. Children under the age of nine were not to be employed in any of them; a distinction was made between children, aged nine to thirteen, who were allowed to work nine hours a day, and young persons, aged thirteen to eighteen, who were allowed to work twelve hours. Employees under the age of thirteen had to spend half their hours being educated, by tutors to be provided by the mill-owners. And by creating a paid governmental factory inspectorate, the Whigs ensured compliance with the health and safety regulations in buildings in relation to ventilation and moving machinery.

  One of the most urgent problems facing the Whig government was the agricultural depression, which had not let
up since 1815, and the acute rural poverty that manifested itself in incessant rioting. Hayricks were burnt; threshing machines were sneaked out of farm buildings at night and attacked with hammers. But although the Whigs believed in rationalization and modernization, they dealt as savagely with the disturbances as the Ultra Tories. Nine men and boys were hung for burning farmers’ ricks, while many continued to be sent overseas to the penal colony of Australia. Nevertheless under the energetic direction of reformers such as the strenuous and controversial Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose innovative inquiries into the health of the working man transformed public health, the Whigs launched a commission to investigate the widespread discontent.

  In the commission’s view the operation of poor relief was to blame. The Speenhamland system of supplementing agricultural wages from the rates which so many counties had adopted during the Napoleonic Wars had made the rates so burdensome that many farmers could not afford to keep their own land. An already distressing situation had begun to spiral out of control when farmers lowered wages as well as laying off labourers, and the local magistrates attempted to reduce the mountain of taxation by capping the poor relief. In 1834 the old Poor Law, which dated back to the reign of Elizabeth, was abolished. By the new Poor Law, assistance out of the rates (what would today be called unemployment benefit) could be doled out only to the ‘aged or infirm’. Any healthy man or woman who was sufficiently ‘able-bodied’ to work but needed assistance from the parish rates had to live in the workhouse, a large local institution set up to house the indigent. The new system also standardized the administration of the Poor Law, which had varied from parish to parish, and made it easier to look after vagrants and orphaned children. By removing the agricultural subsidy, in the long term the Poor Law forced farmers to put up wages.

  In December 1834, however, the king suddenly felt that he had had enough of all this busybodying. He was sick of the Whigs’ progressive ideas, mainly because they showed no respect for the Church of England. Melbourne, the new leader of the Whigs–for Grey had retired in protest against a new Coercion Bill to limit crime in Ireland–had just reduced the number of Irish Protestant bishops by ten. Parliament might have acquired a far greater middle-class component, but William IV used the royal prerogative to dismiss the Whigs for meddling with the Church. He made Sir Robert Peel prime minister in the hope of some respectable Tory policies.