In fact Peel was attempting to form a different Tory party, one with liberal leanings. He wanted to change it from a party of protectionist landowners to one that could represent manufacturers as well. If the Tories were to survive, Peel believed, they would have to reach out to where the new power lay, to middle-class opinion. It would take him the best part of ten years to rebuilt support in the country for the Tories, or Conservatives as he now called them. They were conservative because they wished to conserve the best ancient institutions, but they also looked to the future. At the next election, however, the Tories were still in a minority in the Commons, so the Whigs under Lord Melbourne returned.
As William Lamb, Lord Melbourne had been married to the notorious Lady Caroline Lamb of Byronic fame. Brought up among the racy Whig hostesses of the late eighteenth century, for his aunt was Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, he was in some ways an anachronism. He was concerned with the old abstract Whig ideas of liberty but not much with improving the conditions of working men, from whose predicaments he was in every way quite insulated. Nevertheless the detached and intellectual Melbourne was a modernizer, and a series of innovative acts improved the nation’s efficiency.
The Municipal Reform Act of 1835 removed control of the towns from secretive, self-perpetuating oligarchies and gave it to the middle classes, just as the Great Reform Act had done with Parliament. In the pursuit of religious freedom, the Whigs continued to cut back the Church of England’s hold over the country’s institutions. In England and Wales the thousand-year-old custom of the local vicar being entitled to the tithe or tenth of his neighbours’ earnings was abolished. From 1836 marriages could be solemnized in Nonconformist chapels. Though religious tests would not be abolished at the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge until 1871, in 1836 the University of London was founded in order to grant degrees without them. Now Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews could study in England instead of being forced to go to Scotland or the continent. Stamp duties on newspapers were reduced to a penny. The first compulsory civil registration of births, deaths and marriages took place in 1837, supplementing the parish registers invented in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell. In 1839, thanks to the efforts of Rowland Hill, the penny postage was adopted: any letter could be carried for a penny to every part of the British Isles.
But despite these modernizing laws, much anguish pulsated beneath the surface. The 1834 Poor Law was disastrous in the short run. Oliver Twist, which Dickens wrote three years after the new system began, exposed workhouses as places of institutionalized cruelty whose inmates were treated like prisoners though their only crime was poverty. Every little bit of individuality, every bright touch, whether it was just a bunch of daisies in a jar or a treasured knitted shawl, was banned. Meals were taken in silence; couples were split up from one another and from their children; and all slept in dormitories. Workhouses survived until the early twentieth century when the 1906–14 Liberal government introduced old age pensions, national insurance and unemployment benefit.
As for the factory legislation, it might have improved conditions, but the reformer and philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury revealed that Britain had no reason to feel proud of herself when there were five-and six-year-olds working down the mines. By allowing the evangelical Shaftesbury to lead an investigation into factories, the Whig government unleashed the whirlwind. Though he had been the driving force behind the 1833 Factory Act, he was not satisfied with it, and decided to broaden his remit into investigating coalmines. His reports into what he found there reduced some MPs to tears when extracts were read to the House of Commons in 1840.
Shaftesbury’s ‘blue books’, the reports to Parliament of the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment in Mines and Manufactures, sent a shudder through Britain. In unemotive, official language which made its subject matter all the more chilling, they detailed how six-year-olds spent twelve hours a day under the earth harnessed to trucks of coal, dragging them along tunnels knee-deep in water, while their mothers heaved coal on their heads up to the top of the mine. That was how Britain was obtaining the coal which made her ‘the workshop of the world’.
The result was the 1842 Mines Act, which ended the employment of women and girls and boys under ten in the pits, and the Second Factory Act of 1844, which reduced the hours women worked to twelve and children to six and a half hours a day–though children were now allowed to be employed from the age of eight. Still shocking to our eyes, it was a great step forward to contemporary opinion. Friendless and parentless apprentices, and young boys of ten or more whose parents needed their money, continued to be sent down the mines for thirty years to come. Their tiny, blackened, undersized figures for some reason did not evoke the same pity and fury among MPs that their sisters did. The ten-hour day Shaftesbury campaigned for so tirelessly remained out of reach for years, defeated by economists’ predictions about a fall in manufacturing, a loss of markets and wages, and by the power of the manufacturers. Though the ten-and-a-half-hour day came in in 1850, it was not until 1874 that the ten-hour day was at last made the legal maximum.
Sir Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1842 revealed the filthy urban slums so many Britons were living in, which had been thrown up cheaply everywhere round the textile mills and coalmines. Factory workers lived like animals, herded indecently ten to a room. The new streets were built so quickly, and there were so many of them, that the sewerage practice of the old midden heaps which had been acceptable in small numbers in a village or hamlet became positively hazardous in the new towns.
Textile workers suffered from lung diseases brought on by inhaling cotton fumes in ill-ventilated buildings. The fires and smoke belching out from the factory chimneys besides which they lived darkened the skies for miles around. Natural sunlight rarely penetrated, and life was carried on in a perpetual sulphurous glow to the sound of machines pounding night and day. Even at midday it felt like midnight. The striking change from the ‘green and pleasant land’ which the mystical poet William Blake had known as a boy had made him wonder two generations before whether a better, more Christian life could ever take hold again in the face of the new capitalism. Blake had been considered a dangerous radical in his time, but his views were becoming mainstream.
Now that people knew more about the hell-like misery so many workers endured in the ‘satanic mills’, the industrialization process which had been hailed with such excitement as the beginning of the modern age began to be questioned. In 1844 the son of a German cotton manufacturer Friedrich Engels, in a striking indictment of the industrial process, delineated the lives of the poor in Manchester in his book The Condition of the English Working Class. The suffering that Engels saw convinced him that only revolutionary change would stop the masses from being exploited by their masters. Robert Owen, the son-in-law of Arkwright’s partner, as long ago as 1799 had made his mills at New Lanark in Scotland co-operative, with the profits being shared among the workers. Though the experiment failed, Owen was so disillusioned by the toll that the industrial revolution was taking on people’s lives that he concluded trade unions were the only answer.
J. M. W. Turner would be one of the last important artists to celebrate the power and glamour of steam in his painting Rain, Steam and Speed in 1844. By 1848, obeying the precepts of the century’s most influential art critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters would self-consciously hark back to the world portrayed by fourteenth-century Italian painters as a revolt against their own time. A misty medievalism became the mode as artists and intellectuals retreated from machines and modernization. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century William Morris had created the utopian Arts and Crafts movement, which celebrated both the individual artistry of the traditional craftsman over the machine made and a revivified idea of the community.
Dickens’s Oliver Twist was the first of a series of socially concerned novels which drastically changed the sensibility of the reading publ
ic. 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.
Victoria (1837–1901)
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. The
y 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.
The Story of Britain Page 66
