The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  At a Cabinet meeting on 6 November Peel declared that on the evidence he already had it was necessary to open the ports to cheap grain from abroad at a reduced emergency tariff and put a new Corn Bill through Parliament. But only three of his ministers would back him. The others did not believe in the emergency and preferred to wait for the end of the month when the two scientists Lyon Playfair and Professor Lindley would have finished their report. Even when the report came in, the Tory party would not back the repeal of the bread tax. Peel resigned, but when the Whig Lord John Russell attempted and failed to form a ministry to repeal the corn laws, Peel nobly took back his resignation and formed a government again solely for that purpose. The repeal of the corn laws in May 1846 was finally carried by the Free Traders, who were Peel’s supporters in the party (they became known as the Peelites), together with Russell’s Whigs. But Peel himself was forced out as Tory leader and the party split into Peelites and Protectionists. Headed by Disraeli, the Protectionists attacked Peel in the most wounding manner as a traitor to his party. But in his last speech as prime minister Peel insisted that he had not betrayed any conservative principles. He had simply done what he came into Parliament to do, which was to show that ‘the legislature was animated with a sincere desire to frame its legislation upon the principles of equity and justice’.

  But the Irish did not see the Westminster government that way. Though the Archbishop of Dublin asked prayers to be said in every Catholic church for God’s mercy, there was to be no mercy. The devastating figure of one million Irish people died in one year alone, between 1846 and 1847, and another million would die over the next three years; those who did not die of starvation were carried off by mortal illnesses brought on by malnutrition. For the sacred nineteenth-century laws of political economy decreed that corn could not be delivered free to the population. It could only be put into government depots and paid out in return for labour. This bureaucratic approach was useless during an emergency. It took months, hundreds of thousands of deaths and the example of private charities physically taking provisions to the people for the British government to see that in an emergency there was no room for economic laws. The only way to get food to the starving was to deliver it to the people directly in a vast relief effort.

  The Irish famine was the greatest social disaster to befall any European state in the nineteenth century. But the new Whig government that took over from Peel, led by Lord John Russell, proved inadequate to the task. By the Soup Kitchen Act of 1847 Parliament finally voted £10 million to help Ireland. Thus more than three million men, women and children received food from the soup kitchens. But the humanitarian aid ceased long before it should have done. At the end of 1847 the British government decided that the Irish should thenceforth be supported by their local parish unions. Yet, with the economy destroyed, there were no rates to pay for that support. The official British view was that if any further help was given to the Irish it would make them too dependent on government aid. It was the same mindset which had turned workhouses into forbidding places to keep the poor out of them.

  Most landlords behaved with astonishing callousness. Far from being appalled by the sight of men, women and children dying around them, their agents only registered missing rents. What was of concern to themselves and their employers was that the cottar system of farming–the smallholder with a couple of fields–was proving unprofitable. A ruthless series of evictions began. At mid-century it was averaging almost 20,000 families per year, as landlords incorporated many smallholdings into larger ones on English lines. A constant kind of guerrilla warfare against landlords was the response of those who remained. In 1848 there was another failed attempt at rebellion under the Young Ireland movement, which had been resurrected under a man named Smith O’Brien. But the most frequent reaction of the Irish to their homeland’s ills was to abandon her.

  Sure that things would never get better in their lifetime, during the course of the next fifty years one million Irishmen and women bitterly made their way to the friendlier shores of the United States of America. They settled predominantly on the eastern seaboard, particularly around Boston. As important as their pitifully scant belongings was the loathing they carried in their hearts for the English. It was sealed in blood by the famine, and persists among their descendants even today. The treatment of the Irish during the famine by the English is taught in some American schools as an act of genocide, the deliberate murder of a people.

  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 impressi
ve 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 Russ
ell 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.