One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

Late in 1857 Palmerston raised eyebrows by appointing to his cabinet the marquess of Clanricarde, who had been named in an Irish court case in 1855 involving a possible illegitimate son and underhand dealings over his inheritance.32 Punch, always quick to sniff out scandal, printed a large cartoon on 23 January 1858 showing Palmerston in a carriage with Clanricarde on the back; the caption read ‘Premier’s New Cab-Boy – with such a character’.33 A month later Palmerston was out of power, brought down partly by the Clanricarde business; he had ‘grown giddy’ in making appointments which were an abuse of power, said the Illustrated London News on 27 February.34 When Prince Albert reviewed the parliamentary session in September 1858 he marvelled at the suddenness of Palmerston’s fall. The man who was previously ‘stamped the only English statesman, the champion of liberty, the man of the people, etc., etc.’, was now ‘frequently received with hooting’ and was hated on all sides, including his own. Albert also noted Palmerston’s calm manner: ‘He remains, outwardly at least, quite cheerful, and seems to care very little about his reverses.’35

  The main cause of Palmerston’s downfall was the public perception that he failed in his patriotic duty as an English statesman in his response to French outrage about the attempted assassination in Paris of the emperor, Napoleon III, on 14 January 1858. The perpetrators were Italian nationalists, led by Felice Orsini, who had used grenades made in England and had been helped by French and English sympathisers with the cause of Italian independence from foreign rule. Pressure was put on Palmerston’s government by the French, and a Conspiracy to Murder Bill was brought before parliament early in February. The bill was unpopular with the press and public; as Marx observed in an article in the New York Daily Tribune on 22 February, Palmerston’s bill ‘will only contribute to exasperate the already wounded pride of John Bull’.36 It was not supported by many of Palmerston’s colleagues either, including his bitter rival for leadership of the Liberals, Lord John Russell, who objected to a bill coming forward apparently in response to the demands of a foreign despot. (Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Napoleon, had been elected president of the Republic in 1848, but when blocked by the constitution from running for a second term, had declared himself emperor in December 1852 and set about imposing censorship and repressive measures.)

  Palmerston’s home secretary, Sir George Grey, wrote to Russell on 2 February to persuade him to support the bill. He understood that ‘we cannot of course listen to any proposal to expel refugees or foreigners on mere suspicion’, but ‘the law with respect to the crime of conspiracy to murder is in an uncertain and unsatisfactory state’. As an offence under common law, it was currently punishable only by a fine or imprisonment, whereas in Ireland the same offence was ‘a capital felony’. The government thought a general act should be passed ‘making conspiracy to murder, whether in this country or abroad, a felony punishable by penal servitude’.37 This may have been a sensible idea, but as another of Palmerston’s colleagues, Sir James Graham, pointed out, in terms similar to Marx’s, it would not wash with the great British public. ‘John Bull is a strange animal. If you goad him, his courage rises.’ Besides, ‘all Europe would laugh at our degradation’ in dancing to a tune set by the self-styled emperor of the French.38 The vote was lost, and on 19 February Palmerston’s administration resigned, whereupon a surprised and reluctant Lord Derby took over with a minority Conservative government. His only hope of this spell in government lasting longer than the previous one in 1852 was that the opposition was divided and Palmerston, round whom many different factions had previously gathered, was no longer supported by many on his own side. As Bentley’s Miscellany pointed out in April 1858, Palmerston was ‘hoist with his own petard’; he relied on mass popularity because of his rugged English patriotism, and was undone when he brought in his bill apparently at the behest of a foreign nation.39

  Derby appointed Disraeli once more as his chancellor of the Exchequer, though he probably still had some doubts about his colleague’s suitability for office. Disraeli presented a risk, with his unorthodox background and demeanour, his Jewishness – though he had been baptised as a youth – his lack of a university education, his authorship of racy novels in his twenties, his frequenting of ‘fast’ circles composed of scandalous aristocrats, from whom he borrowed large amounts of money and on whose patronage he depended, and his sexual ambiguity. Derby’s son Lord Stanley certainly distrusted Disraeli, noting in his journal at the time of his father’s accession to power that, ‘able as he is, this man will never command public confidence’.40 No one ever knew quite how seriously to take Disraeli.41 He was clever, cynical, mocking, and at the same time romantic and exotic in language and behaviour. In his diary in 1833, when he was having an affair with the politically influential Lady Henrietta Sykes, he wrote, apparently seriously: ‘My life has been a struggle, with moments of rapture – a storm and dashes of Moonlight, Love, and Poetry.’42 As Derby was trying to put together a cabinet in 1858, Disraeli wrote to him on 22 February, expressing in fulsome terms his sorrow that Stanley was resisting an appointment (though he presumably did not know that this was partly because of Stanley’s disapproval of him): ‘It draws tears from my eyes, & from yr heart, I am sure, drops of blood.’43 The stolid Derby is unlikely to have recognised this florid diagnosis of his fatherly feelings.

  Despite the difference in their backgrounds and personalities, Derby and Disraeli made a good team. They were fortunate that the support for Palmerston had collapsed, so that many Liberals were prepared to work with them on their legislative programme, which in any case began as a continuation of that of their predecessors. Derby was inclined to favour political reform, as was Disraeli, and they took parliament with them.44 In particular, they continued with Palmerston’s plan to put through an India Bill transferring the government of India from the East India Company to the British government. All sides agreed, particularly in the aftermath of the Sepoy rebellion (known at the time as the Indian Mutiny), that it was unsustainable for the East India Company, a commercial institution, to continue to run India as if it were an arm of government. As Joseph Irving, author of an account of the public events of the year 1858, pointed out, the East India Company by this time ‘carried on political functions without ministerial responsibility’. There was ‘no responsibility to Parliament, to public opinion, or to the Crown’, he wrote, and the ‘persons enjoying these functions … were elected by bodies and gentlemen who knew nothing about India, and yet the Company had the power of removing the Governor-General at any moment’.45

  Though there was general agreement about this change of governance, the debates on India were hard fought in relation to administrative detail and took up several months of the parliamentary session. Arguments over competitive entry for civil servants dealing with India under the proposed constitution, and, from the bishops in the House of Lords, a strong desire to impose Christianity on India, held up the passing of the bill until the end of July 1858, but as Disraeli told the queen in one of his almost daily reports to her, the heat and stench hampering parliament were in his favour with regard to getting it through. On 24 June he wrote in the familiar style in which he had begun, with her encouragement, on his ministerial appointment at the end of February, to send her his ‘rough notes, written on the field of battle’:

  The Cr of the Exr with his humble duty to Yr Majesty: The India Bill was read a second time without a division. Lord Stanley [who was soon to be appointed the first secretary of state for India] made a clear & vigorous exposition of its spirit & provisions … No serious opposition apprehended in Committee … He [Disraeli] proposes to proceed with no other business, until it is concluded. When the Bill has passed, the temper of the House, & its sanitary state, will assist him in passing the remaining estimates with rapidity, & he contemplates an early conclusion of the Session.46

  Knowing how to flatter Victoria, who had come to like him after having first distrusted him, Disraeli dangled before her an influential future as empress of India: ‘It is
, the Cr of the Er really thinks, a wise & well digested measure, ripe with the experience of the last five months of discussion: but it is only the ante-chamber of an imperial Palace; & Yr Majesty would do well to deign to consider the steps, [which] are now necessary to influence the opinions, & affect the imagination, of the Indian populations.’ He wound up his letter with the reassurance that ‘notwithstanding the Thames, I continue very well’.47 The new dispensation for India was to prove momentous for Victoria, for Disraeli’s reputation, and for India itself.

  In its summary of the parliamentary session on 1 August 1858, the Era singled out the Derby government’s achievements in getting through parliament the Thames Purification Bill, for which the nation would be eternally grateful; the India Bill, ‘the work of the session, in labour and anxiety’; and a third bill, the Oath of Abjuration Bill, better known, as the session wore on, as the ‘Jew Bill’, since the main point of contention was the passage to allow Jews to sit in parliament without swearing ‘on the true faith of a Christian’.48 Bills had been brought forward by both Liberals and Conservatives year after year, ostensibly to remove absurd outdated clauses in the parliamentary oath such as that abjuring allegiance to the descendants of James II (whose line had long since become extinct), but in fact in order to remove the ‘true faith of a Christian’ clause. Time and again the motion was passed by the House of Commons but defeated by the bishops and others in the House of Lords, out of plain religious bigotry in many cases, and a worry about Jews being allowed to legislate on matters relating to the established church. The prominent Whig Lord John Russell, prime minister from 1846 to 1851, brought in the first of his bills in 1849 in order to permit Lionel de Rothschild to sit in the House of Commons. Baron de Rothschild (his title was an Austrian one) had been elected a member for the City of London in June 1847 but could not take his seat. Like its many successors, this first bill was passed by the Commons but failed in the Lords. In 1858 Disraeli discussed a possible compromise with Russell. The outcome, after much toing and froing, was that the Commons once again passed the bill with a large majority and the Lords, on 1 July, permitted the Commons to pass a resolution admitting Jews to their own house, while remaining stalwart against having Jews in the Lords.49 The awkward compromise allowed Rothschild to take his seat in the Commons on 26 July by swearing on the Old Testament alone.

  Medicine and marriage

  When the parliamentary session closed on 2 August, it was the job of the lord chancellor Lord Chelmsford – one of the most vehement opponents of the measure to allow Jewish representation in parliament – to read out the Queen’s Speech in the House of Lords to members of both houses. He announced that the queen was especially pleased by the India Act, which promised ‘a just and impartial administration of the law’ and the sympathetic promotion of the welfare of the Indian people; she also welcomed the act to purify ‘that noble river’, the Thames, ‘the present state of which is little creditable to a great country, and seriously prejudicial to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of the metropolis’.50 The list of other bills passed into law included several relating to local land and railway business, the Atlantic Telegraph Company Bill, and two important pieces of national legislation, the Medical Practitioners Bill and an amendment to the recently implemented Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act. Both had far-reaching consequences for British life.

  Medical reform was much needed. Medical education, and the qualifications bestowed on medical students, varied, as did the subsequent right to practise. Graduates of the medical schools of Scottish universities could not practise in England. The qualifications offered by the universities and the long-established London medical schools were different from those granted by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons, both of which had their origins in the reign of Henry VIII. By the Apothecaries’ Act of 1815, apothecaries were permitted to practise medicine in England; from this act came the new term ‘general practitioner’, a growing body looked down on by members of the two royal colleges. In addition, there was nothing to stop anyone, whether medically trained or not, from setting up a practice in homeopathy, hydropathy, or mesmerism, all of which alternative medical practices were well established by the 1850s. Jealousies raged between the different interests. As physicians had been historically the only ones required to have a university degree, they were considered to be at the top of the hierarchy, with the surgeons next, and general practitioners at the bottom of the ranks of legitimate doctors. However, the development of medical schools attached to hospitals, and the introduction of anaesthetics in surgery in the late 1840s, changed the dynamics between the different branches.51 Scrutiny came, too, from the Lancet, the medical journal founded in 1823 by Thomas Wakley, a qualified surgeon and from 1835 a Radical MP. Wakley made it his mission to expose inequalities and bad practice and to lobby for reform of the two royal colleges in particular and of medical education in general.52 Meanwhile the growing body of general practitioners became increasingly rebellious in the face of obstruction and snobbery from the royal colleges.

  Wakley and others set about moving for legislative reform. Between 1840 and 1858 no fewer than seventeen different medical bills were introduced in the House of Commons; early in 1858 three separate bills were being considered simultaneously.53 The bills failed because of the power in political circles of members of the royal colleges, and also because of a lack of unity among the reformers and differing ideas of what the reforms should be. Some prioritised the removal of outdated privileges from the royal colleges, others stressed the need for a single standard of medical education and qualification for all doctors, of whatever specialism, and still others wanted first and foremost to bolster the status of qualified doctors by imposing sanctions on alternative practitioners and other ‘quacks’. As Punch noticed in an article entitled ‘The Doctors and their Bills’, printed in June 1858 while the final bill was going through parliament, disagreement among doctors was endangering yet another effort at medical reform. If, because of this quarrelling, the ‘entire measure’ could not be passed, could we not, asked Punch, tongue in cheek, have it homeopathically, ‘contenting ourselves with a small draft’ until the whole could be swallowed.54

  In the end, a compromise act was passed. The chief medical officer of health, the reforming John Simon, was responsible for drawing up the bill. It was brought to the Commons by William Cowper, Palmerston’s stepson (and probably biological son, since Lady Cowper had been Palmerston’s lover for years before she married him), who was president of the Board of Health until the fall of Palmerston’s administration in February 1858. As drafted, it restricted the powers and exclusivity of the royal colleges and made provision for all doctors to take the same qualifying examinations; it also set up for the first time a Medical Register, which would be published annually and exclude unqualified practitioners, and established the General Medical Council to oversee all administration of medical matters. In Simon’s draft version the council would be made up of members of the royal colleges, of the universities, and of general practitioners. While the bill was going through its readings in May–June 1858, however, the home secretary Spencer Walpole was lobbied hard by the colleges, so that the final bill retained some of their privileges. General practitioners were therefore excluded from membership of the Medical Council. (It was not until the passing of the Medical Act of 1886 that they were granted representation.) The reformers were disappointed, but, as if taking Mr Punch’s advice, they accepted the bill as an important step towards full equality within the profession. The main advances made by the act when it came into effect on 1 October 1858 were the creation of the register to keep quacks out, the forming of the Medical Council to oversee matters, and the unification of medical examinations for students of all branches of medicine.55 Though imperfect, the act was an important milestone in regularising a profession which had become, as Palmerston had said in parliament in 1853, ‘a labyrinth and a chaos’, adding frankly that, as home secretary at th
at time, he had ‘no hopes of being able to bring forward a measure’.56

  If it took many years of trying before an acceptable Medical Act was passed, the journey to completion of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act was somewhat shorter, but no less troublesome. Bills to make divorce more accessible were introduced and failed in 1854 and 1856, in the latter case due to lack of debating time, though the fierce opposition on the part of many politicians and churchmen to making divorce available to anyone other than the very rich was the real obstacle to progress. Dickens wrote scathingly in Household Words in October 1856 about the failure to push through an act:

  The Law of Divorce is in such condition that from the tie of marriage there is no escape to be had, no absolution to be got, except under certain proved circumstances not necessary to enter upon here, and then only on payment of an enormous sum of money. Ferocity, drunkenness, flight, felony, madness, none of these will break the chain, without the enormous sum of money. The husband, who, after years of outrage, has abandoned his wife, may at any time claim her for his property and seize the earnings on which she subsists. The most profligate of women, an intolerable torment, torture, and shame to her husband, may nevertheless, unless he be a very rich man, insist on remaining handcuffed to him, and dragging him away from any happier alliance, from youth to old age and death …

  It is proposed [in the recent bill introduced in parliament] a little to relax the severity of a thraldom prolonged beyond the bounds of morality, justice, and sense, and to modify the law. Instantly the singing of paeans begins … Authorities, lay and clerical, rise in their parliamentary places to deliver panegyrics on Marriage as an Institution (which nobody disputes to be just); they have much to relate concerning what the Fathers thought of it, and what was written, said, and done about it hundreds of years before these evils were; they set up their fancy whipping-tops, and whip away; they utter homilies without end upon the good side of the question, which is in no want of them, but … the tortures and wrongs of the sufferer have no place in their speeches.57