This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  56

  Removed and discharged:

  273

  Above age six, apprenticed out:

  113

  Left in the care of the Parish:

  712

  This workhouse was considered for its day to have been neat and even ‘commodious’. Yet none of the inmates was allowed out without permission from the master and when they were out, they had to be back on time otherwise they were ‘gated’ – refused permission to go out. Children in the workhouse were regularly beaten by the master. Anyone pretending to be ill to escape work would have their food ration cut and even thrown into the dungeon. None of this was thought unusual and, anyway, the people who may have given the nation legislation against such treatment had other and apparently mightier decisions to make.

  With Pitt’s death, George III was faced with a limited choice of politicians from whom to form the next administration. He sent for William Wyndham, Lord Grenville. Grenville was Pitt’s cousin, but his political alliance with Charles James Fox had led to a break with Pitt two years earlier. By calling on Grenville to form the next administration, the King was tacitly accepting Fox.

  Fox’s mind raced across every political idea in England in the latter part of the eighteenth century; his pedigree suggested someone who would never be ordinary. Nor was he. His great-grandfather was the first Duke of Lennox, who was the son of Louise de Kéroualle, the mistress of Charles II. So the Stuart King and the Hanoverian George III cannot have been unaware of them. And should anyone have forgotten, Charles James Fox’s Christian names were obvious reminders. Fox’s father was the first Baron Holland who, as Paymaster General, made a fortune by siphoning funds. With this background, it is hardly surprising that Fox is remembered as a far from ordinary figure. He was a rebel, a gambler, a piercing critic of what he saw as George III’s political and fiscal oppression of the American colonists, a supporter of the French Revolution and, when the King suffered temporary loss of his faculties, a leader of the movement to have him replaced by the Prince of Wales. Fox was also Great Britain’s first Foreign Secretary. Now, in 1806, the coalition of politicians produced the Ministry of All the Talents – a misleading description inasmuch that not all the Ministry was talented. The close supporters of the late William Pitt knew they could never be part of the administration. Addington (now created Lord Sidmouth) was Lord Privy Seal, and Lord Henry Petty was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Charles Grey, a friend of Fox, was his successor as Foreign Secretary, and was soon to become Prime Minister; but for the moment he was Grenville’s First Lord of the Admiralty. The Pittites, Hawkesbury, Castlereagh and Canning were left to fume on the backbenches. And there was little vision in the British approach to ending the war. It is probable that there could be no end until the French wanted it, or had been beaten, but when Fox died, in September 1806, there was no one left with his political agility to negotiate the peace anyway.

  This does not mean that Britain was in some dreadful political hiatus. A good example of serious work particularly pushed forward by judicious lobbying was the abolition of the slave trade in March 1807. This only went some way to stop the trade, which by some estimates had seen some twelve million Africans shipped to the Caribbean and the Americas and about a third of them in British ships, the majority from Liverpool. Most of the African slaves were destined for the British-owned sugar plantations in the West Indies or the cotton and tobacco farms of the southern provinces in America. Not all countries decided to stop the slave trade, or even contemplated doing so. The British did so partly through the emergence of an evangelical movement in the British Isles from the second half of the eighteenth century. Pamphleteers, especially from Quaker-based groups, fought slavery and tried to influence opinion formers such as William Wilberforce. Although Wilberforce was the leading political campaigner, it was Thomas Clarkson and his like that urged him to take up the challenge. Certainly when the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in the late eighteenth century, it was Quaker led with Wilberforce as much a target as any other opinion-maker.

  But it was more than campaigning that turned the slave trade into something no longer deemed acceptable. This was the period that would lead to a reforming society, and perhaps most famously towards the Reform Act of 1832 that signalled the complete political reformation in England. More visible, and therefore pertinent to public debate, was the increasing sense that not all was right with colonial slaving custom. After the American War of Independence, many of the black slaves who had been encouraged to take the British side were homeless and stateless. The British gave them refuge in Canada – effectively only the eastern seaboard; in the free state of Sierra Leone; and in England – mainly that meant London. At one point it was thought that 10,000 slaves were in London and many, if not most of them, were on the streets.

  We have also to consider the now famous court case brought about by the neglected historical figure of the slavery abolitionist, Granville Sharp (1735–1813), the grandson of an archbishop of York. He was living in London with his surgeon brother when in 1765 Jonathan Strong, a black man, was brought to the house for treatment. He had been so badly beaten by his master, David Lisle, that he was close to death and his injuries took four months to heal. Lisle tried to recapture Strong, but Granville Sharp arrived at the house. Sharp went to law and said the slave was no longer in slavery as he was in England and not in his master’s service. In 1768, the court found in Strong’s favour. Later, Sharp did this again with an escaped slave, James Somersett. The then Lord Chief Justice in 1772 was Lord Justice Mansfield. He decided that once in England, the slave could not be forced to leave against his or her wish unless a crime could be proven. The consequences of that effectively ended slavery in England. It was also Lord Mansfield who heard the case in 1783 of the Zong – a slave ship sailing out of Liverpool. Crossing the Atlantic, the ship was in difficulties and the captain, Luke Collingwood, had 133 African slaves thrown overboard. Bizarrely, the case was not about murder or injustice. It was about an insurance claim. The owners tried to claim the insurance for loss of cargo – the description of the Africans. The public outrage at the inhumanity of the event added considerably to the greater realization that the British could no longer condone this trade.

  There was another event that added to the bubbling cauldron of freedom. The French Revolution of 1789 had many a knock-on that was not envisaged and is sometimes forgotten. In 1791, slaves in Saint-Domingue in Haiti rebelled and won their rebellion. The British sent in the Royal Navy and the army but was defeated – as many as 40,000 British troops perished. Imagine the result. The African slaves had succeeded in demonstrating that it was possible truly to throw off their chains. The plantation owners and slave masters in the Caribbean trembled.

  The anti-slavery movement gathered strength and in March 1807 the trade was banned. The Royal Navy was given the task of intercepting the slavers, but of course other States had no intention of giving up. Moreover, it took until 1833 for the abolition of slavery (rather than just the slave trade) to pass through both Houses and only after a compensation fund of £20 million had been agreed.

  Within a year of the 1807 Act abolishing the slave trade, the Ministry of All the Talents was no more. It had been formed by Grenville when George III reluctantly accepted that Charles James Fox should be in an administration. Grenville had even included some of the followers of the Prince of Wales, the radical opposition to so much that was dear to the monarch. The administration had foremost in its mind the war with Napoleon. Yet it fell not because of the war with Napoleon but because the mix of political views simply could not be united. Certainly with the death of its most powerful figure, Fox, in September 1806, the government had not long to go. A deciding factor was the poorly managed attempt to return to the matter of Catholic Emancipation. Viscount Sidmouth, Henry Addington, had been a less than successful Tory Prime Minister between 1801 and 1804. His reputation was made a decade later when as Home Secretary he used draconian measures to
counter the Luddites. Now, in 1806, his biggest influence was against Grenville’s proposal to allow Catholics to become senior officers in the army – a further step towards Catholic Emancipation. But the Parliamentary draughtsmanship was poor; the Commons said so, and the King became suspicious that his government was on the road to Catholic Emancipation without telling him. Yet little or none of this was political manipulation; it’s simply that the Ministry of All the Talents was not actually very talented at all – certainly not without Fox – and it fell in 1807.

  The new Prime Minister was the elderly third Duke of Portland. He’d been a member of the coalition government of Fox and North in the 1780s and later, for seven years, Pitt the Younger’s Home Secretary. At sixty-nine, he was the same age as George III and neither man was at the height of his powers. However, Portland’s Cabinet did include four men with undoubted and sometimes explosive talent. The Home Secretary was Lord Hawkesbury, Spencer Perceval was Chancellor, Viscount Castlereagh was War Secretary and George Canning was Foreign Secretary. It was not a time for unimaginative government towards the end of 1807. Britain was about to embark on another conflict and by the following year, 1808, the Peninsular War had begun. It would continue for six years.

  The Peninsula of the war was the Iberian Peninsula – Spain and Portugal – and this was Britain’s part in an otherwise ineffectual European campaign against Napoleon. The Peninsular campaign is significant because it meant a change in tactics and, eventually, in strategy in Britain’s determination that Europe should not be controlled by Napoleon. The threat was not imagined. After all, Napoleon, as would Bismarck towards the end of the century, measured success by the amount of territory taken. Moreover, the British had watched Napoleon build Boulogne from creek to embarkation port to invade the nation of shopkeepers. Furthermore, this was the age of innovation, of commercial and industrial development; absolute control over Europe could bring about the political and economic domination of Britain by foreign interests. As if that was not enough concern to the British, the government of Portland was going through difficult times. A certain Mrs Anne Clarke published allegations of corruption in army administration and directly implicated the Duke of York – the King’s son and Commander-in-Chief of the army. The Duke was not a very good soldier (it was this Duke of York who marched them up and down again) but he was a conscientious administrator and had tried to improve the soldiers’ lot. Perhaps the fact that Mrs Clarke had been, but no longer was, the Duke’s mistress coloured her allegations.

  The Duke of York was forced to resign as Commander-in-Chief although Mrs Clarke was later discredited. But the real importance of this event is that it allowed the opposition to revive charges of corruption in high places. It also provided the right atmosphere for an independent MP named John Curwen to bring forward a Bill to stop the sale of Parliamentary seats. Until this Bill, selling and buying a seat in the House was quite common practice and few thought it a dishonourable way in which to get a Commoner or a peer into the House.

  Elliot, the Irish Secretary to the then Prime Minister, Grenville, wrote a letter in 1806 which insists that the money for a seat be paid in English money and not Irish, which was very important because the Irish pound was worth less.

  November 4, 1806

  Parnell states that he believes Lord Portarlington will let us have his seat for £4000 British, provided he is given to understand that he is to have the support of Government for the representative peerage on the second vacancy after Lord Charlemont’s election.

  The Bill that became known as Curwen’s Act eventually restricted the influence of the Crown as well. So it was at this point that something close to the way MPs are elected today began to evolve. Curwen’s Act wasn’t Parliamentary reform but it was one layer of it. And for some, it wasn’t the actual buying of seats in the House that angered them, but the way they were bought. The bulk buying-up of seats meant that ministers controlled votes and individuals. One of the seat brokers, Sir Christopher Hawkings, cleared his entire stock to ministers and there was well-founded suspicion that the money for them came out of the Privy Purse, in other words was financed by the King himself.

  A peer who owned a seat would put an MP into Parliament and then tell him how to vote. So to be independent, a would-be MP had to have money of his own – but even then there was no telling how safe that seat might be. Certainly a majority of votes did not always guarantee a seat. For example, Sir Samuel Romilly paid for his seat, thought that he had won it but then found a petition was raised against him in spite of his having paid £2,000. Buying a seat eventually faded from the electoral system, but not for a long time. Even in the twenty-first century the method of payment to support political parties and even the amount that could be spent at general elections continued to demonstrate that the apparent democratic Parliamentary process was less than perfect.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  1809–19

  While Parliamentarians discussed the price of representation, the war rumbled on. In one battle alone 40,000 died. Another battle was staged for political rather than military reasons and, as a result, two Cabinet ministers duelled and the Prime Minister suffered a stroke. And, at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, a famous general was, for the moment, giving up his political ambitions.

  Sir Arthur Wellesley was the son of an Irish peer. He was born in Ireland but insisted that he was English and was said to have asked if the fact that he had been born in a stable meant that he was a horse. After service in India he had become a Tory MP. By 1809 he was back in command of the British forces in Portugal and, at the Battle of Talavera, he earned his first title, Viscount Wellington. (He wasn’t created Duke of Wellington until 1814.)

  Elsewhere in Europe, one British expedition ended in disaster. The British tried to send its army up the River Scheldt to take Antwerp. When the French reinforced Antwerp, the British commander left a garrison on an island called Walcheren in July 1809. The British were destroyed, not by French muskets, but by malaria; as in so many wars, including those of the twentieth century, disease and infection account for most casualties. The British public wanted French blood, not infected corpuscles of their own troops. What they got was a group of British transports ferrying more than 25,000 Frenchmen to freedom in France, ready to fight another day. If the French were to be beaten, then it would have to be Wellington’s role to do so. But Wellington did not have a large and well-disciplined army; something he could not take for granted in 1809. He thought his army a rabble of plunderers but they served him, if not well, then eventually successfully.

  By 1810, Wellington and his rabble had mauled the French army at Busaco and then allowed them to follow him to the seemingly impregnable Lines of Torres Vedras, the lines of fortifications he’d built to protect Lisbon. If they had the strength and imagination, the French might attack. The British were vulnerable but the great chain of Torres Vedras, and the prospect of a bleak winter with few resources, were too much. Come the spring, and leaving behind thousands of their dead, the French retreated from Portugal and into Spain. Wellington took his time. He refused to hurry for those who demanded spectacular victories. He wanted to take the war to France itself. In 1811 the British held the enemy at Fuentes d’Oñoro and Albuera but still Wellington waited; the waiting paid off. The French generals began to quarrel. Troops were withdrawn for the campaign in Russia. Wellington advanced on the frontier strongholds of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz and prepared to face the French Marshal Auguste de Marmont. At Salamanca, Marmont’s military calculations failed him and Wellington had his first significant victory of the Peninsular War. But the war was far from over. Another army force under Marshal Nicolas Soult, who had fought Sir John Moore at Corunna in January 1809, was already on the march. Wellington was forced back to the Portuguese frontier.

  In London, the government and the court were forced to address George III’s illness. In 1810 the King became apparently incurably eccentric in his behaviour. As long ago as 1788 his
sanity had been questioned and Pitt had said that Parliament should provide legislation for a limited Regency. In 1810 the Prince of Wales, Prince George, became Regent, but his powers were restricted for one year. There were limitations on what appointments he could make. He couldn’t, for example, create new peerages – often done for political reasons. Now, the King was placed in the care of Queen Charlotte and a council of advisers. And, in 1811, to make it very clear that this was Parliament’s doing and therefore the Regent was bound by it, a Regency Act became law. The Act was the answer to the constitutional question: would the Prince bring his Whig friends into government, particularly Grey and Grenville, and discard the Tories? Grey and Grenville had gone four years earlier when the King had refused what was called ‘a measure of Catholic relief’. The Prince had no reason to change government policy or to be seen to do so. Furthermore, the quiet and, in many ways, unremarkable Spencer Perceval, who had become Prime Minister in October 1809, now had his Cabinet under control. But then, in May 1812 Perceval was murdered. It was not an assassination in the political sense. A bankrupt businessman called John Bellingham, armed with a grievance and a gun, shot him dead in the House of Commons lobby. So Perceval, who had achieved more than most recognized, went into the history books as the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated.

  As if all this wasn’t enough for the new Prime Minister, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool, Britain now found herself at war with the United States. It became known as the War of 1812. It started because the Royal Navy seized American ships trying to run the blockade against Napoleon, and because the British presence in Canada still annoyed the Americans. A plan to avert war was agreed, but it had to be carried more than 3,000 miles across the Atlantic by sailing ship, and then across land to the Americans and then, if agreed, to all the waiting commanders. Very simply, the plan didn’t arrive in time and the war began, continuing until January 1815.