The Protestant arrogance of the eighteenth century reflected how the British saw themselves in the world and, increasingly, how the world saw the British and their treasured institutions, particularly banking and the law. In fact, the institutions were icons for the British and how others saw them. They had colonies, the makings of an empire in India, powerful fleets, industrial and technological achievement, a ‘safe’ monarchy, an enviable and evolving Parliamentary system and a government that, although still subjected to royal whim and persuasion, was indeed edging towards a recognizably sound form of modern democracy. There was, too, a religious revival although the Established Church was not threatened by dissident Christianity. The evangelical movement was confident and increasingly regional. For example, the Anglican Bishop of Chester would often remark that there were more Non-conformist worshippers in the see than Anglicans. As for Catholicism, it was not longer a threatening umbrella for French and Spanish ambitions on the British throne. In Scotland, the churches had reached their own conclusion how best to live together and although the Church of Scotland was not an Established Church it was the accepted ‘official’ Church. The Episcopalians were in the minority but of no great threat to the orthodoxy.
In Ireland, there was an altogether different form of social discontent. The United Irishmen of Protestants founded by Wolfe Tone had indeed agitated for dramatic reform and independence by the inspiration of the French Revolution. The Catholic Church – some three-quarters of the population – may not have been an organized threat to the Protestant Ascendancy in that island, but they nevertheless reflected a platform from which Parliamentary and social grievance might be mounted against the British. Certainly, Pitt the Younger had wanted Catholic Emancipation in Ireland even though the King refused on the grounds that this would be against his own coronation vows as defender of the faith of the Established Church.
The United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 may have fizzled out, but it certainly convinced Pitt that political control had to be concentrated in Westminster and therefore there had to be an act of political union. This was enacted as the Union of Great Britain and Ireland on 1 August 1800. (Northern Ireland is still referred to as Great Britain and Northern Ireland.) That Pitt failed to achieve a Catholic Emancipation Act at the same time was simply a step too far for the moment. It would come, but not in his lifetime. The Roman Catholics had been governed by the 1571 Penal Laws in England and in Ireland, the 1695–1727 Penal Code. Why then, if Pitt had failed to convince the monarch in 1798, could Prime Minister Wellington and King George IV get a Catholic Emancipation Bill on the statute book in 1829? Simply, there was an urgency in the fear of both men that Catholic disturbance really would lead to a break up of the Union led by the formidable figure of the Irish MP David O’Connell (1775–1847) whose Catholic Association demanded that Catholics had a right to be MPs.
However, we should not see reform in terms of big issues. Often they were matters of small conscience, almost uneasiness. For example, Robert Peel, the new Home Secretary in 1822, began work to change the criminal law, prisons and even the very public display of punishment. If villains were executed in the Port of London area, then the wretched remains were placed on a particularly gruesome form of display and left for all to see. It was called gibbeting. The idea was that the sight of these remains should act as a crime deterrent. But there’s no evidence that it did. One William Sykes was moved to write to Robert Peel that: ‘the scare-crow remains of the poor wretches who, long since expirated by death of their crimes, now hang upon gibbets It is said that “Persecution ceases in the grave”. Let these poor remains find a grave, and the remembrance of their offences pass away.’ A woman could still be burned alive for some crimes, even something as simple as coining. Public flogging of females was still a spectator sport. Neither burning, hanging nor flogging appeared to be a deterrent to criminals.
Peel may have been impressed with the plea from Sykes but the practice of gibbeting continued in London until 1834. But those like Peel who wanted criminal law reform were not liberals, in modern terms, although it was at this time that the distinctions between political ministries were beginning to become clearer. And during this time of experiment with reform perhaps the most important change was the evolution of political positions as Westminster. There wasn’t yet a clear ideological distinction between those who claimed party labels, but Parliament was definitely moving towards what would now be called the party system and an official opposition.
When Lord Liverpool had a stroke in 1827, he had been Prime Minister for fifteen years. Some say that Liverpool was a nonentity but he had governed during the final years of the Napoleonic Wars; the considerable economic and social changes that followed; evidence of rebellion; scandals in the royal household at a time when the monarch’s credibility was essential to the political stability of the administration; and the suicide of his Foreign Secretary. And through all this, he had little direct control of the House of Commons because he sat in the Lords.
And the system under which Liverpool governed in the 1820s, although moving slowly towards the two-party system, was far removed from what now exists where two main parties lay out their promises and then the nation votes for one lot or the other.
In the 1820s an election was the time when the King and his government (which the King chose) asked for a vote of confidence. And so a general election wasn’t much fought by an opposition trying to replace the government, indeed most seats weren’t even contested. The biggest influence on the outcome of the election might well turn out to be a public display of confidence not by the people, but by the monarch, in the government.
From this it is easy to see how Liverpool could be judged as someone who had done little more than keep apart the two powerful government factions of George Canning and the Duke of Wellington, while clinging to the memory of Pitt the Younger. That judgement would be too simple and would not acknowledge the way in which ministers set their own agendas, even if this meant ignoring those of their own government. For instance, there had long been a debate on the extent of Catholic Emancipation. Some of Liverpool’s ministers were as much opposed to this idea as others were in favour. Therefore, the chances of success were almost nil. There was no way in which Liverpool could simply say, ‘This is Government policy, therefore I insist everyone agrees,’ especially as the King wouldn’t have agreed with him anyway. The best he could hope for was an agreeable Parliament, rather than an agreeing one. Every time there was a new idea, his job was to reassure many of his colleagues that it was an evolutionary concept, rather than a radical departure.
Thus Liverpool ruled for fifteen years (probably longer than most had expected him to), but he couldn’t have survived without the support of the Regent, the Prince of Wales (the future George IV). Second, the way in which government worked meant that it couldn’t be judged in the way that government is judged today by its legislative programmes.
When, in 1827, Liverpool went (he was to die the following year), the King reluctantly appointed his successor: George Canning. Canning had been Foreign Secretary during the previous five years and now his political thinking grew in a direction that would have been recognized during and after the Second World War, when plans were laid for a transatlantic alliance. This was hardly surprising considering that, as Foreign Secretary, he had been deeply involved in events in Spain, where he had supported a Spanish rebellion against the ruling junta. Canning may have said the rising was justifiable, but there was a definite anxiety throughout Continental Europe where a rising against authority could be taken as inspiration to overthrow Holy Alliances. No wonder Austria and Russia were going to intervene. No wonder Canning saw intervention in the affairs of others as an unwise act. Britain had rarely got off lightly when drawn into a conflict that was not really its own. Yet in Britain, volunteers lined up to go to Spain to support the liberal armies – just as they would in 1936. Effectively, the volunteers made no difference. The Liberals in Spain were beaten down. If anythin
g should be remembered from this it is the word Liberal. The events in Spain at the start of the nineteenth century so inspired Radicals in Britain that they adopted the word Liberal as a political title.
The interests of the Europeans in the early nineteenth century turned to Latin America. The Spanish had colonies, the Portuguese were in Brazil and the British traded there. While the Spanish had been distracted by the Napoleonic Wars, many of their South American colonies had gone their own ways – or tried to. The Spanish were now keen to re-establish control. There was every chance of a series of colonial wars. Canning wanted the Americans to help Britain oppose European intervention. This was in the American interest: it didn’t want wars on its continent, no matter how far south they were fought. But the then President, James Monroe, was persuaded not to involve America in unworkable alliances. On 2 December 1823, the fifth President of the United States addressed Congress. His speech has become known as the Monroe Doctrine and remains the basis of American foreign policy. A summary of what he said might be that the United States would see any European attempt to influence politically the ‘Western hemisphere’ as ‘dangerous to our peace and safety’. In 1917, it was President Wilson who, during the First World War, declared, ‘I am proposing that the nations should adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its policy over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own policy, its own way.’ So, the consequences of the Napoleonic Wars, the ideas of a British Foreign Secretary and the consequent reservations of a young United States produced a doctrine that survived into the twenty-first century.
We must judge that for his remarkable talents, Canning was never much trusted by George IV and, equally, Canning did not trust the King. He would not accept the way in which the monarch believed it still the royal right to interfere in foreign policy. Canning’s grievance was harder for him to cope with because foreign ambassadors – particularly the Russian and Austrian – knew exactly how George worked and so circumvented Canning’s authority. Canning knew, for example, that Prince Khristofor Lievan, the Russian ambassador, and the Austrian envoy, Prince Esterhazy, had direct access to the King and tried to persuade him to countermand the policy over South America. Canning was ready to resign over the worrying interference, or tracasserie, as he called it. Of course, Canning had resigned once before – on the government’s treatment of his friend, the King’s wife, Caroline of Brunswick. That had not made him a favourite of the King who suspected that Canning had had an affair with her. But if George IV had sleepless nights, they were few in number. Within a few months, George Canning was dead, probably exhausted by office.
To judge this period, we must remember that the sense of tumult and revolution was not a distant memory. The lessons of the consequences of the two revolutions, the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, had been difficult to understand in a British political system so influenced by the Crown. Canning, in highest office for just one summer, understood the groundswell of change. He understood too that if there were to be change, then there had to be credible systems to put in place of old ways, and that changing a system had to be seen to everyone’s advantage without anyone else losing position or dignity. One such movement was Catholic Emancipation which Canning supported and which included the abolition of the Test Acts. There were three Test Acts, each dating from the seventeenth century, and each centred on the question of religion in Britain. They were called the Test Acts because they made legal tests of a person’s faith. If anyone wanted to hold public office, then he (no question then of she) had to be an Anglican communicant, denounce the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and accept that the monarch was head of the Church of England. At this point, British society was influenced by laws which restricted the social, educational and political movement of large numbers of the population. There was fundamental discrimination against most people other than male (and often house-owning) members of the Church of England. Only they had the right to university education and to hold political office. Jews, Roman Catholics, Dissenters and women were excluded.
In the early nineteenth-century political climate men believed that change would come, that great changes had to be made, but that they had to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. The instinct to preserve the institutions of politics meant that for the moment the government of the nation remained a matter of reacting to events rather than deliberately instigating them. This then was the political climate in Britain as it moved from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and the next. Those in high office were very much the instruments of – rather than being entirely instrumental in – the events that would take the institutions and therefore the influences on the British character forward. The mini-volcano that preceded this change was in the Tory Party commanded by Wellington and a more effectual future Prime Minister, Robert Peel. Frederick Robinson, Viscount Goderich, had succeeded Canning in August 1827 but could not hold the Cabinet together, and he was gone by January 1828. Now attention was focused on the new Prime Minister, a man with an immense sense of duty, the hero of Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
1828–32
In January 1828 when the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister of Great Britain the convenience of labelling would have it that here was another Tory leader; but that would be a simplification too far. Wellington had little notion of party politics. His political conviction was that of duty, of public service, and he became Prime Minister perhaps reluctantly and largely because he saw it as a duty to carry on the government of the monarch. His Cabinet colleagues did not share his philosophy and the mixture was soon to boil over. Someone said that the first Cabinet meeting had a sense of gentlemen who had just fought a duel. Wellington complained that too much of his time was taken with smoothing feelings.
In its first year, the Cabinet was forced to accept the repeal of the Test Acts – the laws by which anyone wanting to hold public office had to demonstrate his allegiance to the Church of England and the monarch’s leadership of that Church. Peel, Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, and William Huskisson opposed the repeal, but changed their minds when they saw that the Commons would have it anyway. Dissenters and Non-conformists had for ages been able to claim indemnity from the Acts’ punishments, but for many it was an important symbol of something else: Catholic Emancipation.
But the first serious Cabinet split came when two boroughs – Penryn and East Retford – were found guilty of corruption. The High Tories wanted to merge the towns into adjoining constituencies. Huskisson wanted the seats transferred to unfranchised towns; he said it was a resigning matter. Wellington, probably to Huskisson’s surprise, accepted Huskisson’s resignation although the Duke could not have imagined the result. With another Canningite gone, the old Tory Party began to crumble, and what happened in Ireland hastened their decline. Here was the time of utter contradiction among Tories – what to do about Catholic Emancipation in Ireland where some three-quarters of the islanders were Catholics?
It was now that the lawyer Daniel O’Connell forced the political pace against the English. He did not want independence: he wanted Home Rule under the Crown. Importantly for our understanding, O’Connell was a Catholic. At that time, anyone appointed to a government office had to go through a by-election. The man who was now given one of the vacant government jobs, at the Board of Trade, was an Irish Protestant called William Vesey-FitzGerald. The election was to be in County Clare. Daniel O’Connell, who five years earlier had formed the Catholic Association in Ireland, decided to stand in the by-election. But the law said that as a Catholic he couldn’t hold office and so couldn’t be an MP. But he won the election. Peel was against Catholic Emancipation in any form and could not support any electoral revision. Wellington was a political pragmatist. He had a potential rebellion in sight and most certainly did not want to launch yet another military campaign i
n Ireland to put down any form of rebellion. Peel was not so understanding and Wellington did not want to lose him from government. Peel would have resigned from the Cabinet if Wellington had not made it clear that he was absolutely vital to the administration’s survival. To support Wellington, Peel felt that he would have to give up his seat in High-Tory Oxford, where he had been elected as an anti-Emancipation campaigner, and bought himself a seat in Wiltshire. It was this act of loyalty to Wellington, together with the King’s horror of the Whigs in power, that persuaded George to agree to a Bill for Catholic Emancipation. Peel steered it through the House the following year, in April 1829. What this meant practically for Irish Catholics was that all the Irish offices, other than the posts of Viceroy and Chancellor, could now be held by them. For those in Ireland who wanted to repeal the Union with England, there was a long way to go. Any agitation for Home Rule was viewed with great suspicion, even by some of the senior clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, not all Irishmen who wanted a degree of autonomy fancied the idea of an Irish Parliament dominated by O’Connell. The differences within the island itself were stark – of a kind recognizable today.
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