This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  In the south-west of Ireland, the Catholics wanted more freedom from England. In the most northerly of the five ancient kingdoms, the people of Ulster (descended from English settlers) had little desire to seek independence – even though it had been the Protestant community who attempted to get Home Rule in the eighteenth century, long before Catholics were powerful enough to try. And in England itself there was little political satisfaction at the outcome of the Emancipation Bill. The Catholics themselves, largely centred on old families, were far from agitators. The Tories were split three ways into what today is called the right, who had voted against the Bill; the followers of the late George Canning, who were no longer in government; and, in the middle, the supporters of Wellington and a pragmatic Peel. The Whigs were also divided because some of them had been Canning’s supporters, and had therefore voted for the legislation; other Whigs had opposed it. A further complication arose when some Tories started campaigning for Parliamentary Reform precisely because they thought a more balanced Parliament would not have let the Bill through. This impossible political confusion encouraged a writer in the Quarterly Review to suggest that the time had come to forget the political labels Whig and Tory. He believed that the political conflict was not between two parties trying to control government, ‘but between the mob and the government . . . the conservative and subversive principles’.

  Meanwhile Robert Peel had other matters on his mind – law and order. He wanted to organize the ‘thief-takers’ who had existed since the first half of the 1500s into a police force. Thief-taking was a business, and the money came from the reward for every thief. In the countryside, local villains were known and the system worked. In the towns and cities, unpaid constables and thief-takers might work for a parish or a ward.

  But many law-abiding people didn’t want an organized police force. There was a very real fear that it could, and would, be used to usurp public liberty. The Parliamentary view at the start of the nineteenth century was that public morality was the best form of protection. However, in London, although constables and watchmen were commonplace, they did most of their work in the daytime. They were often reluctant to seek out footpads and muggers once it was dark. Peel, as Home Secretary, decided to change all this. By December 1828, Peel was considering appointing a police authority that would take charge of London by night and for the existing police authorities to switch their allegiance from joint control of Home Office and Bow Street to a larger unit within his own Home Office. This would mean a slow handover of powers and so he decided to centre the new policing group on Charing Cross and five parishes within it parochial boundaries. Peel referred to the need to make ‘changes in the Police of the metropolis’.52 Peel’s metropolis police – or Metropolitan Police as it would become known – did not include the jealously guarded jurisdiction of the City of London.

  The extra money for the new services would, Peel suggested, come out of the local rates. There was already a tax, or a rate as it was called, to pay for the watchmen. This was called the Watch Rate. The new tax would be a Police Rate and from this emerged the term Police Watch Committee, still in the twenty-first century used by local authorities. Here are the beginnings of the Metropolitan Police Force, which, in 1829, Robert Peel set up with a Commissioner of Police and his Assistant Commissioner, in an office in Scotland Yard. The policemen became known as Peelers or Bobbies after Robert Peel. Ten years later a Royal Commission said there should be wider police areas, but many people didn’t want to pay a national tax for policemen. Others insisted that policing was an entirely local matter. And so county justices were allowed to appoint men who would organize local forces; these men were to be known as Chief Constables.

  For the nation, the important moment of this time was June 1830 when George IV died with a miniature of Mrs Fitzherbert round his neck. George IV, a lumbering and increasingly ugly fellow, was not missed. The new King, William IV, was not another Prince of Wales, but the Duke of Clarence, the late George IV’s brother. He had been a fine naval man and, at one time, a patron of the young Nelson. For some time, Clarence had lived with his mistress, Dorothy Bland, an actress who was more popularly known by her stage name, Dorothy, or Dora, Jordan. The arrangement was perfectly reasonable. Their behaviour frightened no horses and they lived happily enough and, indeed, had ten children. However, the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 stated that the monarch’s approval was necessary for a prince (or a princess), under the age of twenty-five, to marry a commoner. George had always disapproved and so William and Dora had never married. Occasionally William found pleasures in other women, but as he said, ‘Mrs Jordan is a very good creature, very domestic and careful of the children. To be sure she is absurd sometimes and has her humours. But there are such things, more or less, in all families.’ But money (or the lack of it), boredom perhaps and the prospect of a younger wife meant separation. Dorothy Jordan was given £4,400 a year, and she moved from their home, Bushey House. She died alone, hiding from her creditors, just outside Paris.

  William had been a naval officer for more than thirty years, the first British monarch to have a whole career in the senior service and by chance, which death is, came to the throne. He had remained the Duke of Clarence, all but obscure on the royal list, until the death of Princess Charlotte (George and Caroline’s only child) in childbirth in 1817. Next in line was his older brother, the Duke of York, but he was in uncertain health, and there had been a keen hunt for a bride for this naval duke who might one day be King.

  Courtiers found Amelia Adelaide Louisa Theresa Caroline, the unmarried daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen who was twenty-five years old and not particularly pretty. But then the Duke of Clarence was fifty-two and even less pretty. It must have been a daunting prospect for her. In 1818, she had arrived in London to be greeted by the grossly fat Prince Regent, the news that her future father-in-law (George III) was locked in Windsor Castle and the expectation that she would sort out William’s finances. But the marriage worked. However, it did nothing for public approval of the monarch. Wellington may have organized the approval of the new King among courtiers, or some of them, but he could not control the sentiments of the electorate. In fact, Wellington was to discover that even with a very limited electoral suffrage (of a population of about 20 million, fewer than 435,000 had the vote) even he, the hero of Waterloo, had no exceptional gift when it came to the return at the general election. Furthermore, it was a big Parliament: 685 Members from the forty English counties and 179 English boroughs, twenty-four Welsh counties and boroughs, the two universities, the twenty-four cities, and the Scottish and Irish constituencies. But there was an imbalance between population and Members. Cornwall, for example, had a population of only 300,000 but had forty-two MPs. Lancashire had one million more people, but only fourteen Members. And for all of them, the prospect of a new Parliament was complicated by a further distraction: a rebellion in Paris in July 1830.

  The July Revolution threw out Charles X, the last of the restored Bourbon monarchs, and Louis Philippe became King of the French, a constitutional monarch. Perhaps seeing what was possible, the Belgians rebelled against the Dutch, their rulers since 1815. The condition by which people who have lived in servitude become willing to rise up when there is a demonstrated possibility that rebellion may be successful spread through Europe. Wellington and his Tories grew nervous as news from the Continent reached London. Wellington’s suspicions allowed his opponents to suggest that the former commander-in-chief was planning yet more Continental military excursions. There seems little evidence that Wellington was planning anything at all, but political rumour assumes an authority above gossip. It was said that these events influenced the outcome of the general election. They certainly had an effect on what happened in Britain after the election.

  Wellington was defeated and the man asked to form the new government was the Whig leader, Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey. The Revolution in France had aroused his interest. He had campaigned, unsuccessfully, for changes i
n Parliament since the 1790s and now he saw his chance. Political reform was certainly a way to calm rebellious instincts. Grey agreed to be Prime Minister only if Parliament would accept a Reform Bill. It did. The reform-minded Whigs now had power for the first time in half a century. It was not an easy time to be in power. The events in the Continent made military spending a high priority but not a popular one. No one who might govern was to be popular. All the more important then to note the vents of March 1831 when the government leader in the Commons rose to present the Reform Bill, which would by the following year become one of the most important political and social milestones of the nineteenth century.

  It is said that the Industrial Revolution created inequalities among the peoples of Britain. But the Industrial Revolution simply made the existing inequalities more obvious. In the 1830s almost everything in society was unequal. There were restrictions on the economic, social, educational, religious and democratic development of the people that made sure that one group remained in charge and another remained almost entirely without influence.

  Charles Grey began his programme of reform by getting rid of the so-called rotten or pocket boroughs – the constituencies owned, and therefore controlled, by the wealthy. And then he gave the vote to more people. Grey was the natural leader of the Whigs. He was an aristocrat, to the right of the Whig party and he respected the old institutions. And although he was a Reformer, his instinct was to balance the relationship between the governing aristocracy and the general public. He believed reform was the way to stop the Radicals getting their hands on government. In the 1830s, the government that was pushing through this Reform Bill was the most aristocratic Cabinet of the century.

  However, the Reform Bill didn’t make it through the Lords first time. But thanks to the Irish Members, the Bill received its second reading on 23 March at three in the morning. But in April the Tories (who held the balance of power) defeated the government at the committee stage and the King dissolved Parliament.

  This meant another election and, this time, the reformers achieved a big majority. A new Reform Bill was presented in June with an important amendment: voting would be given to certain tenants in the counties. This allowed the landlords to control the votes on their estates: tenants would be unlikely to vote against their landlords’ wishes. It got through the Commons in September but, in spite of the best efforts of the aristocratic Cabinet, not the Lords. In October they defeated the motion when twenty-one bishops voted against it. If they hadn’t, Reform would have been on the statute book by one vote. The Commons immediately asked the King to prorogue Parliament and when the new session began the Reform Bill was put forward once again. This time the Lords, realizing that continuing opposition was not feasible, passed the Act in 1832 with various amendments. The Act abolished many boroughs and handed over seats to the shires and, to a lesser extent, to the cities. But there were anomalies: 56 per cent of the electorate lived in counties but they had only 31 per cent of the seats; fifty-six boroughs were told they could no longer have Members; thirty boroughs were allowed just one Member each and twenty-two new boroughs could have two Members each. The vote was given to men who were freeholders of property that was worth forty shillings a year, or those with land worth £10 annually, or who were leasing £50 properties.

  In truth, the Reform Act didn’t change people’s lives and rights to the extent some had feared and others had hoped. Yet, whatever the argument about the worth of the 1832 Act, the way the people of Britain would be governed in future had changed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  1834–7

  In 1834, with Britain just three years away from the start of the Victoria era, the sense of reform was still strong and full of expectation. The previous year, government had got through the Abolition of Slavery Bill. The 1807 Act had banned the slave trade to British colonies. The 1833 Act banned slavery in those colonies; £20 million of compensation to the plantation owners and slave masters helped the abolitionist medicine go down. Reform and discovery were talked about almost as if there was a wide awareness that a whole new era in British constitutional, legal, political and cultural history was in its dawn. It was now that a twenty-five-year-old Charles Darwin was sailing with Captain Robert FitzRoy in the Beagle on the voyage that would visit the Galapagos Islands. Charles Dickens was twenty-two and about to become Parliamentary reporter for the Whig journal, the Morning Chronicle, and in two years’ time the first episode of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club would appear.

  Grey was, until the summer of 1834, Prime Minister; Palmerston was Foreign Secretary; William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne, the man who was to tutor the young Victoria, would replace Grey. It was all very exciting and even romantic. It was not, however, a time of so much comfort for the poor and enlightenment for those with responsibility for legislating to relieve the worst effects of poverty. When the Poor Law was amended in 1834, there was loud rejoicing. Not much of it was heard in the slums and alleyways. The Poor Law may have been considered an improvement by some, but it defied the evidence of a desperate need for something more liberal and less dogmatic. There had been a Poor Law since the 1530s; money came from voluntary payments in the parishes. By the end of the sixteenth century magistrates were allowed to raise money – in other words, funding poor relief was now compulsory.

  By the eighteenth century, the impoverished who weren’t able-bodied had to go to the workhouses. The parishes had to provide jobs outside the workhouses for the sound of limb. But agricultural workers in particular were more and more falling on harder times (England was very much a rural society) and the parishes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, support the poor.

  And so, when the Poor Law Act was amended boards of guardians were appointed to administer it. In theory, this was an improvement to the system; in practice, its effects were not necessarily seen that way. Instead of putting the able-bodied to work in the parishes and tending the less able in the workhouses, now all paupers were forced into the workhouses in which conditions were to be wretched – as a matter of policy. As one government commissioner put it: ‘Our intention is to make workhouses as like prisons as possible.’ This was the nineteenth-century version of the short-sharp-shock treatment. The idea was that the poor would do anything to avoid the workhouse. The cost of looking after the poor was about £8 million a year. Parliament had let through an inadequate piece of legislation and given those who would administer it overwhelming authority. The proposed legislation was never properly scrutinized and the Commissioners presented their evidence in a less than objective way. But MPs were simply glad to get rid of the problem by voting it into law. The Secretary of the Poor Law Commissioners was Edwin Chadwick. He was unbending, domineering, arrogant and unpopular but, apparently, unassailable for nearly two decades. The character of leadership was not much help in deciding if poverty hurt or did not. Moreover there was little prospect of champions stepping forward to improve the lot of those with so much in their lives that might have been improved.

  For example, at the start of the nineteenth century the Combination Acts were passed. These said, in simple terms, that two or more people weren’t allowed to ‘combine’ to get better working conditions and higher wages. In 1824, the Combination Acts of 1800 were repealed which meant that there were now people trying to form area and even national trades unions – in other words broadening the authority of organized labour. This movement took trades unionism from groups who wanted better conditions to groups who had an ideological, social and political agenda. That sounded like progress, but just as there was something akin to a fear of the poor, so there was a fear of organized labour. The Whigs, for example, appeared so afraid of some union movements that they were reluctant to allow Parliament to confront them for fear of rousing what some saw as a sleeping giant. Where they could act quickly, and sometimes unfairly, they did. Six labourers in Tolpuddle in Dorset administered oaths of trades unionism. In 1834, they were transported. It was a tactical mistake. The story of the Tolpuddle
Martyrs was to be remembered more for its symbolism than for their punishment.

  If any had wished for a sign of disapproval of the way the six labourers were treated, then it might have come in the autumn of 1834. On 16 October the Houses of Parliament burned down. By the following morning, the forum of the first Prime Minister, Walpole, of Charles James Fox, of the Pitts, of Edmund Burke, was little but dust and ashes. But this was no act of revolution. A janitor in the House was burning bundles of wooden tallies, sticks that for centuries had been used for accounting in the Treasury. He got carried away, the Palace of Westminster overheated and the ultimate result was the neo-Gothic building that exists today. That this inferno happened in the year of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, of the enactment of inadequate Poor Law reform, of an unsuccessful experiment in national trades unionism, and of three prime ministers, is coincidental; however, it’s not hard to imagine the stir it caused in William IV’s England.

  William was not one of the nation’s finest monarchs. As Duke of Clarence, he had been considered a comical figure, oddly shaped and often tiresome – but a loving father to his ten children by his actress mistress of twenty years. As a royal duke he had been a harmless enough figure; on the throne, he was a liability. He’d wanted to be King so much that he took to gargling to keep away infection and any disease that might take him before his royal time had come. His habit of spitting out of the window of his coach, of wandering about London until rescued and of making less than regal public statements didn’t endear him to his ministers. And he knew it.