Raglan was sixty-six years old. He had fought, and was wounded, at Waterloo in 1815 and had married Wellington’s niece. He was not a distinguished general and for some reason persisted in calling the enemy the French. However, he may be remembered for more than his style of coat and raglan sleeve. Many of his commanders were about the same age and older, with the exception of his Cavalry Commander, Lord Cardigan, who, apart from leading the charge of the Light Brigade, had the woollen jacket, the cardigan, named after him. The Light Brigade charge would in twenty-first-century military affairs be considered a stupid operation. There would be no glory, only tragedy. It would be the sort of event that would have the public crying for withdrawal from the conflict.
The Charge was launched in October 1854 in Balaclava. The Russian guns were dug in. The British sent 673 cavalry along the valley to attack the Russians. They succeeded but at terrible cost in lives and wounded. Cardigan thought his men very brave, drank a bottle of champagne and went to bed. Later it was understood that the Light Brigade had charged the wrong Russians. Raglan had not been quite coherent in what he wanted his cavalry to do and when his orders reached his junior commander, Lord Lucan, he misread them. He too was born of the single-minded bravery and was later promoted Field Marshal. Obey the last order or question the value? The consequences of doing the wrong thing were considerable. William Howard Russell, the famous correspondent of The Times, reported, ‘At twenty-five to twelve not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of those Muscovite guns.’ It was all a fine nineteenth-century example of useless military heroism. Of the 673 cavalry in that charge, 113 were killed, and 134 wounded. Nearly 500 horses were left for dead in what Tennyson would call ‘The Valley of Death’. After the charge, the British and their allies were still determined to take Sebastopol, the great Russian port on the Black Sea. But before that could be achieved, the two sides met again, this time at the Battle of Inkerman. It was a ferocious affair. The British took 2,357 casualties; the French, 929; the Russians, more than 12,000. However, the matter was inconclusive as the objective of taking Sebastopol was not achieved. That would have to wait until spring 1855.
Dreadful weather took command of the campaign. The soldiers were still in their summer clothes and many had lost their kit altogether. Cholera and dysentery, withering cold and starvation took a greater number of men that enemy bullets had not. The hospital ships running between the Crimea and Constantinople were hardly safe havens for the wounded. One in ten died on that voyage and, in February, half the patients of one of them died – and by no means all of them from their wounds. And then conditions started to improve and lives began to be saved. At first the government did not know just how terrible were the conditions, but finally woke up to the disaster that would eventually bring it down. The scandal of the Crimea could no longer be hidden from the British public. A Commission of Inquiry was set up although its report was not published until the worst was over. The Secretary-at-War, Sidney Herbert, wrote to Florence Nightingale, who had arrived in Crimea with her nurses, and gave her his backing for the actions she believed necessary to relieve the suffering of the soldiers. And the evidence of neglect which faced Miss Nightingale was an equally damning example of bad planning and buck-passing – no one would accept responsibility. In the field, the consequences of poor decision-making and even worse leadership were clear at last. Raglan resigned and then, ten days later, died. In September 1855, Sebastopol at last fell and, in March 1856, yet another Paris Peace Treaty was signed.
The war was over and Britain, under its new Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston (who was born in 1784 at Broadlands, later the twentieth-century home of Lord Mountbatten) continued the family business of industrial and economic expansion. As Britain expanded its trading interests abroad, there were extra mouths to feed at home.
The population of England and Wales had grown from less than fourteen million at the 1831 census to nearly eighteen million in 1851. In the same period, Scotland’s population grew from 2.2 million to 2.8 million. In Ireland, the population had fallen from 7.8 million in 1831 to 6.5 million at the eve of the Crimean War – and, for the moment, that downward trend continued. The famine had had its effect, but emigration now contributed greatly. In Scotland alone, more than 10 per cent of the population was Irish born. Famously, the biggest movement was to America, but those seeking a new life in the New World weren’t all Irish. In 1850, the number of Americans who’d been born in Great Britain was reckoned to be 1.3 million.
The 1851 census provides a picture of the nation, and of what the people of Britain were doing for a living halfway through the century. The biggest single group was still agricultural workers – nearly one-and-a-half million of them. Then came domestic servants – about one million. Here, in extracts from a report in the 1851 census, is a simplified picture of the nation’s workers.
1851 census:
Cotton calico, manufacture, printing and dyeing:
501,565
Boot and shoe makers:
274,000+
Hat and dress makers:
268,000
Coal miners:
219,000
Washerwomen, manglers and laundry keepers:
146,091
Errand boys, porters and messengers:
101,000
Grocers:
86,000
Gardeners:
81,000
Engine and machine makers:
48,000
Railway labourers:
34,306
Pedlars:
30,500
Horsekeepers, grooms and jockeys:
29,000
Nurses:
25,500
Straw hat and bonnet makers:
22,000
Anglican clergymen:
18,587
Policemen:
18,348
Surgeons and apothecaries:
15,163
Stay makers:
13,700
Hairdressers and wig-makers:
12,000+
The census also reveals something about one class that was expanding rapidly in Victorian society: civil servants. There were now 31,000 of them. In 1853 a commission reported to the government that there was a need to improve the upper echelons of the Civil Service. Its principal authors, Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan, put forward the idea of recruiting by examination. They recognized that just as a man expected results if he paid any professional – a lawyer, for example – then the tax-payer had the right to a similar professional expectation from the Civil Service. The nineteenth-century Civil Service mandarins pointed out that setting an examination didn’t necessarily test a man’s character. And surely the best people would not care to sit for a public examination. But Northcote and Trevelyan had identified a widely recognized weakness in the nation’s bureaucracy.
Reform was also under way in another area of English life associated with scandal, corruption and privilege – the Established Church. By the 1850s, the Church had undergone administrative and constitutional reform in rather the same public manner as had the Civil Service. The Roman Catholics remained in a minority with restricted civil rights and there was a larger minority group, the Dissenters or Non-conformists: those who chose not to conform to the Established Church.
What people actually believed is hard to judge but there is a perception that in most rural areas superstition was a greater influence on lower-class countrymen and women than the parson’s promises of heaven or his threats of hell. However, contemporary opinion suggests that by the 1850s the Church and the people were well pleased with each and while High and Low Churches may have striven for men’s souls, the liberal wing of the Church strove for reform. This was the age of reform of almost any institution and the anomalies in Church administration made it an obvious target. Bishops had done very well from endowments, some making tens of thousands of pounds a year. One archbishop is said to have died with an estate in excess of £1 millio
n.
Liberal churchmen were uneasy about the Church’s established wealth from property, investments, patronage and donations, all of which made the Church of England an institution with greater wealth than some European States. Religious rather than secular reformers wanted reform because they believed the Church had lost its religious way although this was a continuing mood that had surfaced during the latter part of the sixteenth century and had never waned. Yet it took government-sponsored commissions and legislation to make basic changes, such as those forbidding a clergyman to hold more than two livings. The Church in all its Anglican and Non-conformist persuasions visibly thrived; between 1831 and 1851, more than 2,000 new churches were built, many of them sponsored by new money that wanted wealth and achievement to have the tallest spire and the stoutest pews as a memorial. The nineteenth-century desire to erect what would eventually become nationwide neo-Gothic memorials to God and, of course, the Victorians was under way.
As we saw above, the coalition government of George Hamilton-Gordon, the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, had collapsed largely because of the mismanagement of the Crimean War. The Cabinet refused to accept the motion in the House for a Commission of Inquiry into the ‘condition of the army and the supply services’. Lord John Russell, the former Prime Minister who was, by then, Lord President of the Council, protested and resigned. The House voted against the government by more than 150 votes. And so Aberdeen’s Cabinet, which had included William Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Palmerston as Home Secretary, had to go.
The Queen was unhappy. She liked Aberdeen and it was thanks to him that the royal family came by Balmoral Castle. Aberdeen had inherited the lease from his brother and the Castle was said to sit in one of the driest areas of Scotland – something to do with the rain clouds breaking to the west. This attracted the Queen. Without seeing anything more than watercolours of the castle, the Queen bought the lease from Aberdeen in the late 1840s. ‘It was,’ she wrote in her journal on first seeing it, ‘so calm, so solitary, it did one good as one gazed around; and the pure mountain air was most refreshing. All seemed to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.’
The most obvious man to be Prime Minister was Palmerston but the Queen didn’t much care for that. The Conservatives held a majority in the House and so she called on the Earl of Derby. The fourteenth Earl was then in his late fifties. He had entered Parliament as a Whig in the 1820s, served as Secretary for Ireland, worked for the abolition of slavery and then joined Disraeli and the ranks of the protectionists, the Conservative group who had brought down the Peel government. Briefly in 1852, Derby had become Prime Minister. If there had to be a change, then it would have to be Derby. Disraeli was delighted. This was a chance of office. He, Disraeli, even threatened to break up the party if Derby didn’t accept the challenge. But Derby knew that any government he formed wouldn’t last long if it was without Gladstone, Sidney Herbert and, most important of all, Palmerston. Derby couldn’t count on Gladstone. He detested Disraeli (he actually said Disraeli inspired in him a sense of revulsion) and would never sit in Cabinet with him. He and Herbert could not forgive the way in which Disraeli had brought about Peel’s downfall. That left Palmerston, who wouldn’t serve under Derby.
Derby failed to get the three men he needed and the Queen tried Lord John Russell. Although well regarded, there wasn’t enough support for him and so the first and obvious choice, Palmerston, became Prime Minister at the age of seventy-one. Disraeli was very Disraeli about the whole affair. He described Palmerston as an imposter, an old painted pantaloon, a man utterly exhausted. But not everyone shared this sense of spite. Sidney Herbert pointed out that people may criticize and dislike Palmerston but he was, ‘the only public man in England who has a name’.
Palmerston’s peerage was Irish. At twenty-two he had become a Tory MP and, by the age of twenty-five, a junior minister. By 1830 he was in charge of foreign policy. He was Foreign Secretary for both Lord Grey and Viscount Melbourne. After the fall of the Peel government, Palmerston was back as Lord John Russell’s Foreign Secretary, but he lost his job because he simply disregarded the wishes of the Queen and therefore the government. Now, four years after forcing Lord John Russell to sack him, the Queen had Palmerston as her Prime Minister.
How would she get on with this man she called ‘Pilgerstein’? The answer was, very well indeed. Palmerston took charge of the war and proved to be a good war leader. Victoria recognized this. He, in turn, recognized her intellect and her careful enthusiasm. Furthermore, Palmerston changed his mind about Prince Albert. Until this point, he hadn’t held Albert in much regard. Now he saw him as a thoughtful adviser. ‘How fortunate,’ Palmerston once remarked, ‘it has been for the country that the Queen married such a prince.’
And by the end of Palmerston’s first year as Prime Minister, and the end of the Crimean War, Victoria had completely changed her attitude towards the man she had dismissed for going his own, and not her, way. ‘Of all the prime ministers we have had,’ said Victoria, ‘Lord Palmerston is the one who gives the least trouble, and is most amenable to reason and most ready to adopt suggestions.’ What her once beloved Melbourne (by now seven years dead) would have thought of such praise can only be guessed. Victoria raised Palmerston to the Garter. Elevated to that most noble order, Palmerston did not rest in his Windsor stall. He sensed that the country wanted an inquiry into the mismanagement of the Crimean War even though he risked losing two of his Cabinet ministers – Gladstone and Herbert – in the process. A more innovative Prime Minister might have suffered, but Palmerston was at the pinnacle of his public popularity. And no matter how talented the Peelites (who included Gladstone and Herbert) were, they had no great numbers to support them. And Palmerston had a war, the supreme test of foreign policy and domestic political diversion. Furthermore, Palmerston understood how to exploit the authority of his office. The nineteenth-century constitutional analyst, Walter Bagehot, once described the office of Prime Minister as that of the nation’s headmaster, a person with influence, an authority, a facility in giving a great tone to discussion, or a mean tone, which no other person had. He saw Palmerston as a headmaster with a light tone to the proceedings of Parliament.
Palmerston was twice Prime Minister, and when he won the 1858 General Election, he won it on his personality rather than his policies. Equally, the party really did accept Palmerston’s opinion that no new legislation was necessary. On one occasion he was asked what new ideas he would bring before the House. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘there is really nothing to be done. We cannot go on adding to the Statute Book ad infinitum . . . we cannot go on legislating for ever.’
Within a year of bringing the war with Russia in the Crimea to an end, Palmerston, his government and most of all, his far-flung soldiers, were about to face a test of great and long-lasting consequence – the often misnamed Indian Mutiny.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
1857–60
The British had been in India since 1663 when the East India Company set up in Bengal, having been chased from their other holdings in south-east Asia by the Dutch. Bengal had been ruled by the Moguls since 1576. About halfway through the eighteenth century, Clive of India defeated the ruler of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey and the Moguls ceded Bengal to the East India Company. The Company nominated an Indian prince to the throne, but in truth ruled through a British governor – whom, of course, they appointed.
The Mutiny started in 1857. For about twelve months Indians had rebelled against British rule – rule not by the British government, but by the East India Company. As well as its own governor and princes in its pocket, the Company had its own bureaucracy and, most importantly, its own army. It has to be remembered that the popular version of the Indian Mutiny, more properly, the Sepoy Rebellion, is misleading. The uprising was not about animal grease on cartridges. It was, inevitably, a far more complex matter.
During the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century the Bri
tish fought what became known as the second Maratha War. The result was a further consolidation of British interests and most importantly, the merging of Gujarat with the presidency of Bombay. From there, the Company also controlled Agra, Delhi and Meerut. Here was an addition to the North-West Province. By the time of the third Maratha War, which lasted just between 1817 and 1818, the Company had amassed, by the standards of the day, a huge army. The Maharaja of Nagpur, Appa Sahib, and the leader of the Confederacy, the Peshwa Baji Rao, were roundly routed. Baji Rao was sent off to the Ganges with a pension book and his land was merged with the Bombay presidency.
Thus by 1820, the British East India Company had established the Raj in India, but it still was not government from London. It was the effective ruling of India by what we would call a corporation, but with government support. This did not mean unlimited profits. When Lord Wellesley was Governor (1797–1805) he had not much regard for the profit/loss accounts of the Company, although there were periods of excellent trading results under his rule. Wellesley’s main interest was sorting out Britain’s place in India. He resigned before he could be sacked, but always believed that he had done a remarkable job and should be honoured. He had his supporters. This consolidation by the Company did not mean that they could stand down their considerable forces. In the 1820s they were at war with Burma; a decade later, with Afghanistan; a decade on from that, with Sind (now Sind Province in Pakistan) and the Sikhs in Punjab. Moreover, between1814 and 1816 there had been the Gurkha War, immediately followed until 1818 by the third Maratha War. Between 1845 and 1849 there were two Sikh wars.
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