The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The question which forces itself upon our minds at the distance of one and a quarter centuries is how much of a true political shift took place as a result of the electoral reforms of 1884. Did the granting of a vote to 4,376,916 male adults (as opposed to 2,618,453) before the passage of the Representation of the People Act3 appreciably change the way in which Great Britain was governed over the next few decades? Believers in Parliament might see British history as an unfolding progression of freedoms by which, as general election followed general election, more and more people – first the urban males, then the entire working class (males), then all adults, male and female – were empowered. But empowered to do what? To elect representatives who for the most part perpetuated the system which had placed them there. The great majority of British members of Parliament since W.H. Smith became ‘ruler of the Queen’s Nav-ee’ in H.M.S. Pinafore have followed his example –

  I always voted at my Party’s call

  And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

  If the majority of the population was working class, how did it come about that until the twentieth century there were next to no working-class parliamentarians thrown up by this supposedly democratic system? Was the Reform Act of 1884 a step in the direction of democracy, or was it a piece of legislation which allowed 4,376,916 male individuals to go into a ballot box and choose between two party candidates who in many fundamental areas had identical political aims? Is the reason that Irish Home Rule split the Liberal Party quite simply that it was the only issue about which the political classes were seriously divided, and the only issue, thanks to the solidarity of the Irish MPs, in which a vote cast in a ballot box might make an appreciable difference to the way politicians conducted public life?

  We have already seen that Gladstone, who moved thousands to tears with his evocation of Bulgarians shivering on their icy mountains, did nothing to change the terms of the Congress of Berlin; nor did he, who so deplored ‘Beaconsfieldism’ and its jingoistic creeds, hesitate to make Sir Evelyn Baring the effective king of Egypt. Tory brewers could fight with teetotalling Nonconformists over duties on beer and spirits, but this was a comparatively minor issue confronting the parties compared with the political issues which, with hindsight, we might consider primary. In 1886, with a slump in trade, London saw the riots which we have described here. The socialist ideas of Hyndman or Marx or Morris were simply not considered by the political classes. We can see that the position of women in society is a question which emerges from the localized debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and their reform, so bravely raised by Josephine Butler and James Stansfeld. We can see how closely the feminist issue raised by that drama relates to the growth in women’s education – the extraordinary struggles of women to receive a university education on a par with men. In Britain, London University was alone in allowing women to sit examinations and receive degrees. The numbers of women at Girton College or Newnham in Cambridge, Lady Margaret Hall (founded 1878), Somerville (1879), St Hugh’s (1886) and St Hilda’s (1893) at Oxford, were tiny, but significant. The actual texture of life for women of all classes was eventually to change as a result of these places. It is something far less quaint than the old photographs of the Girton girls’ rowing eight would suggest: it is the empowering – professionally and intellectually – of their sex.

  Those who believe that Parliament is an institution with a serious political function might be surprised that the first woman member to take her seat did not do so until 1919 and that the proportion of men to women in Parliament is still in the twenty-first century overwhelming. But this is one of the many issues where the real agents of change were extra-parliamentary. Women’s colleges, trade unions, the churches, the cells of non-parliamentary political groups and – in time of war – the meeting-together of people in ships, squadrons and regiments were all far more effective agents of change in Britain than any political party pre-1945 – arguably beyond. The function of Parliament was to preserve the power of the political classes; and this in effect meant the Rich.

  Twenty-seven years after the Reform Act, a disillusioned Radical MP named Hilaire Belloc wrote a brilliant analysis of the Party System.

  We are not surprised at Romeo loving Juliet, though he is a Montague and she is a Capulet. But if we found in addition that Lady Capulet was by birth a Montague, that Lady Montague was the first cousin of old Capulet, that Mercutio was at once the nephew of a Capulet and the brother-in-law of a Montague, that Count Paris was related on his father’s side to one house and on his mother’s side to the other, that Tybalt was Romeo’s uncle’s stepson and that the Friar who had married Romeo and Juliet was Juliet’s uncle and Romeo’s first cousin once removed, we should probably conclude that the feud between the two houses was being kept up for dramatic entertainment of the people of Verona.4

  The deadly accuracy of this analysis, published in 1911, can be shown by analysing the guest-lists at country house parties from any time between 1880 and the outbreak of the Great War.

  ‘Pace Bagehot,’ wrote David Cannadine in his magisterial The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, ‘the spirit and substance of the mid-Victorian Commons was aristocratic, not plutocratic.’ One sees what Cannadine means when he goes on to remind us that in 1880, of 652 MPs, 394 were nobles, baronets, landed gentry or their near relations, and that after 1884 this balance was somewhat reduced.5 (In the 1910 elections the youngest candidates on both sides were the sons of peers.) There is, though, something misleadingly romantic about the distinction between a plutocracy and an aristocracy. The Victorian aristocracy might have enjoyed the fiction that it was a race apart. Its strength actually derived from its adaptability, its ability to absorb new blood and new money into its ranks. While romantic snobs such as Proust’s Baron de Charlus might think that an aristocrat was a person with many quarterings, tracing a pedigree back to the Carolingian nobility, the Victorian nobleman as like as not was making sensible injections of cash into the family kitty. The decline in agriculture and the collapse of money from rents and farms both made this a necessity and allowed the new money to buy up landed estates. It took very few years to make an aristocrat. So, the Peerage might tell us that the 5th Earl of Harrowby, for example, had been born in 1844 and in 1887 married the Hon. Dame Ethel Smith. Her mother, Emily, became Viscountess Hambleden in 1891. This deeply aristocratic lineage was created to add a touch of nobility to her second marriage. The viscountcy passed through her to the first male born of this marriage. This was our old friend W.H. Smith, whose fortune was made from station bookstalls but who was by then, like the truly Gilbertian figure he inspired, some time first lord of the Admiralty, first lord of the Treasury and lord warden of the Cinque Ports.

  Not only did the banking families of the Barings, the Glynns, the Marjoribanks and the Rothschilds all enter the peerage, but by the 1880s trade of all sorts could do so. Arkwright’s partner, Jedediah Strutt, was a poor weaver who developed the revolutionary spinning jenny. His grandson Edward Strutt became 1st Baron Belper in 1856. His son married a daughter of the 2nd Earl of Leicester. His great-granddaughter married the 16th Duke of Norfolk. By the 1890s ‘the proportion of business and commercial families achieving peerage was 25 per cent and rising’; under Gladstone or Salisbury, the families of Hardy (iron), Guest (steel), Eaton (silk), Armstrong (engineering), Brassey (railways), Guinness, Allsop and Bass – all beer – ascended to coroneted grandeur. Between 1886 and 1914 200 new peerages were created.6

  ‘Relying on God, not on Fortune’ is the family motto of the W.H. Smiths – aka Viscounts Hambleden. Deo non fortuna fretus: but a fortune helped; and stationery and magazines made more money than arable or sheep.

  Chamberlain in 1883, campaigning for the extension of the franchise, had denounced the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury:

  Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class – of the class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin; whose fortunes – as in his case – have origin
ated by grants made in times gone by for the services which courtiers rendered kings, and have since grown and increased, while they have slept, by levying an increased share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country.

  The election was to be a ‘Mend Them or End Them’ contest for the aristocrats, declared Chamberlain,7 but he was soon brokering deals, on the one hand with the Whigs such as Lord Hartington, on the other with the Conservatives such as Lord Salisbury, in whose third Cabinet he would serve as colonial secretary. Chamberlain’s mercurial political career makes best sense when one realizes that he made an absolute identification between Power and Money. Beatrice Potter, who was in love with Chamberlain, and excited by his Radical ideas, was herself the child of a first-generation millionaire who had made his money out of railways. She longed for a creed, and believed in the early to mid-Eighties that Chamberlain’s radicalism might be what she sought. Yet she was shrewd enough to see that the big Birmingham business families, ‘the Kenricks and Chamberlains form the aristocracy and plutocracy of Birmingham. They stand far above the town society in social position, wealth and culture, and yet spend their lives as great citizens, taking an active and leading part in the municipal, political and educational life of their town.’8

  She was devastated when four years later, in November 1888, Chamberlain, twice a widower, remarried. The day before the ceremony she prayed for them in Westminster Abbey – ‘I prayed that the love of a good woman might soften and comfort him’ – and the next day observed:

  This marriage will, I think, decide his fate as a politician. He must become a Tory. The tendencies of his life are already set in that direction: hatred of former colleagues, sympathy with the pleasure-loving attractive class of ‘English gentleman’ with which he now associates … by her attraction to the ‘good society’ she will draw him closer to the aristocratic party. She is, besides, an American aristocrat and like the aristocrats of a new country is probably more aristocratic in her tastes and prejudices than the aristocrats of the old country.9

  This was shrewdly judged, and it is probably a truth which needs to be set beside the artistic truths of the novels of Henry James which, for the last two decades of the nineteenth century, chronicled the meeting of the old and new worlds: usually in the form of American innocents, often heiresses of great wealth, failing until a crucial and late moment to perceive the moral duplicity of the Europeans. For all their elaborate manner, many of James’s great novels have the simplicity of The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck, a female who does not understand why a foxy-whiskered gentleman should bid her return, bringing sage and onions, to his feather-bespattered lair. Isabel Archer’s fox in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is Gilbert Osmond, aided and abetted by the wicked Madame Merle. But there is a shift between The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl (1904) which perhaps reflects a political reality. Whereas Isabel Archer is the victim of Merle and Osmond’s plot, Maggie Verver is comparatively robust. In the end, it is the immense wealth of the old man, Adam Verver, which shows itself stronger than the title of an Italian prince. He can force the treacherous Charlotte, his second wife, to return with him to the United States while his daughter Maggie keeps her prince in Europe – a premonition of the strength of American money in relation to the old world order, a strength which President Woodrow Wilson would demonstrate within fifteen years of The Golden Bowl’s publication.

  It is interesting that as well as Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, another rising political star of the 1880s, should have married an American. Chamberlain married Mary Endicott, aged twenty-four, the daughter of the American secretary of state for war.10 Randolph Churchill married Jennie Jerome, a figure more reminiscent of Edith Wharton’s novels than those of Henry James. She had grown up in a superb mansion in Madison Square. They met during the Cowes regatta in 1873 and were engaged within a week. Though her son saw Jennie as ‘a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power’,11 it was not a happy marriage. By the time that mother-loving little boy, Winston Spencer Churchill, was a schoolboy at Harrow, London buzzed with rumours of Jennie’s and Randolph’s affairs, and rocky relationship.12

  Politically, at this distance, it is hard to see why Lord Randolph Churchill so impressed his contemporaries. Pop-eyed, small of stature and caddish in manner, he seems like the archetypal career politician. He led the Tory attacks on Bradlaugh in the Commons, for example, with expressions of fervent Christian shock that an atheist should be admitted to that assembly, while privately admitting to his wife that he thought ‘all religious differences senseless’. At home he ridiculed ‘the monotonous exhortations of a clergyman in a white surplice’, while in public he spoke as if the Heavens would fall if Bradlaugh took his seat.

  ‘God forbid that any great English party should be led by a Churchill!’ Gladstone exclaimed when someone spoke of the young Randolph as a potential leader of the Conservative Party. ‘There never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down that had either morals or principles.’13 It is hard to make much sense of his ‘Fourth Party’, a group which consisted of Churchill, John Eldon Gorst, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and – some of the time – Arthur Balfour: Gorst saw it as ‘the rise of the Democratic Tory party which was always Dizzy’s dream’. Some saw Lord Randolph as a Liberal trapped, as it were by accident, in the wrong party – this was the theme of W.S. Churchill’s hagiographical treatment of his father. Some of his more erratic judgements are perhaps attributable to the illness which eventually killed him, aged forty-five, in January 1895. Bouts of euphoria followed manic states, and his speech – a cruel fate for one who so eloquently entertained the Commons – became incoherent. Paralysis set in. Gossips diagnosed syphilis – probably correctly. Certainly this was not helped by the family disease of alcoholism. But Churchill also had something else wrong with him – a brain tumour, or maybe multiple sclerosis.14 Perhaps he sensed that all was not well when he so impulsively resigned as the very young chancellor of the Exchequer in Salisbury’s government in December 1886, because W.H. Smith (secretary for war) questioned his limitation of expenditure on defence. Since the details of the budget were as yet undisclosed to the public, the reasons for his resignation were mysterious to them, and the career which began as the meteoric rise of the Democratic Tory fizzled into obscurity.

  33

  Into Africa

  DURING THE MONTH of October 1885 – which saw the funeral of Lord Shaftesbury in Westminster Abbey, a general election in France, and the removal of 14 tons of rock by dynamite to form the tunnel in New York harbour known as the Hell gate, while a cyclone swept southern Italy, and a horse called Plaisanterie won both the Cesarewitch Stakes and the Cambridgeshire Stakes1 – a thirty-eight-year-old Englishman was lying in a small hut in the East African region north of Lake Victoria Nyanza – Masai country. In his Lett’s monthly pocket diary, measuring 4½ inches by 2¾, he wrote, in a tiny handwriting, ‘Eighth day’s prison. I can hear no news, but was held up by Psalm XXX, which came with great power. A hyena howled near me last night smelling a sick man, but I hope it is not to have me yet.’2

  Though he was not to be eaten by hyenas, James Hannington’s (1847–85) confidence was misplaced. His arrival as the newly consecrated bishop of the newly created diocese of Eastern Equatorial Africa had been full of hope and prayer. Docking at Mombasa, he had established his diocesan headquarters at Frere Town and then began a progress westwards through land which he had persuaded himself was ‘his’ diocese. The Masai were disturbed by the party – 226 strong – which the bishop took in his entourage, and the Christians suffered frequent attacks as well as bad weather and illness. At Kwa Sundu, in October, Hannington reduced the party to 50 – and pressed on towards Lake Victoria Nyanza, covering 170 miles in five days. All in all it had been an heroic trek – starting with a walk of well over 400 miles to plant the Cross of Christ on Kilimanjaro, and marching onwards down routes which had been trodden by traders – from Mom
basa, through Taita by the lakes of Naivasha and Baringo to Uganda.3 But the new young king of Ganda, Mwanga, found the advance of a white man along such a route undoubtedly threatening. The bishop and his party were surrounded, overpowered and arrested. The pocket diary reveals that Hannington applied to himself the words of the Psalmist – ‘I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord. Be of good courage. Wait, I say, on the Lord.’ On 28 October, inquiring the reason why his custodians were drumming and shouting louder than usual, the bishop was told that he and his companions were to be taken to Uganda. As they set off, Hannington’s party was surrounded by Masai. The bearded young man looked his murderers in the eye and bade them tell King Mwanga that he had purchased the road to Buganda with his life. Then he pointed to his own gun which was being brandished by a Masai warrior. The gun went off and, as his friend the Rev. E.C. Dawson put it, ‘the great and noble spirit leapt forth from its broken house of clay, and entered with exceeding joy into the presence of the King’. The Masai then massacred, with spears, all but four of the fifty men accompanying the bishop.

  Ugandan Christians revere Hannington as a martyr. He was not the last Anglican martyr to meet a violent end there – in our own lifetimes President Idi Amin saw to that. Archbishop Janani Luwum was among the untold numbers massacred in the years 1971–9 in Uganda.4

  Hannington, who earned the timeless crown of martyrdom, was also a man of his time – an archetypical new man, young, energetic, certain – very recognizably a man of Chamberlain’s world rather than, say, that of Lord Melbourne. Like Benson, the archbishop of Canterbury, like many of the new electorate, he came from the lower middle class – his father ran a warehouse in Brighton. Hannington himself worked in the warehouse from the age of fifteen to twenty-one. The family, originally dissenters, joined the Church of England in 1867, when Hannington was twenty. He was thereafter entitled to go to Oxford, though he attended a private hall – St Mary’s – rather than a college, and barely scraped a degree, being twenty-six before he did so. He was priested when he was twenty-nine, so had a mere nine years of ministry, nearly all of it exercised abroad for the Church Missionary Society.