Thank you for downloading this eBook.
* * *
All the books totally free of charge, if you like to receive our books on the next time, please Subscribe and join our free books group.
Subscribe
Jacob Rees-Mogg
* * *
THE VICTORIANS
Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain
Contents
Introduction: The Eminent Victorians
Peel: People Before Party
Palmerston: ‘The Shibboleth of Policy’
Napier: The Great Radical
Sleeman: Moral Purpose
Pugin: The Hand of God
Albert: Behind the Throne
Disraeli: The One-Nation Conservative
Gladstone: An Eminent Moralist
Gordon: Servant of the People
Dicey: Call of Duty
Grace: The Superstar
Victoria: Pole Star
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the Author
Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Conservative and the MP for the constituency of North East Somerset. Jacob sits on the Brexit Select Committee and he chairs the European Research Group. After Eton, Jacob read History at Trinity College, Oxford, before moving into finance. He co-founded Somerset Capital Management, which specialises in emerging markets investment management.
My mother on her 80th birthday, without whom this book could not have been written.
Introduction: The Eminent Victorians
Early in 1895, Queen Victoria’s private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby attended on Her Majesty for the last time. Ponsonby had served the Queen in this role since 1870 but he had suffered a stroke in the previous year. He was no longer able to fulfil his duties and now he was calling on the Queen at Osborne to say his farewells. It is recorded that he looked at Victoria and said slowly, ‘What a funny little old woman you are.’ The Queen’s response was ‘Sir Henry, you cannot be well’ and she swiftly rang the bell for him to be removed from the Royal presence.
In a peculiar way, this unorthodox comment issued by a loyal courtier has become something of the standard view of the entire Victorian age. It is a very strange view or summation of a time of truly transformational, revolutionary change in Britain, an age when life expectancy was increasing, material wealth rising year by year and the Constitution evolving gloriously into a settled and stable state. All of it reduced to the figure of this littlest of little old ladies, of rather an excessive fusspot, who is never amused. At a stroke, the gilding of the Victorian period becomes scraped and damaged.
In his famous book Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, the Bloomsburyite Lytton Strachey did his bit to scratch at this gilding. His book took a blow torch to the heroes of the British nineteenth century while the abiding cynicism of our age has tended to accept his assessment. This too seems counter-intuitive because the briefest glance at the history of Victorian Britain reveals its abiding achievements and the parade of significant public figures from whom so much can be learned. Sadly, society these days, which has so little faith in anything, is understandably nervous of those Victorians who believed in so much, who embraced a sense of purpose and destiny so glaringly lacking both in their Hanoverian predecessors and in the beau monde of our contemporary world. In Eminent Victorians, Strachey mocked the weaknesses where they could be found but ignored the ‘great image, whose brightness was excellent … This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and thighs of brass.’ Such beautiful and resonant language comes from the Book of Daniel, as it described a glorious and gleaming figure. Only its feet were wrought of clay. Yet Strachey focused on the clay alone.
Perhaps it is natural to mock the recent past. We do so in order to ignore the failures of our own world so it is little surprise that the twentieth century should laugh at the Victorians. The twentieth century was a new age when, as Bloomsbury promised, tea would be taken at different and exciting times of the day but it was a period which embraced war and destruction on a scale unprecedented in world history. No wonder the new century should seek instead to laugh at the era just passed while a century of growing cynicism and of decline should glance enviously back to a period of moral certainty, of success. It could hardly have been any other way.
Nonetheless, I owe a debt to Strachey and his mean-minded book because when I had leafed through Eminent Victorians I was struck by its unfairness and its cynicism. It occurred to me that it was time to look again at some of these eminent Victorians and to reassess their effect upon and contribution to their world and to our own. Now is the time to reconsider and marvel at how remarkable the Victorian period was and to study the luminaries who led it and who invested in the condition of the people. After all, good leadership matters. Historians quarrel about the importance of individuals in the development of history and argue about how much would have happened anyway. However, the drive and industry of certain people cannot be ignored and the effects of their lives and their decisions can in fact be discerned and something of their impact glimpsed. Indeed, such was the quality of leadership in Victoria’s reign that it is more difficult to decide whom to exclude than to include as so many figures dominated their own fields. It is thus a reasonable complaint to say that any selection is essentially arbitrary.
Hence I have chosen a dozen such leaders in this book. A dozen who share certain common characteristics but who would not by any means have agreed with each other on everything. They come from throughout the ‘long Victorian century’, which stretches from the birth of Lord Palmerston in 1784 to the death of Albert Venn Dicey in 1922. Two elder statesmen, in the figures of Palmerston and Sir Robert Peel; two later, and rival, politicians, in the form of William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli; two military men, in the shapes of Sir Charles Napier and Charles Gordon; the architect Augustus Pugin and the legal authority Dicey; the great cricketer W. G. Grace and the administrator William Sleeman. Finally, Victoria herself and her consort Albert.
Each was patriotic but in a positive rather than an aggressive sense. Napier saw faults with England, especially in its relationship with Ireland but he also realised that the law was a force for good and would help people in India as much as it did at home. Gordon, like Napier, had a strong belief in the equality of all people. Each life was valuable to him and when he was victorious in battle he was generous. Similarly, he believed that spreading British civilisation, and specifically stifling the slave trade, was an intrinsic good in its own right. Victoria, as she presided over an age and a culture, embraced a vision of equality for all of her subjects and was in no doubt that her rule was essentially benign. Indeed, her treatment of her non-British servants maddened her Court but it was a crucial part of her understanding of her imperial role.
Disraeli also understood the importance of a collective vision. His political drive was to improve the condition of the people and to make two nations one. Palmerston’s patriotism was the most muscular but the main point of his vision, encapsulated in his famous Civis Romanus sum speech, was that it included all British subjects. Sleeman is in some ways the most thoroughly conventional of the individuals collected in this book, for he was an arch-bureaucrat convinced that British administrative processes could use British law to counter and stop a great evil. Dicey saw with clarity how the law worked and how it related to the unique British constitutional settlement and his legal thinking developed a new orthodoxy. This remarkable man ensured that a true understanding of the Constitution is an absolute subject for romanticism which is of continuing benefit to the nation.
Each figure, whether it be Grace wielding a cricket bat or Gladstone with a moral vision in defence of the Christians in Bulgaria, had confidence in the positive nature
of their home nation. The origins of this moral vision predate the age: the early nineteenth-century Prime Minister George Canning, although he died before Victoria came to the throne, was a strong influence on both Palmerston and Peel. Canning declared resoundingly, ‘We avow ourselves to be partial to the COUNTRY in which we live notwithstanding the daily panegyrics we read and hear on the superior virtues and endowments of its rival and hostile neighbours. We are prejudiced in favour of her Establishments, civil and religious; though without claiming for either that ideal perfection, which philosophy today professes to discover in the more luminous systems that are arising on all sides of us.’ These words epitomise the wise confidence that the Victorians placed in their nation.
All of these heroes possessed a practical patriotism. They recognised the civilising effect of their own nation and understood the good fortune of Britain, as a nation blessed by being the first to receive the benefit of a good Constitution and the rule of law. They also had the self-confidence to say that civilisation was a good thing and that it is reasonable to export it to other countries to remove such hardships as exist there. Pugin particularly wanted to reassert the Gothic beauty of England, an aspect of life that he felt had been lost because of the effects of the Reformation. He believed that all types of people benefited from the beauty of holiness and that it was a truly universal gift. Peel was also absorbed by domestic concerns and was determined to advance the prosperity of factory workers by offering cheaper bread.
This is by no means to argue that all the policies of these figures coincided. Disraeli vigorously opposed Peel and later Gladstone. Indeed, their clashes and debates are the stuff of political history yet it is important to note that they shared common philosophical ground. All three clearly wanted to improve the condition of the people and help them to enjoy the fruits of a modern society. None of our figures was a socialist, aiming to cut back prosperity for all in a hopeless quest for a phoney equality. Even Napier, whom we could describe as the most Blairite figure in this book, wanted the great social movement of Chartism to succeed within the existing structure, because he wished the northern city dweller to be as well-to-do as the southern farmer.
Perhaps the strongest believer in the civilising effect of modernity was Prince Albert. The Great Exhibition was a monument, almost a temple, to the latest productive methods. It was created not only as a patriotic effort to show the best of British enterprise but also as part of a global vision to demonstrate that all the world could prosper from these advances. Such an unabashed desire to spread civilisation at home and abroad meant having confidence in the British system and it was this faith that made each of these figures true patriots. This Victorian self-assurance is anathema to the present-day politically correct elite but it had the effect of improving people’s lives enormously.
In addition to their belief in progress and their wish to see its benefits spread across the world, they all had a determination and drive to succeed. They knew, or at least believed, that what they were doing was good, with the result that they put tremendous energy into turning a vision into reality. Perhaps Grace symbolises this determination most potently. He possessed enough energy for two men and devoted this vitality to ensuring he was the best in the world. He was a tough and brave competitor who was keen to win because he knew he was good. As for Gladstone’s energy, it meant that when properly channelled he was unstoppable and has since gone down in legend.
Even Disraeli, certainly not as physically strong as Gladstone, was hugely driven. Sometimes this had negative effects, such as the case of his vicious parliamentary attacks on Peel. At other times, however, it was tremendously positive, particularly in his successful twenty-eight-year campaign to make the Conservatives electable again. He was driven by a sense of destiny, he had a clear view of his ultimate vision and spent a lifetime travelling towards it.
Albert shared such a tremendous drive, so much so that it was commonly thought that he worked himself to death. Even on his deathbed, feebly writing with a pencil, he was drafting memos to improve Britain’s relationship with the United States. These figures were not interested in ‘chillaxing’. Instead, they embraced the most thoroughgoing work ethic. Perhaps Albert took it too far. Perhaps Pugin did too, for his work literally drove him into an asylum and an early death. Others managed better and more quietly, Sleeman for example, the remote imperial administrator, who achieved what he did by mastering a grand filing system and combining it with remorseless and exhausting travel. This is hardly a romantic vision of Empire but it was truly one of the great works on the nineteenth century.
Sleeman’s innate ordinariness, his position as a competent bureaucrat, in fact symbolises something about the Victorians. They were devoted to the everyday and they made it transformational. The efforts of both Palmerston and Disraeli to improve public health, especially water supplies, Peel’s drive to lower the cost of food and reform the penal system or Gladstone’s desire to reform Ireland: these were all schemes to improve the daily conditions of the people. They were practical schemes and they were essentially mundane. These people were so committed that they drafted and delivered those dull, essential details of implementation.
Their belief in progress was an aspect of their religion for many, though not all. Gordon and Gladstone are the two with the most immediately evident faith and confidence that they were carrying out God’s work. It was part of their tragedy that God was asking them to do conflicting things. For Pugin his religious drive was set within a clear historic context. He saw his work as a grand scheme to be completed over generations and imagined that the beauty of holiness would help guide people in the right direction. Pugin’s religious fervour equalled that of Gordon and the fervently High Anglican Gladstone but it was rooted in a more Catholic perspective of time, which meant he understood that all of his endeavours need not be completed before lunch.
This religiosity connected with a more general belief in duty, a belief that encompassed those who were not especially religious. The slaughter of the First World War made duty an unfashionable concept to later generations but surely a true patriot must value dutifulness above other virtues. Victoria herself was the exemplar. She knew of the dissipation of her Hanoverian predecessors and was determined to live a better life. Although she found being Sovereign sometimes very demanding, she persevered with her work just the same.
The Victorians had confidence in their civilising effort, a belief in the goodness of their own nation and the drive necessary to finish the job. How favourably this compares with the contemporary nervousness about the country where moral relativism accepts an equivalence between good and bad and with a tangible feeling that all we can do is manage decline. This is where we today can and must learn from our ancestors. After all, is it not still true that the British Constitution is a model that works better than those in other nations? That is why it has been so widely copied. Democracy, the rule of law, the rights of property and freedom of speech led, for the Victorians and for us, to a stable and prosperous state. From that bedrock, the conditions of the people improved for the Victorians and continue to improve now.
Other systems are simply less good and they harm the lives of the least well-off, because they rob them of the political voice that democracy and free speech grant to them. The rights of property ensure that investors can be made confident of a return and that democracy will not be abused to steal from the minority to the short-term benefit of the majority. All of this is underpinned by the rule of law. The Victorians were proud of the system they created and we should be too. They created it and we must reinvigorate it.
Moral relativism is not a ‘good thing’. To give one example, it was not ‘culturally inappropriate’ for Sleeman to intervene to stop Thugee. In fact it was wholly beneficial and an advantage to all mankind. Likewise, Gordon’s desire to extirpate the slave trade in the Nile valley was honourable while Napier’s desire to advance the livelihoods of the people of Sindh was noble in its aims, even if less success
ful in practical terms. Each of these figures understood the power of sensible and moral intervention. Perhaps Tony Blair is more of a Victorian in his vision and ambition than either he or I would like to admit. Gladstone’s moral outrage and Palmerston’s defence of British interests were similarly noble. As we shall see, the Balkans debate is one of the real blots on Disraeli’s reputation. The lesson is that great nations may not always be able to intervene directly but they must invariably support the moral standard which they believe in. The great Victorians understood this and were willing to do so.
The work ethic of our forebears is also deeply admirable. It is not that people are lazier today, rather that leisure has come to be seen as a right rather than as a reward for work. There was a true nobility in such figures as Albert and Sleeman who really gave their lives to their understanding of duty. Elizabeth II, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, is one of the last surviving individuals whose whole life has been about duty but for Victorians it was a mainstay of their society.
Clearly none of these figures thought that managing the decline of Britain was sufficient. This is not to blow the trumpet for imperial expansion, for they were by no means all keen to expand the Empire. Rather it is to assert that they all were committed to improving the lot of mankind. They had confidence that society’s ills, so much more pressing in their time than in ours, would be ameliorated and eradicated through human ingenuity. Theirs was not an age that believed in stopping new ideas or processes. Inevitably, not all of their schemes worked and the patent office is full of failed inventions. Crucially, they did not operate a precautionary principle that slowed progress to the benefit of the inefficient and the indolent.
The Victorians Page 1