The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  Within seventy years other than annual parliaments all the Charter’s points would have been complied with. But in the 1830s and 1840s the Chartists encountered great opposition, not least because a section of their membership advocated violent revolution. In 1839 the branch known as the Physical Force Party planned a general insurrection, to be initiated by the seizure of the town hall at Newport in South Wales–only for the mayor and his supporters to defend it with such vigour that they prevented the Chartists from storming it. The rising never took place, and its leaders were transported to Australia. Though the majority of Chartists were in favour of using peaceful constitutional means to achieve their goals, they were tainted by the Newport affair. Acute distress inevitably meant that among Chartist members were machine-breakers and mill-burners, so a reputation as dangerous revolutionaries always hung over them. For ten years from 1838 the Chartists held huge, alarming rallies to try and persuade Parliament to agree to their aims, but without success.

  Monster demonstrations and marches were not just employed by the Chartists, however. The most powerful and best-organized pressure group of the period was the Anti-Corn Law League, another out-of-doors movement, founded in 1838, which began to march on a daily basis in a campaign for the repeal of the laws against importing cheap corn. The poor suffered terribly through the late 1830s. Unemployment enabled employers to keep wages low, and the continued Tory majority in the House of Lords and the power of the landed interest kept the price of bread out of the reach of the impoverished. Until the corn laws were finally repealed in 1846 to feed an Ireland facing starvation after the failure of the potato crop, the League’s agitation to get rid of this last bastion of landed privilege was as violent as that of the Chartists. But it was much more effective, because among its supporters were the wealthy, respectable manufacturers of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

  The Anti-Corn Law League was headed by two superb orators–Richard Cobden, a calico printer, and John Bright, a Quaker manufacturer, both of whom became Radical MPs in the 1840s. Bright made formidable political capital out of Biblical references and the Lord’s Prayer. It was a sin, Bright said in a hundred speeches, a hundred newspaper articles, to stop the poor being able to eat their daily bread–a resonant phrase which was hard to counter. He cast the mantle of a religious crusade over the Anti-Corn Law League’s campaign for cheap bread. By public meetings and by making great use of the penny postage–the new campaigning technique–the League eventually created the same sort of groundswell which had brought about the Great Reform Bill, and it soon developed into support for free trade. If cheap foreign corn were imported, the country it came from would allow Britain to export there, thus establishing a new market for her finished goods. Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to curb the soaring National Debt, the Whigs sought to raise money by adding more and more import taxes to foodstuffs, a policy which neither raised money nor allowed the poor to eat.

  A sign of the dissatisfaction with life at home can be detected in the expanding number of colonies settled by the British in this period. The year 1836 saw South Australia colonized and its capital Adelaide named after the wife of William IV, and three years later New Zealand was settled by Gibbon Wakefield. In South Africa the British were a growing presence. The original European settlers of Cape Colony, the Boers were antagonized by the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, because they depended on slavery for their farming, and the following year most of them began the Great Trek northwards out of Cape Colony to create the Republic of Natal on the north-east coast of South Africa. But the vigorous British settlers pursued them and took over Natal in 1843. In 1854 the Boers moved further north to create two more Boer republics, the Orange River Free State and the Transvaal, and there they were left in peace.

  After the American rebellion, the British ruling authorities had no great expectations that colonies would remain tightly bound to the motherland. After a rebellion in 1837 by the French in Lower Canada against the English in the Upper Province, Canada was allowed self-government three years later, with an executive ministry directly accountable to the Canadian Parliament. This would form the basis for self-government in most of the colonies. In 1850 representative government would be given to South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania–just before the discovery of gold in Victoria caused a rapid increase in the Australian population.

  In contrast to these advances, the home country herself was beginning to look ungovernable. The one hope for some kind of reconciliation between all the warring factions and for bringing the reform movement back to Parliament was provided by the impressive Sir Robert Peel, with whom most of the Radicals were now voting. In 1839 Melbourne’s majority fell to five and he resigned, leaving it to Peel to form a government. But the young queen caused a constitutional crisis when she refused to dismiss her Whig ladies-in-waiting. Under previous administrations the members of the royal household had tended to belong to the governing party, and they would resign when their party lost power. But to a queen who was scarcely more than a girl her ladies (who were part of the Melbourne set) were not just political symbols–they had become her intimate confidantes. Though Melbourne had quite properly advised her that she must have Conservative ladies-in-waiting, as Peel had requested, the young queen dug in her heels. She found Peel cold, awkward and stiff, a depressing contrast to the dashing gaiety of Lord Melbourne. The affair became known as the Bedchamber Crisis. Absurdly, as neither side would give way, and Peel insisted on Tory ladies-in-waiting, Melbourne and the Whigs resumed office again–as it was said, ‘behind the petticoats of the Ladies of the Bedchamber’.

  But it was not for much longer. A combination of fears about the Whigs’ budget, which in a last-ditch attempt to curb the deficit had taken a step in the direction of free trade, and Peel’s support in the country enabled the Tory leader in 1841 to force an election and win a massive victory. Victoria had meanwhile married her first cousin Prince Albert, the younger son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whose calm, pious, loving nature and guidance greatly benefited his wife. One consequence was that the need for Lord Melbourne and the Whig ladies was removed. Prince Albert had studied British history and was anxious to be worthy of the position he found himself in. He had ambitions to do something for the arts, of which he was a considerable dilettante, and he got on well with Peel, for he shared his moral earnestness and exalted sense of public duty.

  Peel himself and his fellow MPs, like the gifted W. E. Gladstone, the son of a Liverpool merchant, who became president of the Board of Trade, had been moving in the direction of free trade themselves, and Peel’s government decided to try a cunning experiment. Peel’s daring stroke was to bring back the abhorred income tax, invented to bear the burden of the Napoleonic Wars. Now its purpose was to lessen the burden of indirect taxation on the poor. By restoring income tax, though only as a three-year experiment, Peel and Gladstone believed that the tariff could be lowered on many ordinary items, including corn. Instead the money the deficit required would be raised from the comfortably off, who would scarcely feel it. Peel reduced or removed duties on over 600 consumer goods and raw materials, budgeting for a loss of £2 million which would be made up by the reintroduction of income tax. With income tax rated at sevenpence in the pound, and by exempting those whose annual incomes were less than £150–which meant the majority of people, since a curate earned only £100–the government would be left with a surplus of £500,000 to help reduce the deficit. Though the situation continued to be grave, gradually over the next few years prices began to come down to a more acceptable level.

  To all aspects of government Peel’s businesslike mind brought sensible management. With his Bank Charter Act the money supply was stabilized. The entitlement of the many small private banks to issue notes above the actual reserves they held had led in the past few decades to a harmful series of failures. Such issuing was now forbidden. The late 1830s and 1840s was the time when the British railway experiment took off and to some extent alleviated unemp
loyment in the textile industries. Lines crisscrossed the length and breadth of the country, much of it financed by share issues to speculation-crazy private citizens. The restriction of credit by the Bank Charter Act damped down the economy just when it was threatening to overheat.

  Lord Aberdeen was Peel’s foreign minister. He made a dramatic contrast to Palmerston, aiming at peace abroad as part of the administration’s attempts to keep its costs down. War was expensive and did not allow tax cuts. The Afghan War had cost £15 million as well as thousands of British lives when the government was being suffocated by a £7 million deficit. It had also been quite pointless. In 1841, ignoring the British puppet, the tribesmen of Afghanistan rose up, massacred many of the British and put the amir Dost Mahomed back on his throne. Worse still, though a safe-conduct was given to the British troops to allow them to evacuate the country and return to India, they were ambushed as they tramped back through the mountains. Out of 15,000 troops only one man, a Dr Brydon, made it back alive over the Khyber Pass, the gateway to British India. The new governor-general of India Lord Ellenborough furiously ordered the Afghan capital Kabul to be sacked as punishment.

  After this disastrous episode, Aberdeen and Peel were opposed to further expansion on the Indian subcontinent. They did not share Palmerston’s fear of Russia and were alarmed at the way Ellenborough in 1843 rushed into annexing for security reasons the province of Sind, which bordered the Bombay Presidency. Nevertheless the territory ruled by the British continued to grow. In 1845 the British humiliation at the hands of the Afghans encouraged the Sikhs of the independent Punjab to the north to launch their own attack, only for the Punjab to be reduced to a protectorate under the Maharajah Dhulip Singh.

  Unlike Palmerston, who was distrustful of French ambitions, Aberdeen desired friendly relations with France. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were twice guests of Louis-Philippe at his court at Eu. There the royal pair were introduced to the French court painter Franz Winterhalter, who would execute a series of charming portraits memorializing them and their large family. Louis-Philippe returned the compliment and visited them at Windsor. Friendly relations developed into an entente, a diplomatic understanding between two powers. Lord Aberdeen’s mild manner resolved by diplomacy boundary problems for Canada created by the movement west of the growing population of the United States. At issue were the north-west coast where Vancouver is situated on the Pacific and the boundary between Canada and Maine.

  President Polk had just been elected in America on the ticket of ‘fifty-four fifty or fight’, a policy to extend the state of Oregon to the line of latitude of 54.50 degrees, right up to the boundary of the Russian territory of Alaska. Peel and Aberdeen were determined that the American border should begin lower down at the 49th parallel, otherwise Canada would have no outlet on to the Pacific. Polk did not fight, and the 49th parallel was established as the boundary between America and Canada, except for a small dip south to include Vancouver Island. A treaty negotiated by Castlereagh which had abolished navies and military establishments on the Great Lakes remained in place, symbolizing trustful relations between the two powers.

  Despite the fundamental surgery of Peel’s first budget the unrest continued, and the Anti-Corn Law League continued to lobby for total repeal. Peel was disgusted at how far the League was prepared to go in its irresponsible use of orators to inflame opinion, but secretly–like many of his more liberal colleagues–he had been converted. Cheap foreign corn seemed the only way to solve the problem of feeding the starving unemployed in textile towns. Overseas powers were simply not producing enough to be able to threaten British farmers with exporting enormous amounts of cheap wheat.

  Since the effect of lowering corn duties in 1842 had not been to reduce agricultural workers’ wages, by 1843 Peel had real anxieties about whether he could continue to be in favour of the corn laws. He believed that successful farming would ultimately depend on better ways of farming, not on protection. The unending, increasing and organized level of anger against the corn laws might come to threaten the landed classes and indeed the whole country. Peel was perpetually frightened of a revolution. That year his private secretary Edward Drummond was mistaken for Peel himself and assassinated by a madman named Daniel Macnaghten while riding in a royal procession in the prime minister’s carriage (Peel was with the queen).

  In all probability Peel would have reformed the corn laws sooner rather than later. All his budgets were nudging towards free trade. But in response a violent and irresponsible pressure group dedicated to protection, popularly known as the anti-Anti-Corn Law League, was set up by the Ultra wing of the Tory party, whose members had been opposed to Peel ever since he betrayed them with Catholic Emancipation and feared that the days of protecting estates based on wheat farming were numbered. In the 1830s they had created the nostalgic Young England movement within the Tory party centred around a mystical and probably mythical idea of the aristocracy. The anti-Anti-Corn Law League was headed by the gifted young speaker Benjamin Disraeli, a cultivated, flamboyant novelist and the first British MP of Jewish extraction, and by the horse-mad Lord George Bentinck, son of the Duke of Portland.

  As the traditional supporters of the Church of England, the Ultra Tories were alarmed by Peel’s determination to lessen the grievances of the Catholics in Ireland by increasing the state grant to the Catholic Maynooth College. This was a time when the Tories’ worst fears about the dangers of Catholic Emancipation were being realized. For in 1845 John Newman, the influential leader of the Anglican High Church or Oxford movement, which emphasized the Church’s links to the ancient pre-Reformation Church, caused absolute consternation when he became a Roman Catholic. Disestablishmentarianism, the ending of the Church of England’s official position, seemed to be in the air. Only the year before 500 ministers and many of their congregations had broken away from the Church of Scotland to form the more democratic Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, known as the Wee Frees after their opening prayer ‘We the Free Church of Scotland’.

  Bentinck and Disraeli forgot Peel’s resurrection of the Tory party. They remembered only what they considered to be his numerous betrayals of it. Night after night Disraeli, who wore weird and wonderful clothing in the House of Commons, strange cloaks in yellow, black and orange, disloyally directed exquisitely turned jibes at his party’s leader. In one of his best taunts, he said that Peel had found the Whigs bathing and run away with their clothes.

  But Peel was not only having to deal with enmity in his own party in Parliament and outside it, where he was burned in effigy by the Anti-Corn Law League. In Ireland in 1843 Daniel O’Connell, backed by an organization which looked back to 1798 and called itself Young Ireland, announced that this was to be Repeal Year. To crowded meetings held at some of the most historic places in Ireland, including Tara, home of the old High Kings of Ireland, O’Connell said he was aiming for three million members, a repeal warden in each parish and a national convention to rid Ireland of what he called the ‘Saxon’.

  Alarmed by the possibility of a fresh Irish triumph after O’Connell’s adroit tactics during the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, Peel banned the meetings. O’Connell had to choose between obeying the law and creating an armed insurrection for which he had neither the temperament nor the inclination. When his followers found that he had no intention of fighting, the enthusiasm which had propelled the movement forward shrivelled and died. The English government nonetheless foolishly decided to prosecute O’Connell for high treason, on the ground that it had to make an example of him. But the House of Lords set the conviction aside and three years later, on a pilgrimage to Rome, O’Connell died, a broken man.

  Perturbed by the level of anti-Union feeling, the exceptionally high murder rate and the general dissatisfaction in Ireland, Peel sought help from education. Despite Catholic Emancipation all the most influential jobs continued to go to the Protestants, as they were far better educated than the Catholics. In 1845 Peel founded the Queen’s College at Belfa
st, Cork and Galway in order that Catholics and Protestants might receive a secular university education side by side. He hoped to remove any rational grounds for discrimination against the Catholics. But like most things which the far-sighted Peel did that were just and constructive, it earned him tremendous unpopularity. Many Catholics as well as Protestants thought that the new colleges would be godless institutions.

  But a terrible catastrophe was about to take place in Ireland which ensured that, despite Peel’s best intentions, hatred and resentment were to be the chief emotions felt by the Irish towards England for a century and a half. For in 1846 a disease of the potato destroyed what had become the Irish peasantry’s only food crop. Thanks to the historical evil of a large number of English absentee landlords, almost no Irish peasant owned his own land. The scientific farming that had transformed England in the eighteenth century had never existed in Ireland, where anyone who attempted to make improvements in their methods of farming would have their rents raised by the agents. The only way for the Irish peasant to make money–and the peasantry comprised three-quarters of the population–was to sublet part of their land to another family and get a cash rent. As a result they had to feed themselves off a very small amount of soil.

  The Irish had discovered that the crop which required the least soil for cultivation was the potato. Out of a population of eight million, four million people were by 1845 living on potatoes alone. It was not a balanced diet, but it was adequate if the crop was good. That summer an American fungal disease known as the potato blight appeared in Europe. It turned every potato to slime in the ground. The wet weather that summer was especially conducive to the spread of the disease. In August Peel, nervous of the implications, demanded weekly reports from the constabulary on the state of the crop and sent scientists over to investigate. By October the report from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was clear. The potato crop had been pretty well destroyed throughout the country. Half the population of Ireland were faced with complete starvation, four million people who rushed from potato plant to potato plant hoping that the stench rising from the fields did not mean all of the potatoes were rotten. But there was not much chance of beating a disease carried on the wind and worsened by the rain.