The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  In northern England, however, manufacturers wanted the government to lift the Northerners’ blockade of the Southerners’ shipping. This was preventing the Southerners’ exporting their cotton, on which much of Lancashire’s multi-million-pound industry was based. However, even if Britain had succeeded in lifting the blockade, the partial ruin of the Lancashire cotton industry would still have taken place, for the men and women who worked the machines announced a boycott of all Southern cotton on the ground that they did not want to support the cause of slavery. The result was a million people in Lancashire living on the rates, a situation a hundred times more pitiful than the Hungry Forties. Nevertheless, the principled operatives continued to insist that they would rather starve than support slavery. As a result of the war, Egypt soon became preferred as one of the chief sources of cotton for British manufacturing, all the more so after it was occupied by British forces in 1882.

  The American Civil War came to an end after four years of fighting in 1865. The North had won under the military genius of Ulysses S. Grant, helped by their greater wealth, their industrial economy and a larger population which triumphed over the agrarian and less populated South. Their swift action in creating a powerful navy to paralyse the Southerners’ principal exports of cotton and tobacco was also decisive. In the course of the war all black slaves were declared to be free.

  Napoleon III used the United States’ civil war to venture into what America by the Monroe Doctrine defined as her sphere of influence. Mexico was a part of the ‘back yard’ she considered a no-go area for the European powers. But war-torn America was too preoccupied to object when alongside a British force sent to demand the repayment of a debt owed to foreign bondholders came a French expedition to make the bankrupt Mexico a client state of France. Napoleon III thus turned the younger brother of the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I into the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. However, with the end of the American Civil War in 1865 the Americans were able to force Napoleon to withdraw his soldiers and abandon the so-called emperor to be executed by the Mexicans.

  The Mexican adventure confirmed Napoleon’s reputation for reckless meddling. But it was his European activities the British worried about. British diplomats were convinced that the emperor’s policy was to move the French frontier up to the Rhine, as indeed it was. Despite the favourednation status France and Britain now had with one another, the threat this would pose to Belgium, always Britain’s first priority for her security, increasingly entailed ruling out any thought of alliance with Napoleon. In 1863 the evident discontent of the Poles, who had rebelled against their Russian overlords, and the claim by the North German Confederation to the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, gave Napoleon the opportunity to propose a European Congress so that all the post-1815 boundaries could be looked at afresh. The British made it abundantly clear that they had no interest in what they believed would be an excuse for France to shift her own boundaries.

  But, in the case of Schleswig and Holstein, Britain suddenly needed an ally. Encouraged by Prussia, the North German Confederation was not frightened off by Palmerston’s command to leave the duchies alone–he had completely underestimated the force of German nationalism. In 1863 the new King of Denmark inherited his throne through the female line. The duchies recognized inheritance only through the male line. Thus the way was open for a German heir. When the King of Denmark promulgated a new constitution which incorporated the more Danish duchy, Schleswig, wholly into Denmark, Austria and Prussia acting for the German Confederation threatened the Danes with war if they would not give up the duchies altogether.

  To Palmerston the idea of the Confederation of German states, newcomers in the power games of Europe, deciding who the territories of the ancient Danish monarchy belonged to was preposterous. But he no longer had the grip on current events that had made him such a force to be reckoned with in the past. The septuagenarian Palmerston had first become an MP as long ago as 1809. He had no idea of the significance of Bismarck and the series of wars he had planned to weld the German states into one united Germany, nor of the overwhelming German desire to achieve this. When to Palmerston’s amazement in February 1864 Prussian and Austrian troops called Britain’s bluff and invaded Schleswig–Holstein, seizing the duchies from Denmark, there was nothing he could do.

  Palmerston had assumed that the Germans would be frightened off by his warning that the Danes would not be fighting alone. His gallantry was inspired by the marriage of the Prince of Wales to the exquisite Danish princess Alexandra that very year. When the Austro-Prussian preparations for war continued, approaches to Napoleon for an army elicited the information that Bismarck had promised France compensation on the Rhine if she stayed neutral over the Danish provinces. But Schleswig–Holstein could not be saved by the British navy alone. After all Palmerston’s bluster, the Danes had to fight on their own.

  Britain’s international reputation, already low after the Crimea, sank lower still. By now Palmerston and Russell were looking increasingly foolish. Queen Victoria called them ‘two dreadful old men’. Lord Derby described their ineffectual posturings over first Poland, when they had fruitlessly demanded a say in the treatment of the Poles, and then Denmark as a policy of ‘meddle and muddle’.

  With Britain a spent force and France compliant, to the surprise of the duchies’ inhabitants, not to say the German Confederation and the German Prince Frederick of Augustenberg in whose name the Austrians and Prussians were fighting for the duchies, Schleswig was annexed to Prussia, and Holstein to Austria.

  After Schleswig–Holstein, even German liberals began to support Bismarck. They saw the truth of his harsh words about the military means needed to unite Germany. In 1866 the promise of the Austrian-held Veneto to Italy and the Rhine provinces to the emperor Napoleon III prepared the way for a new war. Bismarck had bought off the Russians by supporting them against the Polish rebellion in 1863, and waited for what he called the favourable moment. Now Prussia could be sure of no stab in the back from the east from Russia when she attacked Austria to seize the leadership of the North German Confederation for herself. With Russia and France both neutral, Prussia and Italy attacked Austria together, on the specious pretext of the administration of Holstein.

  In three weeks, to the watching world’s amazement, the Austrian army had been defeated by the Prussians, by their superb soldiers, their disciplined tactics and their new needle guns, at the Battle of Königgrätz, or Sadowa as it is known in England, in July 1866. Austria was expelled from the North German Confederation and the Veneto was duly ceded to Italy. But when Napoleon III called in the great prize he believed that he had been bribed with, the shifting of the French frontier to the edge of the Rhine provinces above Alsace–Lorraine, Bismarck made it brutally plain that he had been playing with Napoleon’s dreams. It was out of the question.

  But Palmerston was not there to see this astonishing manifestation of Prussian military aggression which turned the world upside down. Lord Cupid had died after a good breakfast of mutton chops a day short of his eighty-first birthday in October 1865. Despite recent mistakes he remained beloved of the Victorian public, his robust tendency to refuse to toe the diplomatic line when natural justice was at stake always sure to stir British emotions. Lord John Russell briefly became prime minister again. His thoughts continued to revolve round broadening the franchise. The reformers among the Liberals were now in the ascendant, but there were still enough of Palmerston’s supporters to join the Tories and bring down a new Reform Bill and Russell’s ministry in 1866. Derby became prime minister and Russell retired as leader of the Liberals, his place being taken by Gladstone.

  In the event, by a strange turnaround, thanks to the canny Disraeli it was the Tory government which brought in the Second Reform Bill of 1867. Disraeli had been exasperated by his party’s exclusion from power for twenty years. A new clamour for franchise reform had started up, and by the autumn of 1866 there were riots in Hyde Park, with crowds shouting ‘For Gladstone and lib
erty’. Disraeli had persuaded the Conservatives that unless something was done to gratify working men’s desires for a democratic Parliament they faced the possibility of real disorder. It was clear that the Tories did not appeal to middle-class opinion, but they might achieve an upsurge in support if the potentially vast working-class constituency was given the vote.

  Although some of the Tory grandees like Lord Cranborne (the future prime minister Lord Salisbury) handed in their resignations in 1867, the age of middle-class democracy begun by the Great Reform Bill now came to an end. Disraeli ‘dished the Whigs’, as he put it, by introducing household suffrage in the towns. Even lodgers got the vote as long as they paid £10 a year in rent and lived in the same rooms for a year (it was £12 a year in the counties). Lord Derby called it ‘a leap in the dark’: who knew what government would be voted for by a new kind of voter, whose lack of education made educational reforms more pressing than ever? Accompanying the bill extending the suffrage was a Distribution of Seats Bill–eleven obsolete boroughs were disenfranchised, and thirty-five others having fewer than 10,000 inhabitants gave up one member, freeing up MPs for towns whose populations had grown and counties whose populations were also increasing.

  By the Reform Act of 1867 Disraeli brought in an innovative dimension of working-class support for the Tories which he would foster by a striking foreign policy, his ‘forward’ attitude to the empire and important social reforms. His tough stance as a negotiator where Britain’s interests were at stake was sharply defined against the approach of the Gladstonian Liberal party, which was committed to an ethical foreign policy, international standards of morality and the rights of small nations.

  In the late 1860s Britain got her first taste of the Irish militancy that would bedevil British politics for the next fifty-five years. The previous decade had seen the founding in the United States of the Fenians, an Irish secret society devoted to establishing a republic in Ireland, and with the end of the American Civil War many Irishmen took their military experience to their native land. In 1867 they tried an uprising. When that failed they moved on to mainland Britain, where a series of outrages culminated in the blowing up of a wall of Clerkenwell Prison. Gladstone believed that that was what he called the chapel bell, ringing to declare that his mission was to pacify Ireland.

  Solving the Irish question would be the consuming ambition of the second half of Gladstone’s career. Appropriately it was Ireland that in 1868 brought down the Tory government (now led by Disraeli owing to Derby’s ill-health). The Tories traditionally were the party of the established Church. Even Disraeli could not change that. So when Gladstone took up the cause of disestablishing the Protestant Church in Ireland as a way of pleasing the Irish population, the Conservatives had to oppose it. Disraeli’s government fell as the Commons, by a huge majority, voted for Gladstone’s proposals. At the 1868 election the newly enfranchised electorate ungratefully gave Disraeli only 265 seats and 393 to Gladstone, who thus formed the first Liberal ministry.

  The sixty-four-year-old Disraeli retreated to lick his party’s wounds and reorganize it by creating the Conservative Central Office. His poetic, elegant and slender person, with its thin, witty face surrounded still by long, lustrous black lovelocks, was replaced at the government despatch box by the frequently anguished, almost superhumanly strong Gladstone.

  Gladstone and Disraeli (1868–1886)

  William Ewart Gladstone’s vigorous first ministry began in 1868. For the first time the aristocratic Whigs were no longer in a majority in the Liberal party and the Radicals and Nonconformists were to the fore. Gladstone presided over the sort of reforming government which had not been seen since Grey and Peel and which produced the beginnings of the modern Britain we take for granted today, committed to a meritocratic democracy. Both the civil service and the army were thrown open to competition. In 1870 an exam system was instituted for the civil service, while in the army from 1871 commanding rank was no longer to be achieved by purchasing a commission.

  Ever since the Crimean War the disgraceful performance of the army had convinced many that it should be reformed from top to toe and purged of its aristocratic commanding officers. But it was extremely hard to persuade the army itself of this, particularly as the Duke of Wellington continued to be held up as a vindication of the system. Edward Cardwell, the new secretary for war, believed that this was not only unfair, but in the light of the behaviour of Lords Lucan and Cardigan in the Crimea positively dangerous. Moreover the menace of Prussian arms had now reached France, just across the Channel, where the destruction of the French army in a matter of days had given the question of army reforms additional urgency.

  There was furious opposition to Cardwell. The House of Lords threw out the bill to protect its own. But Gladstone was not going to be thwarted. He ingeniously made Queen Victoria cancel the royal warrant which authorized the purchase of commissions. The system of buying promotion was at an end. Short service was introduced, and the militia and volunteers were integrated with the commissioned forces. Cardwell also destroyed the division of command which had plagued both the Napoleonic and the Crimean Wars–between Horse Guards, where the commander-in-chief’s department was based, and the War Office. The commander-in-chief, a post which had usually been held by a royal duke not necessarily on the side of the elected government, was made subordinate to the secretary for war, who had to be a member of the ruling party.

  The legalization of trade unions in 1871 accompanied the broadening of the franchise, the Trade Union Act recognizing their status as friendly societies. From 1872 the Secret Ballot Act ensured that voters could no longer be intimidated–perhaps by an aggressive candidate–as they spoke their votes to the teller. From now on the vote was an anonymous piece of paper placed in the ballot box. Women still did not have the vote, but the old pseudo-scientific prejudices about women’s brains being inferior to men’s, and the debates about women’s capabilities which had occupied so much newspaper print for the previous forty years, were dying down. Though they could not take degrees, by 1872 women started being accepted at Cambridge, with two female halls of residence, Girton and Newnham. The London Medical School for Women was established in 1875, and Oxford followed in 1878 with Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville.

  At Oxbridge women no longer met only members of the Church of England. For by at last abolishing the University Test Act in 1871 under pressure from the Nonconformists the Liberals opened the ancient universities to all the intellectual talent in the kingdom, even if they were Jews, Roman Catholics or Nonconformists. Until that date non-Anglicans had been prevented from studying at Oxford or Cambridge, if they could not take an oath of allegiance to the monarch as head of the Church of England.

  And as part of these changing mores the position of women continued to improve throughout the rest of the century. Though they were hardly a minority in the country, women had begun the nineteenth century not only socially but legally inferior to men. Married women could not be represented separately from their husbands in the law courts until 1857. The influential philosopher John Stuart Mill’s 1869 publication The Subjection of Women both reflected advanced thought and did much to raise the consciousness of his era about how women were oppressed. Enlarging the franchise on such a wide scale brought up the question of female suffrage. In 1865 Mill, who was the Radical MP for Westminster, proposed the vote for women, eloquently advocating the equality of women to men in an amendment to the Second Reform Bill. Though it was defeated, female suffrage societies began to spring up in the major cities.

  In 1869 the Liberal government gave women the right to vote in municipal elections; from 1870 women could vote in school board elections and be elected to the boards, while by 1894 women played a more visible role in local government, as they were allowed to serve on urban and district councils. In 1873 the humane Custody of Infants Acts ensured that all women could have access to their children in the event of divorce or separation, a right previously denied them and the cause of much
anguish.

  From the 1870s to the end of the century a mass of case law was built up to support women as independent beings with separate and equal rights. In 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act at last put an end to the husband’s legal right to all his wife’s earnings. Although in practice suspicious fathers and brothers, or clever women like Charlotte Brontë, had always found ways round this by creating trusts to which only they had access, it was a significant development.

  Education was also fundamentally reformed. In 1870 the Cabinet minister W. E. Forster, a former Quaker married to the daughter of Dr Arnold who had revitalized Rugby School with an ethos of public service, carried an Elementary Education Act through the Commons. This created the first national system, making education available to all children from the age of five to thirteen. Any local district could elect a school board which would have the power to levy a rate and then spend it either on schools already existing in their area or on building new schools. Although the boards were given powers to enforce attendance up to the age of thirteen, it was not until 1880 that elementary education was made legally compulsory, and it was not until 1891 that this became meaningful when a new Education Act made it free.