But for the next five years Robert Peel, the man who first organized the Metropolitan Police, would preside with considerable purpose over all his departments. That may now sound pretty obvious but the role of Prime Minister was little more than 100 years old and the authority of the office was still developing. Peel’s predecessor, Melbourne, was regarded by the Tories as someone who gave the government no central control; he just allowed the various departments to get on with it. The importance given to the office of a twentieth-century Prime Minister hadn’t really been approached until towards the end of Lord Liverpool’s premiership in the 1820s. Liverpool had believed that the Cabinet should be a body for collective decision-making and not, as it had been, a number of departments and individuals who simply did what they wanted to do.
And there was another aspect of premiership that a modern-day Prime Minister doesn’t have to worry about: the monarchy. Although the sovereign’s powers were decreasing, he or she was still a considerable political force and often forcibly expressed fear or distaste for one or other of the political parties, as Victoria had for the Tories – especially Peel and his Tories – during her first couple of years on the throne.
Peel recognized the vulnerability of government to royal whim and the often-sensed Parliamentary politicians’ indifference to the authority of almost any government leader. However, the Victorian constitutional historian, Walter Bagehot, described Sir Robert Peel as the best leader of the Commons of his (Bagehot’s) time. Victoria thought him a cold fish and so he was, in public at least. He was the son of a very wealthy cotton spinner (also called Robert), retained a trace of his earlier Lancastrian accent, recognized his own superb abilities and was sometimes over aware that he was at the head of a Tory institution founded not on trade, but supposedly upper-class values. This was not something about which Peel was overawed. When it came to a tumble, it would not take an aristocrat and few upper-class values to knock Peel off balance. The question in debate may have started with land-owning classes, but it would finish with more urban debate. The question of the Corn Laws had been around for generations; they had existed in one form or another since the Middle Ages. They were protectionist laws that imposed duties on cheap corn imports to protect British grain prices. In 1815 a Corn Law banned imports until British grain had reached a certain price, indeed, an artificially high price. It was unworkable and a sliding scale was introduced, but not for a decade. But the significance of that law had nothing to do with whether it worked or not.
The Whigs controlled the interests of the majority of political decision-makers and the one interest the Whigs had in common was that they were landowners. It would not matter how many times the Corn Laws became an issue, the Whigs would never repeal them. Nor would Peel’s own landowning Tories. And so when the 1815 Corn Law was pushed through the House, it was, perhaps, the last time the landowning class in England actually controlled a political decision.
The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1839. Its platform was simple: the League accused the protectionist system of having nothing to do with keeping down the price of bread but allowing landowners to get the best prices. Equally, cheap food meant a contented people and, in some ways, really did suppress the need for wage demands. There was also the possibility of counter protection laws in other countries – that is, export markets. This did not cheer the landowners, which was something of a dilemma for Peel who had a reputation for doing nothing until he had to. But the Anti-Corn Law League would not go away until the Corn Laws had. Moreover, the League was politically savvy. One ploy was to get people to buy forty-shilling (£2) freeholds and so get a national vote, or even two if they already had such a freehold. Under the 1932 Reform Act, a man who had a freehold worth forty shillings was allowed to vote in the General Election. At the same time, the League was not unopposed outside government. The Chartists, for example, who are sometimes called the forerunners of socialism, were agitating for political and social reform. They were not on the side of the League because they, along with many others, saw the League as a tool of the industrialists who were no friends of Chartism.
In fact, this threat of something more than legislative action may have directly encouraged Peel to agree to get rid of the Corn Laws. His obvious difficulty was that a large number of his political group were landowners. In August 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland and Peel knew that if he were to stay in command he had to put the Corn Law reform – in reality, its abolition – to his Cabinet. He did not get the support he had expected and so he went down. His resignation was a formal affair because the person who could have formed a new administration, the Whig Lord Russell, would not do so. Peel returned. However, the protectionists were waiting for him whatever the damage they might do to the Tories, that is, to their own people. This fight to stop the repeal of the Corn Laws would strip the Tories of any cohesion Peel had hoped to preserve. And the man who led the Tory protectionists and attacked Peel was the son of a Spanish Jew who had been an MP for only nine years. His name was Benjamin Disraeli.
Chartists, protectionists, landowners and industrialists clashed in the furious debate over the repeal of the Corn Laws. The landowners said the League was backed by industrialists who wanted cheap corn, and therefore cheap bread, so that workers had one less good reason to demand higher wages. The Chartists who wanted social and political reform were against the League, saying that if prices collapsed then agricultural workers would be sacked and they would flood the already overcrowded labour market. The labourers were suspicious of the League because it was run by the middle class. Peel, who knew that lifting the tariffs was inevitable, was opposed by the Whigs, and by people in his own party – the new Tories, the protectionists. And there was Disraeli.
Disraeli had become a member of a group called Young England. They opposed Robert Peel and saw themselves as the future of Tory politics. Certainly the party was changing as Disraeli knew it was. It is from about this time that the Conservatives, in a group which might be recognizable today, began to emerge.
In 1843 the whole structure of British society was under stress. There was violence in the towns and people were killed, including two policemen. In Ireland, Daniel O’Connell and a young Irish Protestant group called Young Ireland were pushing for independence (although O’Connell, a pacifist, broke with them when they advocated what would now be called terrorist tactics).
And on 20 January Edward Drummond, Peel’s secretary, was assassinated because the murderer thought he was the Prime Minister himself.
It was against this background, and supported by the editor of The Times, John Walter, that Disraeli saw his chance to show the public that he was wise enough to warn that the repeal of the Corn Laws would split the party, and that he was the man to speak for the landowning and agricultural interests of the people. Disraeli knew he had the confidence of all the protectionists, particularly as they sensed victory. His own party was shambling from one internal crisis to another, but the protectionists refused to reduce hostilities with Disraeli attacking Peel not so much over the Corn Laws (that was Disraeli’s vehicle) but for not leading the Tories in the direction they should be heading.
Peel was in an impossible position. He believed the economic situation demanded the repeal of the Corn Laws. It followed, to his way of thinking, that the party must therefore support these arguments otherwise it would be done for. He judged also that protectionism would prove so unworkable that the protectionists themselves would abandon their campaign. In this he was correct, but he never saw it happen. The Bill went forward. Its sentiment was unambiguous. It would cut all import tariffs on grain – barley, oats and wheat – to a peppercorn sum: one shilling. On 25 June 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed. But on the same night as the Bill went through Disraeli and his friends, with no regard for the party, turned on Peel. This was simple, bitter, revenge.
The subject was Ireland. Peel understood the so-called Irish Question better than most. In his twenties, for six years he had been in Live
rpool’s government as Secretary for Ireland. As Prime Minister, he accepted the enormity of his task. He admitted the problem of peaceably governing seven million people while maintaining intact the Protestant Church Establishment for the ‘religious instruction and consolation of one million’. In other words, three-quarters or so of the population of Ireland were Catholics. A balanced social, religious and political equation was unlikely. It was a sentiment recognized by successive generations of ministers and prime ministers. But the extent of that problem would claim him as it did later politicians. In 1846, Ireland was almost destitute. The Corn Laws could do little for the people. There was a grain famine in Ireland and England, which imports could hardly replace. Then in a few months there was a new disaster. The potato famine began in the spring and the blight had spread across Ireland by the summer. Four million people in Ireland lived almost entirely on potatoes and relief work couldn’t cope. Where it might have succeeded there was corruption. More than 100,000 Irish people migrated to America in 1846 alone, and in the following five years perhaps one million died. And from all this, understandably, came violence: violence from the disaffected, the poor and from the people who capitalized on it all.
It was this situation that faced Peel at the same time as the Corn Law debate in London. He was determined to act quickly and so he asked for what would now be called Emergency Powers to deal with the agrarian violence in Ireland. The legislation to get these powers was called a Coercion Act. It was reasonable to ask for such a Bill to go through the House. It should have had a bipartisan passage.
The protectionists had never opposed the idea. But on the night that Peel got his Corn Law repeal through, Disraeli and his friends wanted revenge. They voted against the Coercion Bill and Peel lost it by seventy-three votes. Disraeli and the protectionists were delighted. Four days later, on 29 June 1846, Peel was forced to resign. Peel never became the elder statesman which he, and the nation, deserved. Four years later, in 1850, he was riding in Green Park in London when he fell from his horse and died. Disraeli heard the news and thought it a great event. Yet it was Gladstone who later remarked that Peel had died at peace with mankind, even with Disraeli. ‘The last thing he did,’ said Gladstone, ‘was to cheer Disraeli. It was not a very loud cheer, but it was a cheer.’
But the Tories – the Conservatives – were so split among themselves that there was no way they could hope to form a government. And so the new Prime Minister was a Whig – Lord John Russell. He was to be the last Whig Prime Minister because at this point a new, important, homogeneous political group began to emerge. It was a mixture of the disciples of Robert Peel (Peelites), Whigs and Radicals, all of whom, in the 1840s and 1850s, came to feel politically homeless. They coalesced into one of the two major parties in British politics between the 1860s and the 1920s – the Liberals. The Liberals didn’t come into being on one particular day at Westminster, but it was then that people began talking about Liberals, particularly the disaffected Whigs, Radicals and Conservatives.
By now, Queen Victoria had reigned for a decade. She and Prince Albert already had five children, and now, after Peel’s resignation, she had a new Prime Minister, Lord Russell. It was a six-year government and might be remembered as a six-year calming down period. This was just part of a period of widespread social, political and constitutional reform, which went far beyond the personal and political ambitions of men like Disraeli, Palmerston, Gladstone and Russell. This was a Britain which was changing the way it earned its living, expanding its interests abroad and expanding its social and religious consciousness. It was a Britain that was building railways, outposts of Empire and neo-Gothic churches. It was a period when men were rejoicing in progressive ideas and technologies, and when some of the worst iniquities of the nineteenth century were being questioned. For example, in the 1840s it was commonplace to find children down the pits. In Leicestershire for example, for every 1,000 males employed in coal mining, more than 400 were described as children and young persons. The figure was the same in Derbyshire, and in Yorkshire and Pembrokeshire the ratio of children to adults employed was higher. Not surprising, then, that fatal accidents were frequent. A Mines Act was passed which, in theory, stopped females going underground and said that boys under the age of ten shouldn’t be employed. But the one group who might have helped the wider cause of children did not. The move to give factory children better education (its proposers had the lucrative textile industries in mind) was opposed by a petition of two million signatures from the Non-conformist Churches. They believed that education would be a chance for the Established Church to influence youngsters. The Bill that did get through the House did little more than limit the working day of eight to thirteen-year-olds to six-and-a-half hours. Nothing was done to remove the dreadful conditions in the factory schools.
The ambition of reformers was to make sure that children and females didn’t have to work more than ten hours a day. But for the moment, this couldn’t be allowed through because industry relied so much on these two groups that restricting their hours to ten would mean that no machinery would operate for longer than that. None of this happened in isolation of these islands. Throughout Europe in the late 1840s, there was a change in social as well as constitutional attitudes. There were revolutions in France, Germany, Austria and Italy (although Italy was still a collection of States and would not be a country as it is now until the 1860s). In Britain Charles Dickens published Dombey and Son, William Thackeray Vanity Fair, Macaulay his History of England and Charlotte Brontë her Jane Eyre. And in November 1847 two men were commissioned, at a secret meeting in London, to write ‘A detailed theoretical and practical programme of the Party’. The document was written in German and translated into English by Miss Helen Macfarlane. That done, it was ready to be published in London in 1850. The two men were called Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and the document was called The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Few understood the significance of what was being published. Even fewer would begin to guess that the sentiments would occupy some of the greatest political minds not of the nineteenth century, but the one after. For the moment though, the British were faced with confrontation not so much at home, but in most inhospitable regions, beginning with the Crimea War, one day to remembered only for Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and an image of Florence Nightingale.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
1854–7
In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the British believed implicitly in their military invincibility and in their ability to put down uprisings in far-off lands. In the 1840s, British troops had fought the First and Second Sikh Wars in India, the First Afghan War and the First Opium War in China. And now, in 1854, the Crimean War began. The Russians had moved into an area of Eastern Europe which included what is now called Romania and was then part of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans were the Turks. The Russians moved in on the pretext that they were the protectors of Slav Christians as indeed they were to suggest some 125 years later in the Balkans. The French and the British saw this Russian action as a portent of Russian designs on the rest of Europe. The Ottoman Empire was huge and rickety, and the Victorians feared the instability that might follow its collapse should Russian adventurism prove irresistible to the Tsar. Moreover, and as ever, the British – never then nor later particularly successful at foreign analysis – feared the Russians had designs on India. More immediately was the inescapable conclusion that the Russians would at least go for Constantinople (Istanbul) and the Black Sea.
The most influential policy adviser to the government was Stratford Canning, a cousin of the one-time Prime Minister George Canning, whose understanding of what could happen had been obvious two decades earlier. Canning had come to the conclusion that persuading the Turks to reform the administration of the Ottoman Empire would simply delay its collapse. But other events would hasten what Canning called ‘the evil hour’. And the Russian Orthodox belief that it should protect Christian Orthodox Serbs exacerbated the si
tuation. It hardly helped British political thinking that in the thick of this analysis, the government was not at its most stable. In 1852, Lord John Russell’s Whig government collapsed. In February, Edward Smith-Stanley, the Earl of Derby, became Prime Minister. By the end of the year, he too had gone and George Hamilton-Gordon, the Earl of Aberdeen, had formed the first coalition government in English political history. Russell was his new Foreign Secretary, but only for a couple of months, although he did stay in the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio.
The new Foreign Secretary was not the one man who would have made more sense of foreign policy, Palmerston, but another earl, Lord Clarendon. However, Palmerston was influential. Canning relied on his help and on the general anti-Russian feeling in Britain. The Turks, knowing they had Canning’s support and believing that any British government idea of appeasement would fall away if the Russians attacked, rejected all demands, most of them clumsily presented, from the Tsar for his claims to intervene to protect Christian Slavs under Ottoman rule. And so, on 2 June 1853, the government ordered the British fleet to sail for the Dardanelles.
But the Cabinet could not make up its mind what it really wanted to do next. And although at that point war might have been avoided, what the Turks did next (in October) made that impossible. They declared war on Russia. The Russians retaliated against the Turkish Black Sea fleet at Sinope (the birthplace of the philosopher Diogenese). Aberdeen dithered. He was called cowardly. As 1854 opened, relations between Russia and Britain worsened and the Russian ambassador was recalled in February. A couple of weeks later, the Crimean War started. There was little need for British assistance as the Turks already had some advantage in the field against the Russians, but Aberdeen, probably under enormous pressure because of his earlier vacillations, agreed that the British army under Lord Raglan (1788–1855) should be sent into the Crimea. Raglan did not think that wise.
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