What neither they nor the British realized was that they would be part of each other’s stories for the next two hundred years, and that by the time the British left India, each would have changed the other for ever.
Captain Cook
INDIA wasn’t the only country the British took over after the Seven Years War. They also became masters of a huge new continent in the south which no European had reached before.
People in Europe often wondered if there were any lands they hadn’t found yet. What if there was another America to be discovered, with people they had never met, and animals they had never seen?
“If there’s a missing continent anywhere, it will be in the south,” they agreed. “Few European ships have ever been to the far south.”
So the Royal Society sent an expedition to see. As captain, they chose a sailor called James Cook, whose father was Scottish and whose mother came from Yorkshire. He grew up on a farm, but went to sea and became expert at navigating and making charts. He told his friends he wanted to travel not only “farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go.”
As Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, sailed across the Southern Ocean, blue waves reached as high as the mast, and albatrosses flew alongside. Cook kept watching for land. He had read that Dutch captains sailing to China had found land to the south, and hoped it might be the top of an unknown continent.
First Cook found the country we now call New Zealand. It was too small to be a new continent, but he mapped its two islands and sailed on. Then, one morning, the lookout reported land ahead. Cook climbed the mast with his telescope, and saw trees stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. When they drew closer, he saw a beach and people waving, and realized he had found the new continent.
The Endeavour sailed into a bay and Cook rowed ashore with his plant expert, Sir Joseph Banks. They jumped out onto the sand and looked around in wonder, for the trees were nothing like trees in Europe, and the animals, which bounced around on two enormous hind legs, were nothing like European animals. The British called the animals kangaroos, and the bay where they landed Botany Bay. They named the new continent Southern Land or Australia. Before leaving, Captain Cook tied the Union Jack to a tree and declared Australia part of the British Empire.
After that, many British men and women went to Australia, some as settlers, who cleared trees, built houses and began farms; others as criminals sent there as a punishment. When their sentence was over, they often stayed, rather than sail all the way back to Britain.
With Australia, India and America all flying the Union Jack, Britain owned the biggest empire the world had ever seen.
The American Revolution
BUT some people wondered if it was right for a small island in the Atlantic to rule so many other countries. Shouldn’t they rule themselves? And indeed, it wasn’t long before some in the empire started to protest.
“What right do the British have to govern us?” the Americans asked. And they pointed out how the British had got rid of kings who refused them a say in Parliament. “We don’t have a say in Parliament either,” they said, “but we still have to obey Parliament’s laws and pay its taxes. It isn’t fair.”
The tax that annoyed Americans most was on tea. Americans loved tea as much as the British did, and couldn’t see why they had to pay an extra tax. One morning, hundreds of men attacked the harbour at Boston, where ships full of tea arrived from Britain. Disguised as Native Americans, they smashed open crates and poured tea into the water until the whole town smelled of it.
“If we can’t vote for Parliament, we won’t pay its taxes,” they shouted. “No taxation without representation!”
When it heard about the Boston Tea Party, the British government was furious, and passed laws saying the colonists should stop complaining and do as they were told. Americans found that intolerable, and, enraged by the Intolerable Acts, called a meeting of all the colonies at Philadelphia.
The British politicians couldn’t see how unfair they were being. Too much power always makes people unfeeling, and with an empire all over the world, the British government had far too much power. Instead of trying to come to an agreement with the Americans, they sent soldiers to subdue them. The soldiers shot at rebels who had gathered at Lexington and Concord, in Massachusetts. But the rebels had guns of their own and drove them off. Britain found itself at war with its own colony.
The British had more money and weapons, but the Americans knew every hill and valley they were fighting for. Most of all, they knew they were in the right. On 4 July 1776 the American leaders, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, announced they wanted America to be an independent country, based on principles they were ready to die for. Their announcement was called the Declaration of Independence. It started: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Americans have been rightly proud of those principles ever since.
The war went on for seven years. The French sent money and soldiers to help the Americans, and George Washington turned out to be a skilful general. He defeated the British first at the Battle of Saratoga, then at Yorktown, where the British army surrendered. Canada stayed in the British Empire, but the rest of the American colonies became a new country with a new name: the United States of America.
The British liked to talk about freedom and fairness, so they shouldn’t have been surprised that some people in their empire wanted freedom and fairness too. And perhaps they should have known that one day every man and woman in the empire, from slaves in Jamaica to villagers in India, would demand the same rights for themselves.
The Scottish Enlightenment
AT about this time, some important new ideas changed the way people thought about the world, much as the Renaissance had changed things at the end of the Middle Ages, and the ideas of scientists had brought change during the seventeenth century. By using the scientists’ principle of believing things only when they had been properly tested, people found they could explain things that had always puzzled them, and disprove beliefs they had clung to for centuries. The change in thinking was called the Enlightenment. And a lot of the best new ideas came from Scotland.
Scotland had become more prosperous and successful than ever before. However much Scots had disliked the Union to start with, they quickly saw how much the British Empire could benefit them, as Scottish merchants traded all over the world, Scottish engineers built roads and harbours in America, and Scottish clerks worked in Indian offices, managing the new lands of the East India Company. With the money Scots made, they turned Edinburgh into one of the most exciting cities in the world, with its beautiful New Town of wide streets and stone houses, and a university famous for its learning. “Here I stand at the Cross of Edinburgh,” one visitor wrote, “and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.”
An Edinburgh economist called Adam Smith wondered how it was that people, towns and countries kept getting richer. Could they go on getting richer for ever? They could, he decided, so long as trade kept growing. And he wrote a book called The Wealth of Nations to explain his ideas.
A philosopher called David Hume wondered how we know things. Newborn babies know nothing, he pointed out, so how do people learn things as they grow up? And how can they be sure that what they learn is right? He decided the best way to understand things is to study them, come up with theories, and then test those theories by experiment. The best ideas come not from believing everything we’re told, Hume insisted, but by questioning things and challenging them.
“We should use our reason,” he said.
And many Scottish thinkers did just that. James Hutton was the first to explain how rocks are formed. Joseph Black, a chemist, investigated how heat worked; and his pupil James Watt helped invent the steam engine. People didn’t have to go on
believing the same old things, the Scots showed, but could make the world better – if only they used their reason.
The strange thing was that just when so many in Britain were starting to use their reason, the most important person in the country lost his. King George III went mad.
The Madness of George III
T HE king shouted at his courtiers, howled like a wolf when anyone approached him, and fought off servants who tried to help. Some said he went mad because of losing his empire in America; others, because kings weren’t as important as in the old days.
“He wants to rule like a king in the Middle Ages,” they said, “but the politicians won’t let him.”
It was true that at the start of his reign George III had tried to take back some of the power kings had in the past. He dismissed the government, appointed his own advisers, and made a friend of his, Lord Bute, prime minister. MPs were so angry they held a special debate in the House of Commons. They agreed that “the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished!”
When George III heard about it, people said he was so enraged that he foamed at the mouth and went mad.
In the king’s bedroom, doctors stood around him, arguing about what to do.
“A nervous excitement,” said one.
“An inflammation of the brain,” said another.
“He will recover.”
“He will not recover.”
The poor king thrashed about on his bed with eyes bulging. He bit his lips until they bled, and didn’t even recognize the queen. The doctors took off his rings in case he cut himself, removed his fine gown and wrapped him in a madman’s straitjacket with strings to bind his arms behind his back.
Meanwhile, MPs discussed what to do next.
“We run the country now,” one said daringly. “Kings are less important than they used to be.”
Indeed, all through the Georgian years, Parliament had become more important and the king less so. Sir Robert Walpole had been the first prime minister who ran the government almost as he pleased. But no one wanted to get rid of the king altogether. So eventually they agreed to make the king’s son Regent while he was ill.
The king’s son was a fat boy, also called George, who spent his time on clothes, horses – and pretty girls who only liked him because he was a prince. He didn’t get on with his father and, to annoy him, had made friends with Charles Fox, the politician who criticized the king the most.
“Send for George,” sighed the MPs.
And while the king howled in his bedroom at Windsor Castle, the prince regent held parties for his friends in the palace in London.
Sometimes the king’s madness lifted for a short while. “What happened to me?” he would say, shaking his tired head. But his recoveries never lasted long. He would go mad again, and his crown would be taken away and his arms tied.
And so the time of kings drew to a close. For the very year after the king of Britain went mad, the king of France, who was even more powerful, was driven from his throne by a revolution that changed Europe for ever.
The French Revolution
A hundred years before, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had made France the richest and strongest country in the whole of Europe. His nobles were so afraid of Louis that they did whatever he told them. There was no parliament in France, and nothing happened unless the king wanted it. The kings who followed him, Louis XV and Louis XVI, were the same.
Meanwhile, the people of France grew poorer and poorer. They ate roots instead of meat, lived in hovels, and walked barefoot while aristocrats passed them in carriages decorated with gold. They couldn’t pay tax, because they had no money. That meant, eventually, that the king ran out of money himself, and the day came when his treasury was empty.
“You must call representatives of the people,” suggested his advisers.
So invitations were sent out, and representatives arrived from all over France – lords, priests, lawyers and merchants. But when the representatives made suggestions about how to govern France better, Louis XVI flew into a rage.
“No one tells the king what to do!” he shouted, and sent soldiers to drive them away.
But the representatives refused to leave. People in Britain and America had a parliament, they complained. And they gathered in the biggest room they could find, an indoor tennis court.
“It’s time the king stopped running everything!” they shouted. “It’s time we governed ourselves.”
That was how the French Revolution started. When people heard of the meeting in the tennis court, a crowd gathered in Paris, attacked the king’s prison, the Bastille, let out the prisoners and set it on fire. While it burned, they danced, cheered and waved a new red, white and blue flag called the tricolore.
“Liberty!” they yelled. “Equality! Brotherhood!”
To start with, most people in France agreed with the revolution. They liked the idea of having more say in their lives. But revolutions can quickly go wrong, because in the excitement people listen to wild ideas they’d usually ignore – and many revolutionaries had wild ideas.
Some of them wanted to kill all priests. “Religion is old-fashioned!” they shouted.
Some wanted to kill the king. A crowd of women set off from Paris to the king’s palace at Versailles, broke into his bedroom, and took him back to Paris.
The revolutionaries became more and more violent. “Get rid of lords!” they screamed. “Abolish the Church! Kill the royal family!”
They broke into mansions, smashed mirrors and hacked furniture to pieces. In the middle of Paris they set up a guillotine, a machine for cutting off heads. Lords, their fine clothes crumpled by nights in prison, were taken to the guillotine and killed while old women sat knitting beneath it, singing, “Let’s water our fields with their dirty blood!”
“We will make France perfect,” declared the leader of the revolutionaries, Maximilien Robespierre, “by killing everyone who is not perfect.”
And so the revolutionaries killed the king and queen, the bishops, counts and dukes. They killed everyone who stood up to them, then killed Maximilien Robespierre as well. It looked as if the guillotine would go on cutting off heads, and the old women would go on singing, until there was no one left in France but old women and executioners.
The Irish Rebellion
UNTIL the killing began, most people in Britain welcomed the French Revolution. “Why shouldn’t the French be free, like us?” they said. It even made them wonder if their life was quite as good as they thought. After all, Britain might be free, but everyone knew it wasn’t fair. Aristocrats were more in control than ever, and politicians more dishonest. Elections happened less and less often.
Life was most unfair in Ireland. After William of Orange had beaten James II at the Battle of the Boyne, English landowners had taken over Irish land and ruled the island so cruelly that the Irish became like slaves in their own country. They grew poor and hungry, and, as Catholics, weren’t even allowed to vote or worship freely.
The French Revolution seemed to wake the Irish up, as if they suddenly saw how unfairly they were treated and realized they didn’t have to put up with it. A Protestant from Dublin called Wolfe Tone founded a “Society of United Irishmen”, which wanted Catholics and Protestants to stop quarrelling and work together until everyone in Ireland could vote, govern themselves, and worship as they pleased. When the British government refused to listen, the United Irishmen began their own revolution and asked the French to help.
But things went wrong from the start. The French couldn’t reach Ireland because of a storm. Meanwhile, the British government got Protestants on their side by telling them the rebels wanted to make Ireland Catholic, and persuaded the Catholic Church to help by offering to open a Catholic school. Soon the United Irishmen had no friends left.
One by one the rebel armies were defeated and their leaders arrested. The last rebels, in Wexford, south of Dublin, retreated from the British until they were surrounded at a
place called Vinegar Hill. They had their wives and children with them, but that didn’t stop the British bombarding their camp. Soon the Irish rebellion was over and Wolfe Tone committed suicide.
The British government realized it wasn’t fair to let English landlords go on doing as they liked in Ireland, but instead of making Ireland free, they made it part of Britain. Just like Scotland a hundred years before, Ireland joined the United Kingdom; the red diagonal cross of St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, was added to the Union Jack; and Irish MPs joined the House of Commons. But only Protestants were allowed to vote for them. The rest of the Irish had no say in their own lives, and grew more bitter than ever. From now on, Irishmen would never stop campaigning and fighting until Ireland was free.
Napoleon Bonaparte
REVOLUTIONS nearly always go wrong. They start with high hopes but end in confusion and fear; and when everything has fallen into chaos, people turn to the strongest man they can find to rescue them. That was what happened after the civil wars in Britain, when Oliver Cromwell took control. And when the French Revolution ended in terror and death, the French turned to an army general called Napoleon Bonaparte.
Napoleon came from the island of Corsica, in the Mediterranean. He was small, ruthless and determined, and gradually made himself the most powerful man in France.
Other governments in Europe were terrified by the French Revolution. “What if a revolution starts here?” they said. “What if they arrest our king, and guillotine us?”
They sent armies to defeat the French, but the French, who were proud of their tricolore flag and revolution, fought back. Napoleon, a brilliant general, beat the Austrians and Prussians; and when the Russians entered the war, he beat them as well. The British joined the wars against Napoleon, but didn’t send an army to Europe to fight him. Instead the Royal Navy attacked the French fleet, and it was they who defeated Napoleon for the first time.
The Story of Britain Page 17