1775–1783 Americans win freedom from Britain in the American Revolution, or War of American Independence.
1788 George III goes mad. He recovers, but only for a time. His son is made Prince Regent in 1811.
1789 The French Revolution begins. The king of France, Louis XVI, is guillotined in 1793.
1793 Britain joins the war against the French. Apart from a short peace in 1802, the war continues until Napoleon is defeated in 1814.
1798 Nelson defeats Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile.
1798 The United Irishmen, led by Wolfe Tone, start an Irish Rebellion, but the rebellion ends at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.
1805 Admiral Nelson beats the French and Spanish at the Battle of Trafalgar.
1807 William Wilberforce gets the slave trade abolished.
1814 After failing to conquer Russia, Napoleon surrenders and is sent to the island of Elba.
1815 Napoleon escapes and returns, but Wellington defeats him at the Battle of Waterloo.
Being British
BY beating Napoleon, the British showed how strong they were when they worked together. Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English soldiers had fought side by side in Wellington’s army, while sailors from all over Britain’s empire had made the Royal Navy the best in the world.
Scottish soldiers had fought as hard as anyone, for many Scots had decided it was time to forget about the Jacobite rebellions.
“We can be Scottish and British,” they said. “We can be proud of both!”
The famous author Walter Scott agreed. His books described the Scottish mountains and lochs, and the old life of the Highlands; some of them told stories about Jacobites. He was as proud of being Scottish as anyone. But he was also proud to be British. Scott decided it was time for the king to visit Edinburgh and show he wasn’t just English, but king of all Britain.
The king was George IV (who had been prince regent while his father was mad). George was even fatter than before, and when Walter Scott saw him dressed in a huge tartan plaid he could hardly stop himself laughing. He was afraid the crowds would laugh too, but he needn’t have worried. When the king appeared, the Union Jack and the Scottish saltire waved together over Edinburgh, and cheers echoed from Arthur’s Seat.
The Scots showed that because Britain was made up of four nations, being British wasn’t simple, like being French or German. British people could be proud of more than one thing – they could be British and something else.
The Peterloo Massacre
Britain should have been happy after its great victory at Waterloo, and the British should have been content. But they were not, because although freedom was in the air they didn’t feel free. The aristocrats were still in control.
Aristocrats still ran Parliament and cheated in elections. There were two parties, the Whigs and the Tories, but there didn’t seem much difference between them. Both Whig and Tory politicians invented government jobs and gave them to their friends. Aristocrats still had all the money and all the power. No one had changed Parliament since the Glorious Revolution, more than a hundred years before. Since then, some towns had shrunk to tiny villages but still sent an MP to London, while others had grown into huge cities but didn’t have an MP at all.
Most people still weren’t allowed to vote. In America all men could vote, but aristocrats thought that far too dangerous for Britain.
“We can’t have a government chosen by ordinary people,” they said. “There are more of them than there are of us. They’d take over the country and start running it themselves!”
No one was allowed to protest during the war against Napoleon, but when it was over, people became more and more determined to win change, or “reform”. Some reformers in Manchester decided to hold a demonstration at St Peter’s Fields, a meadow not far from town, and invited a well-known reformer, Henry Hunt, to make a speech. Hunt, who always wore a white top hat, was so famous for his fiery speeches that he was called “Orator” Hunt. When the day of the meeting came, thousands of people streamed into Manchester from the surrounding villages.
Everything had been carefully planned.
“We don’t want any violence,” the organizers insisted. “This will be a peaceful demonstration.”
But to the magistrates of Manchester, who were sitting in a house overlooking the fields, the sight of such a big crowd was terrifying.
“There’s going to be a revolution,” they whispered, staring at each other in horror. “They’re going to cut off our heads, just like they did in France!”
In those days there was no police force, so they called the army.
“Dirty rebels!” snarled an army officer, glaring out of the window, and he pulled his sword from its scabbard.
In the middle of St Peter’s Fields, Orator Hunt stood up on a wagon to make his speech to the eighty thousand people around him.
“We’re all equal!” he shouted. “And we all deserve the vote!”
The crowd couldn’t hear much, but they saw his white top hat and cheered as loudly as they could.
“The revolution has started!” whimpered the magistrates. “Arrest the speaker before it goes too far!”
So soldiers set off through the crowd towards the wagon. The crowd was packed so thick that they began to hack a path with their swords. People screamed and tried to get away, but to the panicking magistrates it looked as if they were attacking the soldiers. At their orders, hundreds of cavalrymen appeared along the edge of St Peter’s Fields. Horses tossed their heads, and soldiers drew their swords.
“Charge!” shouted an officer.
Four years before, the same cavalry had charged the French army at Waterloo. Now they attacked an unarmed crowd of British men and women. People desperately tried to get away from the trampling hooves, but there was nowhere to run to. Women slipped and fell in the mud; children lost their parents. Ten minutes later, St Peter’s Fields was nearly empty. The spectators had fled, leaving behind broken banners, bodies lying on the ground, dazed people sitting on the grass, and children crying as they looked for someone they knew.
Afterwards the magistrates said they had to send in the soldiers to keep law and order. But when they heard about the massacre in St Peter’s Fields, most people were furious.
“How brave of the soldiers to fight women and children!” they scoffed. “First we had the Battle of Waterloo, now we’ve got the Battle of Peterloo!” And from that moment on, they became even more determined to change the way things in Britain were done.
Unfortunately the government was just as determined to stop them.
“The country is in a dangerous state of revolution!” declared MPs, who sent Orator Hunt to jail, cancelled reformers’ meetings and banned books calling for change.
The Whigs wanted reform, but only so long as aristocrats stayed in charge; the Tories didn’t want anything to change at all.
“Britain’s fine as it is,” insisted the Tory prime minister, Lord Liverpool. “Change is dangerous. Look at France!”
After Lord Liverpool retired, one of the next prime ministers was the duke of Wellington, who had beaten Napoleon at Waterloo, but since then had turned into a stern old man who thought everything should stay as it was. He refused all demands for change; it looked as if the country was deadlocked.
In fact, change might never have come to Britain at all, if it wasn’t for an Irish politician called Daniel O’Connell.
Daniel O’Connell
LIKE most Irish, Daniel O’Connell was Catholic, so he wasn’t allowed to vote. More than a hundred years had passed since the Catholic king, James II, was thrown out, but Catholics were still distrusted. They weren’t allowed to be MPs or hold important jobs. In Ireland, where English Protestants owned the land and made all the decisions, they couldn’t even build Catholic churches in their own villages. Everyone in Ireland longed for an Irishman who would stand up to Britain.
Daniel O’Connell was the answer to their prayers, for he was bold, brash and feared no one. He st
arted a campaign to have the laws against Catholics changed. Thousands joined his Catholic Association, and for the first time since the Irish rebellion, felt proud to be Irish again. Some of his followers wanted to attack English landowners and set fire to English houses, but O’Connell stopped them, for he was determined not to use violence.
“Liberty totters when it is cemented with blood,” he said. “We’re in the right because of what we believe. If we hurt people, we put ourselves in the wrong.”
When an election was called in County Clare, he put forward his name.
“But he’s a Catholic!” the duke of Wellington’s government protested. “He isn’t allowed!”
“I’m not allowed to be an MP,” O’Connell answered, “but you can’t stop people voting for me!”
And the people of County Clare did just that. Daniel O’Connell won, and bonfires were lit all over Ireland.
In his house at Hyde Park Corner, the duke of Wellington gathered his advisers together. “Britain is a Protestant nation,” he said. “If we let in people of other faiths, then the country will fall apart.”
“If we keep them out,” said his advisers nervously, “people of other faiths will never feel British.”
In the end even the duke of Wellington agreed it was too dangerous to ignore Daniel O’Connell. So Parliament passed a law allowing Catholics to vote and become MPs just like everyone else. And it turned out that the duke of Wellington was wrong. Britain didn’t fall apart; it grew stronger because more people felt part of it, rather than thinking Britain didn’t want them.
Meanwhile, O’Connell, whom the Irish called the Liberator, became a hero in Ireland. And reformers all over Britain, seeing how he had ended the law against Catholics, realized that with one more effort they could change how Britain worked.
The Great Reform Act
THE duke of Wellington resigned, and the new prime minister, a Whig called Lord Grey, told the king it was time to reform Parliament. By now George IV had died, and his younger brother William had become king.
“Why do things need to change?” William complained. “Change is dangerous.”
Indeed, only that summer news had come from France of another revolution in which the king had been driven from his throne. William didn’t want that to happen to him.
“Change may be dangerous,” replied Lord John Russell, one of Grey’s ministers, “but sometimes it is even more dangerous not to change things.” And he handed the king reports from all over the country of meetings, protests and campaigns for reform. “What we need,” he said, “is a Reform Act that satisfies the reformers once and for all, so nothing need ever change again.”
Unfortunately, when Lord John Russell put forward his Reform Act, the Tories voted against it, and there weren’t enough Whigs to pass it by themselves. The Whigs called an election and won, so they had enough MPs for the House of Commons to pass the Act. But there were more Tories than Whigs in the House of Lords, so the Tory lords voted against it, and defeated it again.
When they heard the Reform Act had been turned down a second time, people were furious. All over Britain they gathered outside town halls, chanting and booing. A crowd rampaged through the middle of Bristol, breaking windows and hurling stones at the great houses of the aristocrats.
“If the lords won’t let us vote,” they shouted, “then we’ll throw stones. There’s no other way to show what we think!”
In London crowds even attacked the duke of Wellington’s house, throwing bricks and smashing the windows.
“But what can I do?” King William complained when he heard about the riots. “It isn’t my fault the Lords refused the Reform Act.”
Then Lord John Russell came up with a plan. He persuaded the king to create new Whig lords so the Whigs had a majority in the House of Lords as well as the House of Commons. And in that way the Great Reform Act was passed.
The Great Reform Act changed most of the bad old ways. Many more men were allowed to vote than before. Big towns that had never been represented, like Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, were given MPs, and a lot of the cheating in elections came to an end. Politics after the Reform Act seemed much fairer than before.
Even so, many said the Act didn’t go far enough, for aristocrats were still much more powerful than anybody else. And if Russell thought everything could stay the same from now on, he was in for a shock. For in fact, Britain was changing faster than ever. There were changes in how people lived and how they worked. A kind of revolution was taking place – today we call it the industrial revolution – and it altered the country for ever.
The Industrial Revolution
IN the old days everything was made by hand. Each family had a trade – joiners made tables and chairs; cobblers made shoes – and people often got their names from the trades they followed. Men called Smith were blacksmiths who made fire grates and railings; those called Cooper made barrels.
Making things by hand took a long time. To make cloth, first someone had to spin thread; then a weaver, working at home in his cottage, wove it, thread by thread, into a length of fabric.
“Too slow!” thought an inventor called James Hargreaves. And he invented a new kind of spindle called the Spinning Jenny that let one man spin several reels of thread at once.
Then Richard Arkwright came up with a spinning frame that could make thread even faster, and John Kay invented something he called the Flying Shuttle, which rattled from one side of a loom to the other, weaving cloth far quicker than anyone could by hand.
Once people had started inventing, they saw how many things could be made quicker by machines. Machines were made of iron, which was expensive, so inventors came up with better ways of making that too. At Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire, Abraham Darby built a new type of furnace that blazed day and night, producing iron far more cheaply and quickly than before.
Once they had bought machines, businessmen realized it didn’t make sense for tradesmen to work by themselves in their own cottages, so they built factories where hundreds could work together. They divided what the men did into separate tasks. In chair factories, instead of one man making a whole chair, they found it was quicker to have one cut the wood, another shape the legs, and a third fit everything together.
To drive all the machines in a big factory, they needed a new kind of power – something stronger than men or horses, stronger even than the wind that had been used to turn windmills for centuries. That power came from steam engines.
If you heat a kettle until it boils, a jet of steam will hiss out of the spout. If the kettle is enormous, then the jet will be powerful enough to turn a wheel. Connect the wheel to machines by pulleys and belts, and the steam engine will drive the machines.
So businessmen set up factories wherever there was iron underground to make machines, and coal to heat boilers. Many factories were built in the north of England or Scotland. And many more appeared in the peaceful valleys of South Wales, which were changed by the industrial revolution for ever.
Once, the valleys had belonged to shepherds, but when factory owners realized there was coal under the grass and iron in the mountains, they drove away the sheep and closed the farms. They dug mines and built ironworks, and as their factories grew, advertised for people to work in them. From all over Wales, families walked to Merthyr Tydfil and the Rhondda, leaving behind their villages to become miners and factory workers.
New towns appeared, chimneys rose into the sky, and brick streets climbed the hillsides. The valleys filled with the clatter of machinery instead of birdsong, and coal dust instead of clean mountain air. Every morning, columns of men marched up to the mines, and returned at night black with coal. Their hands grew calloused and hard, and their skins pale from working underground.
Visitors who came to look at the new ironworks marvelled at their size. “They’re bigger than cathedrals!” they gasped. They marvelled at the machinery inside them, at the steam engines belching smoke, the roar of wheels and the rows of men bent over t
heir work. And they marvelled at the money they made.
Thanks to the industrial revolution, Welsh iron and coal were exported all over the world. In other parts of Britain things changed too. Scottish ships sailed every ocean, Lancashire cotton factories made more cloth in a week than a hundred weavers could have made in a year, and sleepy little towns like Manchester grew into huge cities.
Britain had invented a new way of making things, and the world would never be the same again.
Railways
THE industrial revolution didn’t only change how people worked, but how they got around as well.
Two engineers from Northumberland, George and Robert Stephenson, invented a way of putting a steam engine on wheels. It ran on iron rails, dragging a tender of coal to heat its boiler, and was strong enough to pull carriages behind it.
The Stephensons built a railway from Stockton to Darlington, the first in the world. Then they built one from Liverpool to Manchester. On the day it opened, crowds gathered to watch. The Stephensons’ locomotive engine, the Rocket, had a tall chimney like a boiler house, and pulled a tender of coal and two trucks for the passengers. Robert Stephenson had painted it yellow to make it look less frightening, but the roar of the engine made everyone cover their ears.
“What a peculiar machine,” said William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool. “I must take a closer look.”
“Watch out!” shouted Robert, and the Rocket’s engineer slammed on the brakes, but it was too late.
“I could have told you,” hissed the old duke of Wellington. “Change is dangerous!”
But it wasn’t long before everyone was talking about railways. Factories echoed to the din of hammering as mechanics constructed bigger and stronger locomotives, while in offices in the City of London, businessmen started railway companies and planned lines from London to Birmingham, Leeds and even Edinburgh. Surveyors set out routes, and engineers designed bridges and tunnels. The most famous of the engineers was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who built Clifton Suspension Bridge over a gorge at Bristol, and constructed soaring viaducts to carry the Great Western Railway to Exeter.
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