The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Karl Marx (1818–83), as so often, made an accurate observation of the political scene and drew a false inference from it. Writing in the Neue Oder Zeitung of 6 March 1855 he said, ‘The British Constitution is, in fact, only an antiquated and obsolete compromise made between the bourgeoisie, which rules in actual practice, although not officially in all the decisive spheres of bourgeois society, and the landed aristocracy which forms the official government.’

  What Marx omitted in his analysis was the extent of cross-fertilization between the two supposedly different species, bourgeois and aristocrat. There was more than a whiff of romantic snobbery in Marx’s nature, and so he writes as if the British aristocracy (from which his beloved wife descended) was a race apart. In some of the continental caste-systems there was no doubt a stultifying immobility. The fluidity of the English system has by contrast been identified as a key precondition for the huge commercial success known as the Industrial Revolution.4 Younger sons of aristocrats did not inherit lands or titles from their fathers: they were sent out into the world to fend for themselves in professions where they rubbed shoulders with the upwardly mobile. ‘Commerce, law, lucky marriages, office under the crown could bring the wealth to purchase a landed estate; and for the landowner as long as he owned enough, the various stages in the peerage followed almost automatically.’5

  This was the society over which Robert Peel presided and which in some senses he epitomized. There were, however, some formidable obstacles in the path of his, and Britain’s, success. They make the period of his premiership so eventful that almost every month brought some form or another of crisis. There were four fundamental factors in play. The first, broadly, was the Condition of England question, the seething discontent of the poor and in particular the apparent successes and popularity, so alarming to the ruling powers, of the Chartist movement. The second was the Irish question, a lingering political problem which all British governments, in all areas, have had a tendency to bungle, but which in Peel’s day was exacerbated by a calamity of Biblical proportions – that is, the famine. The third, deeply connected to both these issues, to the position of Britain in the world, and to all the social changes we have been discussing, was the issue of Free Trade in general, the Corn Laws in particular; and the fourth, obviously consequent on these three, and other issues, was the political composition of the two Houses of Parliament, the actual men who in one House by inheritance, in the other by a very exclusive voting system, were taking their seats. For it was after all the parties within Parliament who determined the success or otherwise of Sir Robert Peel’s ambitions and enterprises.6 We shall consider them in the reverse of the order just listed, but it is important to remember how much they all interconnected.

  The new Parliament building which, very slowly, was a-building during this period was satisfyingly symbolic of some of the multi-stranded themes which come together in any consideration of the period. After the fire, the Lords were squeezed into the surviving Painted Chamber at Westminster, and the Commons sat in the Court of Requests.7 Both these magnificent rooms were destined to be demolished when Charles Barry’s (1795–1860) winning designs for the new Palace of Westminster were put into effect. The very Painted Chamber where Edward the Confessor had died and Charles I’s death warrant had been signed would be replaced by neo-Tudor Gothic, bright as a stage set.

  Barry was a brilliant architect, the son of a modest stationer from Bridge Street, Westminster. He had grown up in a shop facing the old Parliament buildings and Westminster Abbey. He was very largely self-taught, having spent three years, from the age of twenty-two to twenty-five, travelling in Greece, Turkey, France and Italy making architectural drawings. His first great building, executed when he was thirty-three, was the Travellers’ Club in London, an Italianate palazzo set down in Pall Mall, breathing the spaciousness which was always to be one of his hallmarks. He was nothing if not eclectic in style – the fruit of his own travels – and in a few years he had designed the Greek revival art gallery in Manchester and the Tudor Gothic of King Edward’s School in Birmingham. In each of these buildings, Barry was able to tell his clients something about themselves which they wanted to hear. He was one of the most successful architect-hierophants, creating just that blend of serviceability and fantasy which are the hallmarks of imaginative building. The gentlemen who joined the Travellers’ enjoyed feeling that they were still on the Grand Tour, stepping from the dust of Pall Mall into the echoing hall and high-ceilinged domicile of some old Roman family of aristocratic lineage. The merchants and professional families who sent their boys – one of Queen Victoria’s most energetic archbishops of Canterbury among them, and some of the finest Greek Testament scholars of any age – to King Edward VI Birmingham enjoyed the feeling that this excellent grammar school for day-boys had some of the august and ancient charms of Eton or Westminster.

  The committee that set the competition for the new Houses of Parliament had specified that the designs should be in a Gothic or Elizabethan style. Clearly, as one whose infant eyes had first focused on the Gothic traceries of Westminster Abbey and who was as familiar with medieval Westminster as had been the infant William Blake, Barry favoured a Gothic style.

  Having won the competition in 1836, he faced a series of problems before the building could so much as begin. First, there was opposition in the Commons at the proposed expense (£800,000 over six years). Barry’s unsuccessful rivals in the competition then got up a petition to change the specifications to the Greek or Roman style.

  There is no doubt that the British would think of themselves differently if their parliamentary buildings resembled the Assemblée Nationale in Paris or the Senate in Washington DC. Barry’s solid Tudor Gothic, embellished (one is tempted to say camped up) by the florid ornamentations of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52), makes, as they say, a statement. These buildings say, on the one hand, we are new as paint. We are so self-confidently new that we are prepared to pull down some of the historic old rooms which survived the fire. On the other hand they say that, like the lineage of Sir Leicester Dedlock, we are old as the hills and infinitely more respectable.

  Pugin, notoriously, was a convert to Roman Catholicism. One says notoriously, because his was no quiet inner conversion but a furious public campaign. His Contrasts, supposedly an architectural work, but one which surely presages his incarceration in the Bedlam lunatic asylum, is a tirade of hatred against the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, the classical. Gothic, Gothic, Gothic – Catholic Gothic as interpreted by Pugin – is the only style allowable in a Christian country. Pugin was an inspired decorator – the House of Cards effect of the Chamber of the House of Lords, particularly when filled for a State Opening with peers in scarlet robes, the Sovereign in a crown, heralds in tabards and the rest, makes the spectator gasp. Left to himself – as with the polychromatic little church of St Giles, Cheadle in Staffordshire – Pugin seems like a child playing with candies which will soon make himself and his onlookers queasy. In order to be seen at his best, he needed Barry’s assured knowledge of how to use space.

  But more than an aesthetic statement is being made by the choice of late Gothic, with many Tudor elements. Most parliamentarians, and perhaps most men and women in the Age of Peel, believed that to be British was ipso facto to be Protestant. (Here was one of the sticking points in the whole tragic story of failed understanding between England and Ireland.) John Ruskin, most eloquent and most knowledgeable exponent of the beauties of Gothic, grew up with parents so Protestant that – addicted as they were to foreign travel – they tried to avoid staying in Catholic cantons of Switzerland. He would come to modify these views, but as an early Victorian he would have echoed the prevailing view that Roman Catholicism was alien to the national spirit. As Edward White Benson helpfully explained when a Birmingham schoolboy to his fellow scholar Lightfoot, ‘you must know that the Roman Church may be a true church in Italy but in England it is not only in error but in heresy and schismatical’.8 Anthony Froud
e spoke for the huge majority of his compatriots when he said that the Reformation was the decisive, the key event in English history. Tennyson saw it as ‘the dawning of a new age; for after the era of priestly domination comes the era of the freedom of the individual’.9

  Barry’s Parliament buildings had to suggest, therefore, not so much the monastic past of the Middle Ages as the world of new families – Horners, Cecils – who took their lands from the old monastic foundations: a world when Britain, led by a young Queen and standing independent of Europe, sent forth its adventurers on the seas to discover new territories, poised for its golden age of mercantile property, religious freedom, literary flowering. That was the world, semi-mystical, half true, that Barry had to summon up. He also had to bring to life the one element of medieval tradition of which the Parliamentary Committees who paid his fees heartily approved – the medieval peerage. His Palace of Westminster was therefore to evoke a Middle Ages gutted of its central ideological raison d’être – namely Catholicism. The post-1689 oligarchic system of government, the Whiggish idea of an aristocracy importing and sustaining its own constitutional monarch, could be dressed up in the fancy dress of Pugin and Barry to portray a continuity with feudal times.

  To a twenty-first-century reader, such notions perhaps seem bizarre, even comic. So they did to the more facetious of Barry’s contemporaries. But political realities are reflected here. Immediately opposite the swampy building site on which Barry proposed to build his political sermon in stones, on the other side of Westminster Bridge, was Astley’s famous Amphitheatre, where shows which were part circus, part historical tableaux vivants showed to packed audiences. As well as such exciting shows as The Storming of Seringapatam and the Death of Tippoo Sahib or The Conquest of Mexico there were medieval extravaganzas – The Battle of Agincourt or the tournament from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Wildly popular too with the public in the early years of the reign was the newly opened museum at the Tower of London, showing Queen Elizabeth I’s armoury, twenty gleaming knights arranged historically in their armour from Henry VI in 1450 to James II in 1685. It so excited a group of young aristocrats in 1839 that Lord Eglinton decided to stage a tournament at his castle in Ayrshire. The young silly asses who had themselves so expensively kitted out for this piece of farce in authentic medieval armour were caricatured by Doyle and mocked by everyone in the kingdom; they never managed to joust in the lists. The rain was so torrential that the grandstand was waterlogged, the lists were flooded, and the heavily caparisoned steeds sank in the mud. But the ball which followed the fiasco, everyone in fancy dress, suggested a genuine nostalgia for some medieval fantasy-past. This in turn was reflected in Peel’s Parliament with the presence of the Young England movement.10

  They were mainly aristocrats, just down from Cambridge: George Smythe, later 7th Viscount Strangford; Lord John Manners, later 6th Duke of Rutland; Alexander Cochrane-Baillie, later ennobled as Lord Lamington. They were not perhaps very serious figures in themselves but they became the friends and allies of Benjamin Disraeli, now thirty-five years old, intensely ambitious, and not so lucky as Gladstone, whom Peel had made a junior minister. Disraeli had written to Peel begging for office, but he had been humiliatingly rebuffed. He was to have his revenge, being an incessant enemy of Peel’s in the House of Commons and mobilizing that opposition which prime ministers most dread – opposition from his own ranks.

  What a Parliament that was! Peel had the Earl of Aberdeen as foreign secretary, Lord Stanley as colonial secretary, and young W.E. Gladstone as his vice president of the Board of Trade and master of the Mint – that is three future prime ministers in the government, and the old Duke of Wellington still active for the Tories in the Lords. Then, just look at the benches of the House of Commons! Liberal Radicals represented by figures as various and impressive as Richard Cobden, the great apostle of Free Trade, or Henry Labouchere who (with Bradlaugh) was to have so momentous an effect on the perception of the established religion and its place in parliamentary life; the glorious eccentric ‘Ultra’ Tory Colonel Sibthorp in his white nankeen trousers, large white hat, and huge top-boots, thundering against every innovation, from railways to the Prince Consort; Dr Thomas Wakley, founder of The Lancet; Thomas Babington Macaulay, representing Edinburgh; Richard Monckton Milnes – friend of Swinburne, and keeper of Keats’s flame; Lord Palmerston; Lord Ashley (better known to history as the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury), Tory champion of the poor! This isn’t to mention Daniel O’Connell, representing the seats of both Meath and Cork – which must somehow be a version of the Irish electoral principle to vote early, vote often; Alexander Pringle; Sir Charles Napier.

  A galaxy of stars who make our modern parliaments seem very undistinguished indeed. In this Parliament, Disraeli saw Young England as rallying the country diehards against Peel, and perhaps even attracting some of the Radicals. He reckoned that out of Peel’s majority of 90 seats there were ‘between 40 and 50 agricultural malcontents’ – country Tories who distrusted Peel even before his volte-face on the Corn Laws, who were Protestant bigots to a man and who might have been prepared to wound or dethrone Peel on a number of issues.

  Disraeli’s feelings for Young England – so much younger and more nobly born than himself – have an element of romanticism, perhaps even (for all his early love affairs and his devoted marriage to a widow, Mary Anne Wyndham Lewis, years older than himself) tinged with a hint of homoeroticism, and are poured out in his trilogy of novels Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred. The most famous passage in the trilogy has passed into the political language of English Conservatism:

  ‘Well, society may be in its infancy,’ said Egremont slightly smiling; ‘but, say what you like, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed.’

  ‘Which nation?’ asked the younger stranger, ‘for she reigns over two.’

  The stranger paused, Egremont was silent, but looked inquiringly. ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’

  ‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly.

  ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR.’11

  It was always the Tory contention that the Whigs ruled by a sleight of hand, holding together an unpleasant alliance of Nonconformist killjoys and big landowners. The vision of Disraeli’s novels is substantially the same as in his Vindication of the English Constitution, where he wrote that ‘the Tory party in this country is the national party; it is the really democratic party of England. It supports the institutions of the country, because they have been established for the common good, and because they secure the equality of civil rights, without which, whatever may be its name, no government can be free, and based upon which principle, every government, however it may be styled, is in fact a Democracy.’12

  The great difficulty with the Romantic–Aristocratic point of view was a religious one. Barry could imply with an architectural sleight of hand that Catholicism did not exist. Perhaps it was even possible to do so when discussing England in the 1840s. Where Ireland was in question, however, it was less easy. So it was that while Disraeli managed in the early sessions of Peel’s Parliament to persuade his young friends that he could manipulate votes (‘Most private’ – Smythe wrote to Manners in 1842 – ‘Dizzy has much more parliamentary power than I had any notion of …’), by 1845 the Young England alliance largely came unstuck over the (by twenty-first-century standards) unlikely and arcane issue of a government grant to the Roman Catholic seminary of Maynooth. The Young Englanders who had fantasized about the recreation of a medieval past, and who had even praised a scheme (more optimistic than realistic) for the reunion of the two Churches, Rome and Canterbury, voted separate ways over Maynooth and thereafter, as a political entity, were finished.

  The
controversy over the Maynooth grant was one of the more striking examples provided by history of the English political classes working themselves into a fury of ignorance and prejudice over a matter which seemed trivial with hindsight. Maynooth, or to give it its full name, the Royal College of St Patrick at Maynooth, had been established when Pitt was prime minister. It was called a Royal College at the special request of George III. It was – and is – the chief training-college for priests in Ireland. The grant of £9,000 per annum which had been given it by the Irish Parliament in 1795 was annually renewed by the Westminster Parliament after the Irish one was suspended, but in 1845 it was seriously inadequate. The priests and students lived in considerable hardship there and Peel was sensible enough to see – given the influence these young men would have in Ireland when they went out to become priests or bishops – that maltreating the seminarians was not a very good way of improving Anglo–Irish relations. As a sensible pamphleteer asked, when the matter flared into controversy:

  Suppose the clergy of the English Church were, during their college life, educated and supported at the expense of the nation, and suppose that in college they had to endure every kind of discomfort and bodily privation, and that when they entered on their spiritual functions, they were habitually treated by the ruling powers and the great with misrepresentation and discourtesy bordering on contempt – would they, so ill-treated in youth and manhood – be zealous loyalists? I rather think they would not.13

  Considerations such as this, and of simple justice, prompted Peel to propose backing up his reforms of Irish schools, to which he granted more money in his Academic Institutions (Ireland) Act with a decent annual grant to Maynooth – £26,36014 annually, with a further £30,000 for upkeep of the buildings, and with a commitment that the grant would be steady. The college would not have to come to Parliament each year cap in hand.15