The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Peel got this measure through, but not without a tremendous fight. He admitted that he was surprised by the intensity of the hostility. The opponents, who had not mounted a campaign in any of the previous fifty years of the college’s existence, behaved and spoke as if Peel had encroached upon some matter of principle. Anti-Catholic prejudice, rank and sour, rose into the public air. The Duke of Manchester told his fellow peers, ‘The Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland appear to us as a political body, united in their hostility to England with, as another priest tells us, three thousand of the second order of priests united in the same antipathies and ready to carry out their plans for the severance of the empire.’ The Duke spoke for many when he saw the Irish in general, the Roman Catholics in particular, as a threat to Britain itself. In the fifty years since Maynooth was founded there had been a continental war, followed by thirty years in which, through economic tariffs, Britain isolated itself from Europe. In the last decade of the eighteenth century it might have seemed reasonable that the Irish, in common with most other Europeans, were Roman Catholics. In the 1840s, when the old Duke of Wellington anxiously inspected the Channel ports, convinced of the imminent likelihood of a French invasion, when the public lapped up Harrison Ainsworth’s novels about Lady Jane Grey and other Protestant heroines, Popery seemed mysteriously more dangerous. Did not the priests and bishops actively encourage criminal behaviour? The Duke of Manchester believed so.16

  There was an atavistic aversion to the Roman Catholic religion itself, which Peel’s Maynooth Bill awoke. Canon MacNeile, writing to The Times on 29 April 1845, was presumably regarded by many readers of that newspaper as making a reasonable point:

  As the Word of God forbids the bowing down to images as expressly as it forbids theft or adultery – consequently as we could not without wilful rebellion against God’s authority, approve or co-operate in the endowment of a college for instruction in theft or adultery, so neither can we approve of or co-operate in the endowment of a college for instruction in bowing down to images.17

  ‘No Popery’ was deep in the English psyche, but like most prejudices it was capable of selectivity. When the British annexed Corsica in 1794 they had declared that ‘the Roman Catholic is the only national religion of Corsica’. Here was an island which George III had actually insisted be Catholic!18 In Malta, Mauritius and French-speaking Canada, the Crown had given money to the Church.

  The Maynooth controversy exposed the peculiar nature of English attitudes to the Irish. To concede the fact that the Irish were predominantly of a different Christian denomination undermined the confidence of the British and their Church. Gladstone, full of High Church zeal, had written a book, first published in 1839, entitled The State in its Relations with the Church in which he argued vehemently that it was the function of the British state to propagate the practice of the Anglican faith. Macaulay in a devastating review reduced the young Etonian bigot’s arguments to a nonsense. He did so, among other means, by pointing out that if the arguments used to justify the continued existence of an established Anglican Church in Ireland were used in India, ‘it would inevitably destroy our Empire’. British Orthodoxy ‘it seems is more shocked by the priests of Rome than by the priests of Kalee … Gladstone has not proposed insisting that all the Hindoos in India belong to Anglican parishes. Why does Mr Gladstone allow to the Hindoo a privilege which he denies to the Irishmen?’19

  Ridiculously, Gladstone resigned from Peel’s government over the issue of the Maynooth Grant on a point of principle so obscure that no one understood it. Between the years 1839 and 1845 he had seen the error of his Church and State. He was in favour of Maynooth getting its increased grant in 1845 but, because he had written in the terms so ridiculed by Macaulay in 1839, he felt he must resign in 1845.

  The granting of money to a seminary of Irish priests threw into highlight the essence of the Irish problem, the profound distrust on either side, and the deep differences, widening by the hour, between the blossoming industrial power of England on the one hand and the abject poverty of the Irish rural economy. The Reverend Sydney Smith, in his breezy Whiggish manner, dismissed all talk of Irish nationalism as essentially the result of economic privation. Long before the Maynooth controversy Smith advocated paying the Irish Catholic clergy as much as their Protestant counterparts. Such a measure would, he guessed, diminish the evil both of the Irish clergy sponging off their poor peasant congregations and of anti-British feeling.

  ‘What is the object of all government?’ he had asked. ‘The object of all government is roast mutton, potatoes, claret, a stout constable, an honest justice, clear highways, a free chapel. What trash to be bawling in the streets about the Green Isle, the Isle of the Ocean! The bold anthem of Erin go Bragh! A far better anthem would be Erin go bread and cheese, Erin go cabins that will keep out the rain, Erin go pantaloons without holes in them!’20 When read in the dark shade of what actually befell the people of Ireland in the autumn of the year Maynooth got its grant, these words seem less like a piece of jokey common sense than like an epitaph.

  *

  Sir Robert Peel’s common-sense conservatism was based on such a creed as Sydney Smith’s – that the object of good government was a contented, well-fed and well-behaved populace. That, quite simply, explains why he was prepared to take on his own party in Parliament, and in effect to destroy the Tories’ electoral fortunes for twenty years. To his supporters Peel would always seem a fundamentally decent, sensible man, a man of principle, perhaps the last truly sensible prime minister until the rise of Salisbury. For Peel’s High Tory opponents he would always be the ultimate opportunist, changing one of the cardinal doctrines of the party in order to stay in office. Parallels with modern political struggles flicker in any commentator’s mind; one thinks naturally of the agonies of the Conservative Party in the last decade of the twentieth, the opening decade of the twenty-first centuries, over their membership of the European Union. The greatest historian of the Conservative Party, Lord Blake, says that it was one of those extraordinary moments in English history, such as the Abdication of Edward VIII or the Munich crisis, when the whole nation was divided. Families split over it, friendships were broken. Once Peel’s decision had been made, the Tory Party, ‘The party of Pitt, Perceval, Liverpool, Canning, Wellington and Peel vanished in “smoke and confusion”.’21 Afterwards, the parties reformed. The Peelites either drifted with nowhere to go, or joined up with the Liberal Party which had emerged from an alliance of Whigs and Radicals. The diehards who had persisted in wanting the price of bread to be kept artificially high were led in the Lords by Lord Stanley, in the Commons by Lord George Bentinck, with Benjamin Disraeli as his rather improbable campaigner and lieutenant.

  For ten years at least, there had been an active campaign against the protectionist laws designed to subsidize the English rural economy and keep out the import of cheap foreign corn. The movement centred on Manchester, John Bright, a textile manufacturer from Rochdale being one of its leading lights, the other Richard Cobden, MP for Manchester and one of the first aldermen in the city. From the outset, the Anti-Corn Law League which they formed had aimed its sights at the political power of the aristocracy. Corn Law Repeal was much more important in this respect than the electoral reforms of 1842. ‘The sooner,’ said Cobden in one of his speeches, ‘the sooner the power in this country is transferred from the landed oligarchy, which has so misused it, and is placed absolutely – mind I say absolutely – in the hands of the intelligent middle and industrious classes, the better for the condition and destinies of this country.’22 Cobden believed that wars had been the sport of aristocrats, and that Free Trade would bring not merely wealth to Britain but peace to the world.

  Not everyone agreed. The Chartists, on the whole, inclined to the view that British agriculture needed government aid and subsidies by means of keeping the price of wheat – hence of bread – artificially high. They suspected the Free Traders’ motives, believing that Northern capitalists like Bright only wanted
cheap bread so that they could lower the wages of their workers.

  Peel, like his ultra-Tory backbenchers, had fought the election of 1841 as an opponent of the repeal of the Corn Laws, but he had never been an anti-Free Trade fanatic; his budgets were all in the direction of Free Trade. All the economic arguments began to pile up on the side of repealing the Corn Laws. Lord George Bentinck was unconvinced – ‘I keep horses in three counties, and they tell me that I shall save £1,500 a year by free trade. I don’t care for that; what I cannot bear is being sold.’23

  Given the social, economic and political situation of England in the mid-1840s it was inevitable that at some stage protectionism would be abandoned and Free Trade would win, as the market so often does. The vast increases in productivity and manufacturing which were happening while the Corn Laws were being debated were changing the nature of England. Railway mania had struck. By 1848, around 5,000 miles of line were working in the United Kingdom – only 400 of them in Ireland, a fact of dire omen. Five railway companies had built lines to Brighton, three to Norwich. The combination of private investment and improved means of production and transport prepared for an astonishing boom which would inevitably have the long-term effect of improving the cost of living for all but agricultural labourers and those whose livelihood came solely from native-grown crops.24 Even within agriculture itself there was some economic buoyancy, with new fertilizers – nitrate of soda and guano – now in common use, and new crops: the swede and the mangel-wurzel came to be used increasingly, an invaluable feed, far more frost-resistant than other root crops. As for the wheat harvests – they had not been good – 1842, 1843 and 1844 saw a fall in the price of corn of 14s., momentarily halting the demand to lift the tariff and bring in foreign grain at a cheaper price.

  But then came 1845, a disastrously wet summer and the rains which, as it was said, washed the Corn Laws away. Peel took the ultimate risk – he waged war on his own party. Rather than resign and hand the ‘poisoned chalice’ of Corn Law repeal to the Liberal leader Lord John Russell, he did what he deemed honourable and proposed their repeal from his position as Conservative prime minister. So the Corn Laws were abolished. The ‘Ultras’, the country Tories egged on by Disraeli, took their revenge by voting Peel out of power over the Irish Coercion Bill. Wellington called the alliance against Peel – Whigs and Ultra Protectionists who in turn agreed on no matter of principle – the ‘blackguard combination’.25 Thus ended the old Tory Party and the career of the best leader that party had ever had.

  By then the government was faced by a problem of much wider and more sinister significance than the breaking and mending of political alliances in Westminster. The greatest single human disaster to befall the European continent in that century had begun its mortal work.

  6

  Famine in Ireland

  WHILE THE HUMAN population of Europe, Asia – eventually the Americas – collapsed before the imperial invasion of King Cholera, another devastation was making its way to Europe: the fungal disease Phytophthora infestans or potato blight. It came to the Netherlands, to Belgium and to Scotland, all countries with a population of poor agrarian workers, but also with an expanding industrial life, comparatively sophisticated road or rail networks, and the will and capacity in case of hardship to help those afflicted. Of course there was hunger and wretchedness in those countries, particularly in Scotland. But it was nothing to compare in size or scale or horror with the Great Irish Famine. To the scale of the Irish disaster itself must be added the political aftermath of distrust and hatred, with us all to this day.

  James Anthony Froude, not always regarded as a friend of the Irish,1 alludes towards the close of his monumental study of The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1881) to a conversation with an Irish Catholic bishop, who remarked bitterly to the English historian ‘that every death lay at England’s door’. England, it seemed, was expected to work a miracle, like the multiplication of the bread at the Sea of Galilee. Yet, adds Froude, the supposed Carlylean anti-Irish historian, ‘what the Bishop said was true after all’ (my italics). ‘The condition of things which made such a calamity possible was due essentially to those who had undertaken the government of Ireland and left Ireland to her own devices. The conviction fastened itself into the Irish national mind on both sides of the Atlantic; and there it rests, and will rest.’2

  This view is largely endorsed by modern historians. No one doubts the scale of the calamity. Nor is it in question that successive British administrations were incompetent, even callous. Given the nature of Ireland in 1845, however, the actual physical, social and political situation, it is hard to see how the Famine could have been averted. The modern reader is aghast at the unfolding narratives of suffering which any account of the Famine will provide. But in the circumstances, and at the time, it is hard to see what a different government, even a government based in Dublin, could have done. True, good landlords (of whom there were all too few) could alleviate suffering in some measure on their estates. True, the continued trade in corn, when the famine was at its height, was avoidable, causes anguish to read about today, and caused worse than anguish to the starving who watched Irish corn being exported from Cork and elsewhere. But given the social hierarchies which existed at the time, and the political tensions which already overshadowed Anglo-Irish relations, one knows that it is as unrealistic to have expected a modern-style famine relief operation as it is to have expected Lord John Russell’s government to take maize to County Kerry by helicopter. A modern historian, K. Theodore Hoppen, says, ‘Although the government’s response was extremely inefficient, grudging and limited, perhaps only an authoritarian state committed to the welfare of the poor at all costs could have achieved a great deal more.’3

  The story of the famine is therefore truly tragic, the more so when we consider the fact that those very benefits for which the Liberals campaigned so vociferously on the British mainland were, as our historian implies, more nails in the Irish coffin. Early Victorian Liberalism was posited on the notion of less state interference, not more. Liberals like Cobden and Bright were kindly men but they saw Tory Ashley’s attempts to improve factory conditions as state tyranny, socialism by the back door. The idea that states were responsible for the welfare of citizens was horrifying to laissez-faire economists. Combine the idea of laissez-faire with those of Malthus and you end up, as we have seen, with workhouses, designed specifically to encourage effort and self-help on the part of the poor.

  The economic benefits, in terms of the overall enrichment of society, were already being seen in the industrialized North. By 1845, the Benthamites had influenced the political attitudes of a generation. They had a natural distrust of the idea of state aid. Create what would later be called a dependency culture and you will end up with national bankruptcy. So, when the extent of the famine came to be known, there is found an instinctive reluctance on the part of the state to do anything – either in terms of welfare, or, still less, in terms of economic protectionism. Had they not just spent ten painful years campaigning for the lifting of protection on corn? Were they to throw that away because the Irish were hungry?

  And here, the darker and quite undeniable fact of anti-Irish prejudice comes into play. The atavistic and irrational feelings which were provoked by the matter of the Maynooth Grant were not going to evaporate because of the sad stories which began to reach England in the late summer of 1845. In fact, the religious prejudices unearthed by the Maynooth affair only confirmed, for many English Protestants, their Malthusian hunches about the improvident and (as they believed) superstitious population of the Other Island.

  It is awful to observe how the Almighty humbles the pride of Nations. The Sword, the Pestilence and Famine are the instruments of his displeasure: the canker-worm and the locust are his armies, he gives the word: a single copy is blighted; and we see a Nation prostrate, stretching out its Hands for Bread. These are solemn warnings, and they fill me with reverence; they proclaim with a voice not to be mist
aken, that ‘doubtless there is a God who judgeth the Earth!’4

  These are not the words of an Ulster demagogue preaching on a street corner, nor even of an evangelical bishop. They are the home secretary Sir James Graham writing to Sir Robert Peel. The Prime Minister broadly shared Graham’s religious viewpoint. These were the moderates of the day. There were plenty who saw the Famine as a punishment for idolatry. Some Protestants even saw it as ‘a special “mercy”, calling sinners both to evangelical truth and the Dismantling of all artificial obstacles to divinely-inspired spiritual and economic order’, as one pamphlet put it.5

  What is called the Great Famine was in fact a series of calamities continuing over a number of years. The basic facts are these. The first fungus struck the Irish potato crops in the summer of 1845. Some parts of Ireland escaped altogether, but about one-third of the overall potato crop was lost. By 1846, with the blight making deeper predations, three-quarters of the crop was lost. By 1847, yields were a little better, but little had been planted by the despairing population who had eaten their seed potatoes. By 1848, crops were back to about two-thirds of the normal, though it was not until 1850 that the worst was over.

  During this period, the government changed. Peel, technically defeated over an Irish Coercion Bill in the House of Commons, had in reality, as we have seen, fallen foul of his own party over the repeal of the Corn Laws. His immediate reaction, on hearing of the failure of the 1845 potato crop, was to create schemes of public works. In this way 140,000 jobs were created, and he also spent £100,000 on imported maize from America to be sold cheaply to those in need. This did provide some relief, but for the relief to be effectual, it would have been necessary to get the grain to the mouths who needed it the most. Apart from the fact that there were only 400 miles of railways in the whole of Ireland,6 ports on the west coast were non-existent. There were almost no harbours where a grain-ship could pull in.