The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Britain’s colossal wealth, and her world influence, would increase in the last half of Victoria’s reign, but this increase would be dependent on her empire. Hence, for the purposes of a full picture, one must always remember that ‘the Victorians’ were not merely the British, but the Indians, the Egyptians, the Sudanese, the Zulus, and many other peoples of the globe caught up for commercial and political reasons into the drama, their destinies and futures irrevocably changed. To this extent, Disraeli’s semi-serious definition of Britain as an Asiatic, not a European power is true. But the spectre of a mighty Conservative empire in Europe, ruthless enough not merely to annex Danish provinces but if necessary to starve the people of Paris and reduce their monuments to rubble, had a wonderful power to concentrate Liberal English minds.

  Alan and Rex Hargreaves, the sons of Alice Hargreaves, née Liddell, both died in the First World War. Alan crossed the Channel in the Expeditionary Force as a captain in September 1914, was twice wounded and died a year later. Rex, a captain in the Irish Guards, was killed in the attack on Lesboeufs on 25 September 1916. Alice herself lived until 1934.20

  The world of the 1870s is in touch with our world, in a way that earlier decades of Victoria’s reign is not. We can reach it. Many of my generation (born 1950) have met very old people born in the 1870s. The reforms, the changes, the plans, the modernizations all seem with hindsight to be preparations for the tragedy of 1914–18, which would obliterate the Victorian universe. The Free Traders of Cobden and Bright’s generation had believed that the abolition of the Corn Laws, the replacement of hierarchy by commerce, aristocracy by bureaucracy, would herald a universal peace. War, they believed, was a noblemen’s sport, and those who watched the bungling of the aristocratic officers in the Crimea might have been inclined to agree with them.

  In the event, however, increased population and increased international commerce went hand in hand with increased armaments in all the prosperous countries. Inevitably, the expertise which had been devoted to ingenious machinery in factories was turned to the development of weapons. If the human race could mass-produce it could also mass-destroy. The Russian shells at Sinope had annihilated the Turkish fleet, and the British warships, little changed since the days of Nelson – wooden ships with masts and sails – had suffered badly from the bombardment by Russian guns at Sebastopol. Inevitably, new technology would be required in the event of another war. The French pioneered La Gloire in 1859, a wooden ship protected above the water-line with a corselet of iron behind which the guns were mounted. The British, not to be outdone, produced HMS Warrior in 1860, the first all-metal battleship with an iron hull, and a belt of iron armour thick enough to resist shells.

  During the next thirty years, iron replaced wood as the material for ships’ hulls.21 Armour was incorporated; breech-loading, rifled ordnance firing explosive or armour-piercing shells replaced smoothbore, muzzle-loading cannon. Gun turrets replaced broadside guns, and locomotive torpedoes, hydraulic machinery and electricity all eventually made their appearance on warships. These developments were the inevitable consequence of industrial expansion at home and colonial-cum-commercial expansion abroad. To be the world’s biggest trading nation, Britain needed to have the most powerful navy. Nothing could have been more false than Bright and Cobden’s belief that more trade meant more peace.

  The fact that Britain did not fight a European war between the time of the Crimea and August 1914 should not abet the assumption that this era of plenty was achieved peacefully. The Empire and its spoils were preserved, and won, at the end of guns. There was scarcely a year, from the 1860s onward, when some British troops, somewhere in the world, were not fighting. This book is not exclusively, or even primarily, a history of warfare. It is worth recalling, though, that even when the narrative does not mention a war – minor or not so minor – acts of belligerence are taking place. From 1863 to 1872 there was the Third Maori War. In 1870 Canada saw the Red River expedition; in 1871–2 there was the Looshai expedition in Bengal; in 1873–4 the Second Ashanti War in West Africa; in 1874 the Duffla expedition. In 1875–6 there was the Perak campaign in Malaya, and race riots in Barbados. In 1877–8 there was the Jowakhi campaign and the Ninth Kaffir War. Indian troops were sent to Malta in 1878 in readiness for a showdown with Russia over the apparently insoluble Eastern Question. In 1879 came the Zulu War, coinciding with the Second Afghan War. In 1880, Britain fought its first war with the Boers. That is just one decade – and one could make a similar list for the 1880s and 1890s which would include major conflicts in the Sudan, Burma, Matabeleland and China, culminating in the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellions as the century drew to its close. But just as the British – who saw numberless troubles in their colonies or would-be colonies in 1848 – could claim they survived the Year of Revolutions without incident, so the free-trading Manchester Liberals could imagine that their imperial revenues came to them unstained with blood; or at least, to put it a little less melodramatically, without a strong navy and an adequate army on land to defend, where necessary, British interests.

  Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, Britain was basically a sea-power, and the navy took priority over manpower. In terms, though, of political trouble for Gladstone’s government, the army was more to the forefront of attention. While it came unstuck over the question of expenditure on the army and the navy – ‘the critical factor in the decision to dissolve Parliament’ in 1874 – much parliamentary time in the earlier sessions – which Gladstone and his Liberal backbenchers would like to have devoted to Ireland, to educational matters, to reform of the tax system – was taken up with army organisation.22

  Gladstone’s administration of 1868–74 is seen by us as his first. It is abundantly evident from his diaries, however, that he thought of it as his one and only chance of leading a government. He had come in with a landslide victory, with a majority of over 100, many of them Northern Nonconformist Liberals. It is only hindsight which enables us to see this as the first Liberal government – to be followed in 1874 by a Conservative government. The two-party system as understood by modern political historians was being born. Contemporaries would have seen Gladstone’s Cabinet as a coalition of old Peelites such as himself and Cardwell, seven Whigs – Clarendon, Granville, Fortescue, Harrington, Kimberley, Hatherley and Argyll; two Radicals – Lowe and Bright; and three Liberals – Childers, Goschen and Bruce. There was much to do, and military reform was never meant to dominate their agenda in the way that it did.23

  But against the background of the Franco-Prussian War, the British government could not but examine its own military resources. Under the treaty of London (1839) Britain was committed to defend the independence and neutrality of Belgium. In answer to a question in the Commons, the secretary of state for war, Edward Cardwell, was obliged to confess that he was not sure that the army was in a position to send the 20,000 men who would be necessary in the event of Prussian aggression in Belgium. Cardwell was deliberately exposing the army’s flank here. He wanted the response he got – namely a clamour for army reform. ‘The great events on the Continent seem to have given rise to a great feeling in this country which may make the question of army organisation a less hopeless one than it has been hitherto.’24

  Mid-nineteenth-century government in Britain has been described as ‘minimalist’. The editor of Gladstone’s diaries, for example, Colin Matthew, stated that ‘no industrial economy can have existed in which. the State played a smaller role than that of the United Kingdom in the 1860s’. This is certainly true if Victorian governments are compared with today’s British governments, or with the regimes in France, Italy, Germany and Russia in the nineteenth century. Gladstone’s aim had been fiscal minimalism – the reduction of tax had been his ideal. But as a Peelite he recognized that there was a need for elements of state control, and the trauma of the Corn Laws, from which the Tories only began fully to recover in the 1860s or early 1870s, had been a demonstration of the fact that social engineering was possible w
hen governments chose to withhold money, grants and tariffs, as much as when they intervened. As Gladstone in his middle age developed into his own version of political radicalism, he was very far from being a minimalist. He and his parliamentary friends wanted to change things – in Ireland, in schools, in a multiplicity of areas which a Tory would not necessarily consider to be the state’s business.

  Army reform showed the true colours of Gladstone’s government: and they are somewhat paradoxical colours. On the one hand, Cardwell wanted to reduce expenditure on the army: he proposed to do this by withdrawing 25,709 men from colonial service, cutting £641,370 from the stores vote, and by reducing the size of infantry battalion cadres to 560 other ranks (later reduced to 520).25 On the other hand, the populist and egalitarian side to the Gladstone government wished to reform the army on political grounds, to drag it into modern times, to abolish the system of purchasing commissions, and to do away with some of the more violent disciplinary procedures, such as flogging and branding, which were deemed inconsistent with the sunny spirit of the times.

  The impetus for many of these reforms came not in the first instance from the back benches of the House of Commons, but from the Press. It saw in the victorious Prussian army overrunning France a well-trained machine where officers were chosen on merit, rather than because they could afford to buy their positions. And how did the Prussian officer material achieve the necessary range of skills? Why, through an effectively organized system of education in which the government took an active interest. If any one thing in 1870 emphasized the moribund character of the aristocratic system in Britain, was it not the system of purchase? Abolish it, and Britain might become as efficiently meritocratic as the Germans!

  There is a paradox in the fact that these attacks came from the Press, since in Prussia the newspapers were strictly forbidden to criticize the government in any way. If those newspapers such as The Daily News and The Times were consistent in their desire to imitate Prussia they would have invited Mr Gladstone to close them down. In any event, what the newspapers really wanted was not to build up an escalation of arms, leading eventually to a European Armageddon in the trenches – though we can see this was the eventual consequence of making the army more ‘efficient’. What the newspapers, and the Radical backbenchers, wanted was to strike a blow against the aristocracy, who ran the army.

  Gladstone on this as in many other areas of life was double-minded. This isn’t the same as hypocrisy, but the two can be confused. When Ruskin accused Gladstone of being a ‘leveller’, he elicited the reply, ‘Oh, dear no! I am nothing of the sort. I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle – the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian’ – a confession, we read, ‘which Ruskin treated with intense delight, clapping his hands triumphantly’.26

  As the son of a Liverpool merchant who had been to Eton and married into the landed gentry – the Glynne family – Gladstone lived at Hawarden the life of an aristocrat: a huge house, and many acres, and the income from farm rents and coal mines. His brother likewise lived like a Highland laird at their great house, Fasque, in Aberdeenshire. His entire life, except when in the House of Commons, or wandering the streets of London to rescue prostitutes whom he engaged in interminable conversations about the state of their soul, was spent in a country-house world. He was an habitual guest at Chislehurst, Walmer Castle and Hatfield, finding Lord Salisbury’s High Anglicanism much to his taste. (‘In few chapels is all so well and heartily done.’)27

  Yet on the hustings he could tell the citizens of Liverpool, ‘I know not why commerce should not have its old families rejoicing to be connected with commerce from generation to generation … I think it is a subject of sorrow, and almost a scandal, when those families which have either acquired or received station and opulence from commerce turn their backs upon it and seem to be ashamed of it. (Great applause.) It is not so with my brother or with me. (Applause.)’ One wonders how often he came out with such sentiments at the dinner table at Chatsworth or Hatfield.

  The man whom he placed in charge of reforming the army was Edward Cardwell, like himself a Peelite, like himself the son of a Liverpool merchant. There were a number of reasons why his reforms, embodied in the Army Enlistment Act (1870) and the Army Regulation Act (1871), were of very limited efficacy.28 First he wanted to redress the balance of troops by reducing the colonial garrisons and basing the army in Britain. This measure, overwhelmingly popular with Northern grocers because of the money it saved, did not work out in practice. By February 1879 there were eighty-two battalions abroad and only fifty-nine at home, for the simple reason that, the Fenian threat in Ireland apart, there were few reasons for troops being in Britain and many – during an Ashanti or a Zulu war – for them being abroad.

  Nor did events bear out Cardwell’s belief that he would improve recruitment by the Localisation Act (1872), whereby one of two linked battalions was based at home while the other served abroad. Localization, the establishment of barracks in the provinces, enabled recruitment to reach hitherto unvisited areas, and led to the further depopulation of rural Britain.fn1 The establishment of these local depots was very slow, and many line regiments rarely visited their nominal locality, so Cardwell was not really attracting a much wider range of recruits. No doubt those who did enlist preferred life after he abolished branding and flogging, and enjoyed the possibility of shorter service, but the pay was still poor and it was noticeable that most soldiers belonged to the British army because of poverty. The great majority of recruits hailed from worlds where they would have been labourers, artisans and mechanics;29 rural Ireland was one of the areas from which most came.30 There were also very many Scots in the army. The military authorities reckoned that a serving soldier would be marginally better off than the lowest-paid agricultural worker in England, Scotland and Ireland – their wages calculated at £30, £33 14s. and £18 9s. per annum respectively. In fact, military wages lagged very slightly behind those of English agricultural labourers, but were considerably greater than the Irish: a fact which easily accounts for the high proportion of Irishmen who enlisted.31 But of course it was not in the livelihood of the rank and file that the Liberal Parliament of 1868–74 was chiefly interested.

  Of all the aspects of military reform to capture Press attention, public interest and parliamentary time, it was the system of purchase which was the most contentious. And like so many reforms imposed by politicians on a non-political class, it actually had only partial effect, since officers went on selecting members of the ‘officer class’, regardless of whether their pips and coronets had been bought or awarded gratis. Cardwell was adamant that he was not attempting a class war. ‘It is a libel upon the old aristocracy to say that they are ever behindhand in any race which is run in an open arena, and in which ability and industry are the only qualities which can insure success,’ he told Parliament in March 1871. But after three months in which his diehard opponents had questioned every clause of his Bill, and after they had filibustered in committee, he complained to Gladstone, ‘there sits below the gangway on our side a plutocracy – who have no real objection to Purchase – and are in truth more interested in its maintenance than the Gentlemen opposite’. He referred to the Whig aristocrats. ‘They say in private that they want something more for the money involved; that something being the removal of the Duke of Cambridge: – while in truth they wish to purchase an aristocratic position for personal connections, who would never obtain it otherwise.’32

  It is a strange fact, but the purchase of commissions had already been made illegal in 1809, except where regulated by royal warrant. When, after months of parliamentary time had been wasted, Cardwell’s Bill had been rejected by the Lords, Gladstone cancelled the warrant. ‘It was a brilliant manoeuvre,’ says Lord Jenkins: but it wasn’t very brilliant. The government had to pay out £8 million in compensation to officers who suffered from the measure.33 And if this was the neatest way of dealing with an obvious abuse, why didn’t Gladstone think of it i
n the first place?34

  The Duke of Cambridge, whose florid mustachioed face is familiar to the English today from innumerable inn signs, and who so incongruously lived into the twentieth century – his dates are 1819–1904 – could not be expected to take kindly to Cardwell’s reforms. He had been field marshal and commander-in-chief since the Crimean War, and he shared passionately with his cousin the Queenfn2 a sense of the importance of maintaining a link between the Crown and the army. One of Cardwell’s rationalizations was to abolish the dual government of the army, whereby it looked both to the commander-in-chief and his staff and to the secretary of state for war. In September 1871 the commander-in-chief was definitely subordinated to the War Office – Cardwell became in a manner the Duke’s boss, his office and staff in Horse Guards Parade were removed, and he was required to move to the War Office in Pall Mall. The Queen herself protested, to no avail.

  The Duke, who had become a colonel in the Jäger battalion of the Hanoverian guards when aged nine,35 disliked intensely the abolition of purchase. He had been a brave soldier since joining the British army (he lived in Hanover until he was eleven), serving in Corfu, Ireland and the Crimea. He saw action – after Alma ‘I could not help crying like a child’ – he was mentioned in dispatches for his gallantry at Inkerman, and he was far from being a figurehead commander-in-chief. As a professional soldier he was understandably aggrieved by what he took to be Cardwell’s interference. Until his appointment as secretary of state, Cardwell had been a mere paper-pusher in the Treasury. The Duke’s career lasted long into the 1880s; he was a dutiful member of the royal family, standing in after the death of the Prince Consort and performing such functions as entertaining foreign dignitaries and supporting hospitals. Cardwell, worn out by the whole business of army reform, retired, exhausted, in 1874. This enemy of the aristocratic principle asked for, and was granted, a peerage by the same Gladstone who won applause from the Liverpool burghers for thinking it ‘a subject of sorrow and almost a scandal’ when persons such as himself and Cardwell sought ennoblement.