The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  There was an immense concourse of carriages in Piccadilly – a party at Miss Coutts’ and Lord Lansdowne’s besides … We drew up under a large portico, where, as it was raining, hundreds of servants were clustered. Then we entered a very large hall, with pillars in couples, looking like the crypt of the whole building. This hall led to the grand staircase, which encompasses a space big enough for billiard table, statues, etc. Nothing could be more grand and princely than the coup d’oeil – groups sitting and lounging about the billiard table, where the Duke of Argyll and others were playing – crowds leaning over the stairs and looking down from the landing above: the stairs themselves splendid, shallow broad steps of the purest white marble, with their weight of gorgeous crystal balustrade from the wall; and such a blaze of intense yet soft light, diffused round everything and everybody by a number of gas jets on the walls. The apartments were perfect fairyland, marble, gilding-mirrors, pictures and flowers; couches ranged round beds of geraniums and roses, every rare and sweet oddity lying about in saucers, bouquets without end, tiers of red and white camellias in gorgeous pyramids, two refreshment rooms spread with every delicacy in and out of season, music swelling from some masterly instrumental performers, and the buzz of voices from the gay crowd, which were moving to and fro without any crush upon the smooth parquet. The [6th] Duke [of Devonshire] looks just fit for the lord of such a mansion; he is tall and princely-looking with a face like a Velasquez Spanish monarch.46

  It is perhaps difficult for a sensibility of the twenty-first century to understand how such showy displays could take place in a capital city so riddled with poverty and disease, without some insurrection of an envious populace. There are a number of possible reasons why there was no London Commune, no socialist mob charging up Piccadilly, or into the new-built Belgrave Square, to maul the rich as they stepped from their carriages on to the well-lit marble stairs.

  One reason is the fact that rich and poor were kept apart in Victorian England to an unimaginable extent. The poor simply were not allowed into Piccadilly. Even quite bourgeois streets and squares were gated and barred against proletarian ingress. The moneyed classes were well-policed and well-armed. The parishioners of Father Lowder and Father Wainwright were not.

  Another reason is the numbers. In an ever-expanding industrialized population, there were more aspirant than there were despondent members of the working or lower-middle classes, more who hoped for that lucky break, more who by saving or by luck or by enterprise had made a little bit more money than their neighbour. As in twentieth-century America, in nineteenth-century Britain the money-making process was seen by a majority of the populace to be a matter not for apology but for enthusiasm. The palaces of London which groaned with mountains of camellias and sweetmeats were not merely the playgrounds of the old landed families: had they been, some latter-day Chartists or British sans-culottes might have stormed their ornate balustrades. The nouveaux riches, so disgusting to the old upper-class snobs, were incarnate symbols to the rising bourgeoisie of what a little bit of luck or hard work could turn into. The British class-system was always fluid, and anyone with luck, money or panache could always penetrate it. Not only was the nineteenth century a great era for the refurbishment of old country houses such as Chatsworth, it was also a time of astounding new building – much of it paid for with new money.

  Sir William Armstrong (1810–1900) was the son of a prosperous Newcastle merchant, who became mayor in 1850. After the Crimean War so humiliatingly exposed the inadequacy of British artillery, there was room for some clever Englishman to rival the Prussians in the manufacture of an efficient gun. That Englishman was Armstrong, whose gun, breech- instead of muzzle-loaded, fired a shell instead of a ball, with a rifled barrel instead of a smooth one; it was made of coiled and welded steel instead of cast iron. By the time of his death in 1900, when he had been ennobled as Lord Armstrong, his Elswick works competed with Krupps for being the biggest armaments factory in the world.

  Between 1869 and 1884 Armstrong employed Norman Shaw to build him Cragside, an enormous neo-Tudor country house, the first private house to be lit by electricity. The Chinese and Japanese warlords, the King of Siam, the Shah of Persia and the Crown Prince of Afghanistan all came to Cragside to admire the 1,729 richly planted acres, the abundant rhododendrons, and 7 million other trees, and the extraordinary house where hydraulic electricity not only lit the innumerable rooms but turned the spit in the kitchen, operated the central heating, and rang the gongs for meals. The rooms were connected with telephones. The foreign potentates did not come principally to admire Norman Shaw’s half-timbered gables, medieval inglenooks and panelled billiard-room, but they provided a congenial setting in which to negotiate the purchase of automated weapons of death from the mild-mannered millionaire-owner. Of all the nineteenth-century palaces, Cragside perhaps most embodies the paradoxes of Victorian capitalism: the aesthetic of Shaw deriving from his inspiration by Ruskin and Morris, and in turn holding up a lantern to the Arts and Crafts movement, bought with world-conquering money and the ingenious automated capacity to kill.47

  The old-rich and the new-rich helped to keep Britain as a whole rich. That was the idea. That certainly was the idea which underpinned late Victorian politics, making it a contest not between plutocrats and ‘equalitarians’ (to use Gladstone’s mocking word) but between two parties who, much as they might differ over some aspects of foreign policy, of Irish policy and even of domestic administration, were united in a willingness to keep the power and accumulated wealth of the plutocracy and the aristocracy largely undisturbed.

  25

  The End of Lord Beaconsfield

  BRITAIN BECAME SO used to being governed by what could be called an aristocratic consensus or settlement that it was years before the existence of a so-called democracy took hold of the collective political imagination. Indeed, it is open to question whether an enthusiasm for democracy has ever counted for much in Britain, if by that is meant such things as a Bill of Rights, a democratically chosen judiciary or an elected head of state. Prime ministers, Cabinets, civil servants continue to govern Britain with only nominal reference to the results of ballot box or poll. The exclusion of adults from the voting process on grounds of income or gender would now be abhorred by all but a few maniac diehards. But the electorate, being given the right to choose its government, has seldom shown any enthusiasm for changing the Constitution, the method of dividing power between the two Houses of Parliament, or the composition of the Cabinet, the actual decision-making political body.

  Until very recently, the hereditary peers of England sat in the upper chamber as of right: a proportion, at the time of writing, still do so. Their rights and privileges were removed, not as a result of some populist movement, but by modern-minded politicians who felt for whatever reason that enough of that particular system was enough. All the same, whatever happens to the House of Lords in our own day or in the future, we can say that the way Britain was governed remained substantially unaltered from the time of Disraeli to the premiership of John Major and Tony Blair. The electorate has been extended, but elections still take place in roughly the same manner. Thereafter, parliamentary members claim to represent, not a political faction but a place – the members are not announced as ‘The Labour Member’ or ‘The Conservative who has just spoken’, but as ‘The Honourable Member for Scunthorpe’ – just as might have been the case at any time since the reign of Edward III. The Cabinet and the government are still referred to as administrations, their task being primarily to administer the business of the government on behalf of the Crown.

  In this sense, Britain retains a largely aristocratic (or perhaps oligarchic would be more accurate) form of government, even though the prime minister and his or her team do not come from the landed section of society. The parties do not, as in other parts of the world (or as in one specific part of the United Kingdom to this day, Northern Ireland), represent single sections of society or single interests. Only very seldom in British hi
story – the most obvious example is the General Strike of 1926 – does the populace appear to divide along purely class lines.

  How far any of this is the achievement of the politicians of the 1870s, historians and political analysts must decide. Many paradoxes resulted from the 1867 Reform Act. Not only were some of the working class enfranchised by the Act natural Tories; but also, paradoxically, many of the natural Liberals who had voted Gladstone to power in 1868 became alarmed by the rise of the working classes and thought the Conservative Party was a safer bastion against communism. So the Tory Party could appeal to the working classes, to the petits bourgeois of the suburbs and to the old aristocracy who, from the repeal of the Corn Laws until 1874, had inclined to remain aloof from political engagement. The left, if you can call it that – the Radical wing of the Liberal Party – found itself in comparably broad coalition with the old Whigs, the Peelites, and those who were attracted to the milder side of Gladstone’s ‘energy’.

  Gladstone himself, though, believed himself to be beaten in 1874.1 He retired as Liberal leader in favour of Lord Harrington. Disraeli was at last, and unambiguously, on top of the ‘greasy pole’. Having spent a lifetime clambering up, he found himself the commander of the first majority Conservative government since 1841, and it was a substantial majority: taking account of the new Irish Home Rule Party in the Commons, 48 in actual parliamentary terms.2

  In a lampoon for Weldon’s Christmas Annual, 1878, entitled Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi, Disraeli is seen as an Oriental Potentate. After the election

  Then Ben was left sole ruler of the land3

  able with his Vizier, ‘Salis’ – i.e. the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury – to do more or less as he chose. Another spoof, by one ‘Politicus’, envisages the former Tory prime minister, the 14th Earl of Derby, coming to Disraeli from beyond the grave to visit him in his library at Hughenden. This, like the Weldon’s Annual squib, comes from the end of Dizzy’s premiership.4 Derby is merciless. He accuses Disraeli of disregard for the old Tory aristocratic values – by virtue of his 1867 Reform Act – and because of his belligerent foreign policy in the 1874–80 government he also lambastes him for the bloody consequences of international cynicism.

  On the first point, the ghostly Derby loftily says, ‘I thought that Conservatives had a peculiar regard for the Glorious Constitution in Church and State.’5 Over foreign policy (Derby’s son was foreign secretary for the first four years of Disraeli’s second Cabinet, being succeeded by Salisbury) the ghost is much more scathing:

  You, sitting in your cosy room, with the ambition cherished through a life-time all but gratified, do not know what is taking place in thousands of homes in the land. I can pass from home to home unseen. With the speed of lightning I can pass from town to town and from land to land. I have visited the battlefields where Russian and Turk meet in deadly struggle, and where thousands of sons and husbands and fathers are now mouldering to dust. Your vacillating policy caused all that …

  The ghost of Derby accuses Disraeli of cynically siding with the cruel, and tottering, Ottoman Empire against the legitimate aspirations of young nations ‘struggling for liberty in the East of Europe’:

  You are ready enough, with your dreams of ‘a scientific frontier’ to strike weak and semi-civilized people like the Afghans or Zulus; but you, with all your talk … take care not to strike at a nation which is powerful enough to meet you in the field. With your petty wars in every part of the world, with your ceaseless ‘surprises’ and your bombastic talk about ‘a spirited foreign policy’, you destroy confidence and cripple trade. While the resources of the people lessen, the taxation increases. Where are the millions that Gladstone left in the Exchequer? Where are the millions that you have received from the increased taxes upon a growingly impoverished people?6

  The spirit, now beginning to sound a little more like Marley’s ghost than Derby’s, blames ‘Benjamin’ for the phenomenon of poverty in English cities:

  I have seen the tears yet wet on the faces of children who, in their hunger, have cried themselves to sleep. I have seen mothers, sitting over fireless grates, shivering and looking round their desolate homes to see what articles they could pawn on the morrow to get a meal for their children … Conservative as I was, and am, I always thought, and still think, that the best things for a Government to conserve are the liberties, the prosperity, and the happiness of the people.7

  How far does any of this mud stick? Evidently it is mud prepared for the election which threw Disraeli out of office so decisively in 1880: the Liberals came back with a majority of 137 over the Conservatives.

  Disraeli’s greatest biographer and interpreter, Lord Blake, sums up his predicament in 1874 with typical aplomb: ‘He had given very little thought to what his Government would actually do if he won a general election.’8 Dizzy himself, four years after his victory, was heard to murmur, ‘Power! It has come to me too late … There were days when, on waking, I felt I could move dynasties and governments; but that has passed away.’9

  He was sixty-nine years old when he formed his second Cabinet, and he was destined to die a year after leaving office. He was never in the best of health as prime minister, especially in the winter months when he was subject to severe bronchitis. His premiership, then, was inevitably a series of inspired energetic bursts rather than a sustained marathon or a carefully considered programme. In so far as this government of 1874–80 did have a long-lasting consequence, it was to confirm Britain as ‘an Asiatic power’ rather than a European one. The phrase is typical of Disraeli’s playfulness but it was meant. He would no doubt have liked to make Britain more influential in Europe, but after the triumph of Prussia in 1870, and the establishment of the Dreikaiserbund – the alliance of the three emperors of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany – Britain was condemned to a marginal role in Europe. It is difficult to know whether Lord Derby’s ghost, in the spoof by ‘Politicus’, was being fair in his implication that Britain would have had any influence over the Balkans even if she had pursued a different policy in the mid-Seventies when the crisis blew up there.

  In the first major foreign policy decision of his administration, however, Disraeli showed a decisiveness, and a flair, which were all his own – and which it is difficult to imagine any other statesman of the time achieving with such expedition and style.

  The Suez Canal had been opened in 1869. It cut the journey from Britain to India by several weeks and thousands of miles, and by 1875 four-fifths of its traffic was British. In the event of an invasion of India by Russia through Afghanistan (an ever-present possibility in British paranoia if not always in Russian foreign policy), or if there were another Mutiny, the Suez Canal could carry troops from England far more quickly than the old route round the Cape.

  In 1870, when Lord Granville was foreign secretary, there was a chance of the British government buying either the Egyptian khedive’s interest in the Canal Company, or the whole concern. The French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had constructed the canal and founded the Suez Canal Company, was happy to negotiate either arrangement but, incredibly, the British could not see what advantage would be gained. In 1875 Khedive Ismail was again very short of money and was looking to dispose of the 176,602 ordinary shares (out of a total of 400,000 in the Suez Canal Company as a whole). Frederick Greenwood, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was told by the financier Henry Oppenheimer that the khedive was negotiating with two French groups. Greenwood told the foreign secretary, the young 15th Earl of Derby, who did not at all like the idea of the purchase.10

  Disraeli himself now intervened. The Cabinet opposed him, but he overruled them. Undoubtedly his friendship with the Rothschilds helped. Disraeli’s secretary, Monty Corry, went to see Lord (Lionel) Rothschild in his office at New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and the banker advanced the British government £4 million. He charged a commission of 2½ per cent and made £100,000 for his firm out of the deal. Those were the days before ‘insider trading’ was made a sin. Henry Oppenheimer with his synd
icate ‘was the speculator who made most out of the deal’, buying shares before the government purchase was public knowledge. The Rothschilds themselves however did not speculate on the Stock Exchange with their secret knowledge.11 Nor, as was suggested, did Natty Rothschild – a member of Parliament – directly profit from the deal negotiated by his family’s bank.12 (A Mr Bigger alleged that Nathaniel Rothschild was in breach of the Act on Privilege, 22 Geo. III, c. 45, but he was neither a partner in the firm, nor privy to the deal.)

  It was paid for by the chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Northcote, passing an Exchequer Bonds Bill, raising £4,080,000 from the Post Office Savings Bank at 3½ per cent; and by raising income tax to 4d. in the £ – a ‘penal’ level, as has been said by a later member of the Rothschild family.13 It was, however, one of the best investments ever made by a British government. In purely financial terms, the profits were huge. The shares were bought for £22 10s. 4d. per share and had risen, by January 1876, to £34 12s. 6d. By 31 March 1935 they were worth approximately £528 per share.

  Even more important than the paper valuation of the shares, however, was the symbolic importance of Disraeli having secured British control of the Canal Company. As Cairns, lord chancellor, put it to Disraeli, ‘It is now the Canal and India; there is no such thing now to us as India alone. India is any number of cyphers; but the Canal is the unit that makes these cyphers valuable.’14 The Canal was a symbol of British imperial dominance of the world. It is apt that the end of that dominion should have been signalled by Colonel Nasser, in 1956, nationalizing the Canal. British impotence to reclaim it made unambiguous her reduced power and status among the nations. It had become in any case meaningless since the loss of India in 1948 and the gradual dismantling of the Empire. But Disraeli’s purchase was the beginning of that period – which extended perhaps until the Second World War – when British political power could be defined in terms of overseas dominion.