Nation State to Empire

Welcome

2011-02-23T09:58:00.001Z

I hope this blog will give you a clear picture of the profound changes that took place in Britain changed between 1700 and 1914.

Be sure to check the sidebar on the right in order to view these posts in the correct order. You will see that most of them were created in 2009.

Towards 1914

2009-12-07T16:39:00.003Z

Britain’s alliances
In 1902 Britain ended its long period of isolation, which the South African War had so strikingly demonstrated, by entering into an alliance with Japan. It was strictly limited and was inspired by concerns over Russian and German influence in China and Manchuria and was only to last for five years. This gave the Japanese the assurance of Britain’s neutrality if Japan went to war with Russia. But it did not address British concerns about Russian activities in Afghanistan and Tibet.

Though relations with France remained bad over territorial disputes in East Africa, Britain and France also had common concerns over Russia, and the British Foreign Minister, Lansdowne and his French counterpart Declassé, sought ways to ease hostilities. In 1903 Edward VII visited France and tensions eased. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 made the need for an agreement even more urgent.

In April 1904 the Entente Cordiale was signed. Britain was allowed to consolidate its hold on Egypt and France was allowed to establish a protectorate over Morocco; Siam would be left an independent buffer between Burma and Indochina This did not, in practice, give Britain a great deal. Nevertheless, though the entente was not a formal alliance, it proved a diplomatic turning point.

The first Moroccan crisis
The Anglo-French Entente had not been aimed at Germany, but it created problems for German policy makers. In March 1905 Wilhelm II made a deliberate attempt to break it. He paid a state visit to Tangier in which he made a speech emphasizing Germany’s commercial interests in Morocco and the importance of maintaining the independence of its Sultan.This was diplomatic bluster on Wilhelm’s part. Germany had no economic interests in Morocco and certainly did not want war. But it caused French and British diplomats to discuss the military possibilities of the Entente in the event of a war with Germany.

Germany succeeded in having an international conference called at Algeciras in 1906.
The conference confirmed the integrity of the sultan's domains but sanctioned French and Spanish policing of Moroccan ports and collection of the customs dues. There was now no hope of a Franco-German rapprochement and the Anglo-French entente was solidified. The crisis revealed to British statesmen the importance of France and was the effectual end of the policy of isolation. It also revealed Germany’s potentially dangerous isolation, with only Austria-Hungary supporting its position.

The naval race
From 1897 Germany embarked on a drive for world power (Weltpolitik) which upset the relative stability of late nineteenth-century politics and posed a direct challenge to Britain. Germany felt that she was owed this status. She was by far and away the most advanced and dynamic of the great powers, but felt herself surrounded by both a backward Russia and a France that was smarting for revenge. She saw Britain as a declining power and herself best place to take advantage of this decline.

This drive expressed itself in naval policy, which was in part a response to a campaign whipped up by the Navy League. In 1898 the German Navy law announced their intention to build a battle fleet. A law of 1900 decreed that this fleet was to be strong enough to challenge the British in the North Sea. This committed Germany to a continuous, and expensive programme.

This did not mean that the German government was envisaging an offensive naval war against Britain. Admiral von Tirpitz (left) was following contemporary strategic thinking when he calculated that if Germany had two battleships for every three floated by Britain – which meant a German North Sea fleet of some sixty battleships - then the German navy stood a good chance of victory in a defensive war. If so, then Britain would have lost her one great advantage – her naval supremacy.

The Liberal government would have preferred spending on social reform, but it was pushed by events. British naval thinking, exemplified by Sir John ('Jackie') Fisher the First Sea Lord from 1904, was driven by the ‘two-power standard’ whereby the Royal Navy was to be stronger than the combined fleets of the next two maritime powers.

In 1906 HMS Dreadnought was launched. She was 1,500 tons heavier than the last pre-dreadnought built for the Royal Navy and three knots faster and had ten 12 inch guns. This meant that she could outgun and outsail all other battleships, rendering them obsolete until the Germans build their own dreadnoughts.

By 1909 it was suddenly realized that the Germans were going to be building 10 Dreadnoughts against the 8 British ones that had been ordered up to then. The ‘We want eight and we won't wait’ panic then ensued, and six battleships and two battlecruisers were ordered in the 1909 programme. After that, the pace was kept up. Germany would only give up her naval plans in return for a British promise of unconditional neutrality in a Franco-German conflict, and after Algeciras, such a compromise was impossible.

The Anglo-Russian entente
On 31 August 1907 Britain and Russia had concluded the Anglo-Russian Entente in St. Petersburg. It ended decades of hostility by defining their respective spheres of interest in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet, with Russia taking the northern areas of Persia and Britain taking the Persian Gulf area in the south. Its primary aim was to check German expansion into the area.
Along with the Franco-Russian alliance and the Entente Cordiale, this formed the Triple Entente between the UK, France and Russia.

Crisis in the Balkans
In 1908 Balkan issues re-emerged to destabilize Europe. In 1908 the Young Turks, a nationalist and westernizing group, led a successful revolution forcing Abdul Hamid to issue a new constitution. The instability in the Balkans convinced the Austrian foreign minister Aehrenthal, that the status quo was not in the Habsburg interest as the weakening of Turkey was stirring up the South Slavs within the Empire and also outside it. In October 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia- Herzegovina, taking Russia by surprise as it pre-empted negotiations over the Balkans that were already taking place between the two powers. In spite of misgivings Germany backed Austria-Hungary, mainly because of their annoyance over the Anglo-Russian entente - even though, as in Morocco, she had no direct interest in the question. Wilhelm subsequently asserted that he stood beside his ally, Austria-Hungary, ‘in shining armour’, while von Bülow declared that the ‘German sword had been thrown into the scale of European decision’.

The annexation was a humiliation not only for Russia but also for Serbia which regarded itself as the protector of all South Slavs (‘Greater Serbia’ or ‘Yugoslavia’) including the Bosnians. There were massive demonstrations in Belgrade, where parliament voted emergency funds for war.

The crisis ended in March 1909. The annexation was reluctantly accepted and Austria made formal amends to the Turks by agreeing to pay for crown property in the provinces but the damage had been done. There was now a distinct possibility of open conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. Serbia was now implacably hostile to Austria and it began to support openly the South Slav revolutionary movements. Meanwhile Russia began to step up her arms programme.

The second Moroccan crisis
After 1908 the central powers and the Entente grew ever further apart. The next conflict arose (again) over Morocco. Like China and Turkey, it was a crumbling state and a pretty to the interference of the European powers. When a Berber rebellion took place in 1911 the French sent an expedition to occupy Fez, the capital, thus putting central Morocco under direct French control. The French remained in Fez after the crisis had died down. On 1 July the Kaiser ordered the gunboat Panther to Agadir on the grounds that German nationals in Morocco needed protection (even though there weren’t any!).

This stirred up alarm in Britain, forcing Lloyd George to state publicly that Britain could not be treated as of no account in a question that affected her interests. This was read as a declaration of support for France in a war against Germany. In November France and Germany reached a compromise (Morocco would become a French protectorate in return for economic concessions to German interests and a slice of territory in the French Congo). However, public opinion was inflamed in both France and Germany and the British then stepped up the production of Dreadnoughts.

In September 1911 Italy declared war on Turkey and landed troops in Tripoli. When the Italians bombarded the Dodecanese the Turks closed the Straits, and this launched a new crisis in the Balkans.

The First Balkan War
With Turkey embroiled in a war with Italy, the Balkan states moved in. In March 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro formed the Balkan League under Russian auspices to take Macedonia away from Turkey. The war began when Montenegro declared war on Turkey, on 8 October 1912, to be followed by Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. The league was able to field a combined force of 750,000 men was soon victorious.

The Turkish collapse was so complete that all parties were willing to conclude an armistice on Dec. 3, 1912. A peace conference was begun in London, but after a coup d'état by the Young Turks in Constantinople in January 1913, war with the Ottomans was resumed and again the Turks were routed. Under a peace treaty signed in London on May 30, 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its remaining European territory, including Macedonia and Albania. The creation of an independent Albania was a coup for Austria-Hungary as it cut off Serbia from the sea.

The Second Balkan War
This began when Serbia, Greece, and Romania quarreled with Bulgaria over the division of their joint conquests in Macedonia. On June 1, 1913, Serbia and Greece formed an alliance against Bulgaria, and the war began on the night of June 29/30, 1913, when King Ferdinand of Bulgaria ordered his troops to attack Serbian and Greek forces in Macedonia. The Bulgarians were defeated, however, and a peace treaty was signed at Bucharest between the combatants on August 10, 1913. Under the terms of the treaty, Greece and Serbia divided up most of Macedonia between themselves, leaving Bulgaria with only a small part of the region.

The war was a foretaste of what was to come. For the first time a military aircraft (Romanian) was seen flying over a large civilian centre (Sofia). There were appalling atrocities on both sides. 21% of the Bulgarian troops were killed or wounded or died from disease.

The political consequences of the wars were considerable. An enlarged Serbia was now the prominent Balkan power and Russia’s only ally in the region. The Austrians were deeply anxious about Serbia’s ability to stir up trouble among their Slav subjects.

The coming of war
In 1913 the European powers were preparing for a possible war in what has been called ‘the great acceleration’ of the arms race. In March the German government introduced a new army bill designed to provide superiority over Russia in the following year. In confidence the party leaders in the Reichstag were told that the increases were justified by the expectation of the ‘coming world war’. The French urged on the Russians the necessity of completing the railways which would enable them to present Germany with a war on two fronts. The British government was proceeding with its naval programme. Russia was so fearful of the implications of the Berlin-Baghdad railway that she began a huge expansion of her forces and even contemplated seizing the Straits.

Yet none of the powers wanted a world war, and right up to 1914 imperial difficulties were negotiated on a case by case basis. Some German historians have argued that the Junker elites wanted a war and that Germany wished to be the dominant power in Europe. On the other hand, it has also been argued that all the European states had expansionist ambitions and that the 8 December meeting did not come out with detailed war plans.

‘The “disputes” arising out of the Balkan wars were settled because in 1913 the German Army was not ready for war. The “dispute” between Austria-Hungary and Serbia over the Sarajevo incident was not settled because neither Austria-Hungary nor Germany wanted it settled’ (L.C.B. Seaman, Post-Victorian Britain, 1966, 56).'

The over-riding factor behind the war was Austrian fear of Serbia. She was prepared to go to war because she could rely on German support and Germany was prepared to back Austria because of her new interest in Turkey and her calculation that if there had to be a war, it should come sooner rather than later.

The entry of France into the war was made inevitable by the plan drawn up in 1905 by the German chief of staff, Alfred von Schlieffen and arouse out of his concern that Germany could be ‘encircled’ by simultaneous attacks from France and Russia (as Frederick the Great had been). This required that if war broke out with Russia, France should be eliminated by a pre-emptive knock-out blow. Since this attack was to come through Belgium, it risked bringing Britain into the war, since Belgian independence was guaranteed by treaty.

Sarajevo and after
On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife were murdered in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip (right). Princip was a member of the Young Bosnians, one of a group that sought an independent Yugoslav state. The group had been supplied with weapons by an ultra-nationalist organization called the Black Hand.

The assassination gave the Austro-Hungarians the excuse needed to deal with Serbia. On 23 July, egged on by Berlin, the Vienna government presented an ultimatum to Serbia that was designed to be humiliating and to be rejected. At this stage Britain tried to mediate and Russia told the Serbs not to resist but they could not force the Serbs to accept the ultimatum. In support of Serbia, the tsar ordered the partial mobilization of Russian forces. Serbia then accepted most though not all of the terms.

On 28 July the Austrian minister Berchthold declared war, which meant that the Russians felt bound to support their ally. They then began a slow mobilization. Russia mobilized against Austria-Hungary on 30 July.

On 31 July the Germans began to mobilize. On 1 August Wilhelm was told by his generals that the forces that had been prepared for a war in the west could not be redeployed on the Russian front - the Schlieffen plan had to go ahead- Germany now had to attack France. On the same day Germany declared war on Russia. On 3 August it declared war on France.

At this stage British opinion was too divided for their government to act, but on the same day the Germans invaded Belgium (see left for Mr Punch's view) and on 4 August Britain declared war in Germany. On 6 August Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia. J.M. Roberts sees this as final indication that the real decisions were made in Berlin.

Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary is reputed to have said,
' T'he lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.'

The 'Woman Question'

2009-12-07T16:38:00.000Z

There is a useful timeline here on the legal milestones for women between 1832 and 1828.

The question of women’s roles and women’s rights came to the fore in public debate in the 1860s. In 1869 John Stuart Mill published his Subjection of Women (1869). The decade also saw the (unsuccessful) demand for female enfranchisement and the (partially successful) demand for women’s secondary and higher education. By 1870 the ‘Woman Question’ was hotly debated. The word ‘feminism’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1901 but it was cited in the Supplement from a French usage of 1895 to mean ‘advocacy of the rights of women’. By 1914 the term had achieved a wider currency.

The dawn of feminism
Middle-class women had first gained valuable experience of political organization and political campaigning in the 1840s in the Anti-Corn Law League. Although anti-slavery campaigning never politicized British women as much as American women, there is some evidence that women from anti-slavery families in Britain began to link abolitionism to the emancipation of their own sex in the years following the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. Among the four American women delegates was the influential Quaker, Lucretia Mott. But after a lengthy debate, the women were excluded from the debates. Mott went on to become a prominent figure in the Seneca Falls Convention, 1848.

One group of friends who took a particular interest in the 1840 convention also went on to take a pioneering role in calling for women rights. They included Quakers and Unitarians. From the mid 1850s, Florence Nightingale's illegitimate cousin, Barbara Leigh Smith (1827-1901) and her close friend Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), a grandaugher of Joseph Priestley, began to rouse public debate over a range of issues concerning the rights of women: education, employment opportunities and family law. This last question led Leigh Smith to form a committee in pursuit of Parliamentary reform of the marriage laws, especially those laws that limited a married woman’s right to own property.

A circle of women was established round Leigh Smith and Rayner Parks, and this was subsequently given focus by the provision of meeting rooms in London, in Langham Place. A vehicle of communication was established, the English Woman’s Journal. The editorship was eventually taken over by Emily Davies (1830-1921), who later became the first Principal of Girton.

The demand for women’s suffrage
In the early 1860s a debating group was formed, called the Kensington Society, which provided women with experience in preparing papers and speaking before an audience. It was in a Kensington Society debate that the question of women’s right to vote was first raised among this circle. The women found a supporter in John Stuart Mill, who was elected as MP for Westminster in 1865. In the debates on the 1867 Reform Act, he introduced an amendment allowing for women householders to vote on the same terms as men. In the same year the first women’s suffrage committee was founded. One of the leading members was Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1912) the wife of the blind MP Henry Fawcett. In 1868 she made her first public speech on the subject.

In the election which followed (1868) a number of Lancashire women with the necessary qualifications cast their vote. The returning officer moved their vote invalid. The suffragists then took a test case to the courts, and among their advisors was a young Manchester lawyer, Richard Pankhurst. In 1870 he drafted the first woman’s suffrage bill, which was introduced by two Radical-Liberals, Charles Dilke and Jacob Bright. This was rejected but Bright secured an amendment to the Municipal Corporations Act of 1869 which gave women with the appropriate property qualifications the right to vote in municipal elections. In 1870 it was also established that women might both vote and serve on the new local school boards. This was the first formal entry of women into public life.

The early suffrage movement was divided over the question of whether or not to include married women in the suffrage demand. The question arose because of the common-law disability of coverture, which debarred a married woman from exercising the vote if the franchise depended on a property qualification. The dilemma meant that demands for the vote were entwined with demands for a reform in the legal position of married women.

Marriage legislation
Since the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 women had been allowed to sue for divorce, though not on the grounds of adultery alone.

The Act of 1870 allowed married women to own their own wages and earnings, certain investments, and property inherited as next of kin of an intestate. They were allowed to inherit personal property of a value of less than £200 under a deed of will but no more. But from the late 1870s a string of judicial decisions showed that the act was not working as intended. In particular a magistrate in Manchester ruled that a wife could not sue her husband for stealing her property even when they had received a judicial separation.

The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 extended the rules of equity to all married women’s property and was a triumph for the argument that the protection offered to the rich should be offered to the poor. But this was not the same as giving married women the same rights as men, which did not happen until 1935. By preserving (until then) a series of trusts the wealthy classes were able to opt out of a reformed common law (following the Judicature Act) which gave married women considerably more freedom than they had previously enjoyed. In this way rich and poor continued to be governed by different systems. Politicians were reluctant to accept that their own homes should be affected by changes to women’s rights. The married women’s property acts harmonized well with the Victorian desire to improve the morals of the poor.

Protection of a different kind was provided by the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1858, which allowed a woman beaten by her husband to apply for a separation order (though this was often refused).

In 1891 the case of Regina v. Jackson overturned an earlier ruling that a husband cannot legally detain his wife in his house. Two years earlier Ibsen’s Doll’s House had played to crowded and excited audiences in London.

What these measures have in common is a recognition by parliamentarians of masculine bad behaviour – but primarily among the working classes. But it was also problematic because of fears that they would cause discord in the home. There was no place in Victorian ideology for disputes between husbands and wives.

Education
Educational reform began in the 1840s, stimulated by a variety of factors, including the rising wealth and expectations of the middle class, the belief that the mother as the first educator of her children needed a sound education and an increase in the number of middle-class unmarried women.

In 1848 Queen’s College in Harley Street and Bedford College (founded by the Unitarian, Elizabeth Reid) were founded.

1850 saw the foundation of the North London Collegiate School by Miss Frances Buss (1827-94); in 1854 Cheltenham Ladies College was founded; the second principal was Miss Dorothea Beale (1831-1906).
1871: Maria Grey set up the National Union for Improving the Education of Women.
1872: the Girls’ Public Day School Trust established.

There were tremendous obstacles, both social and cultural in the way of higher education for women. In the early 1860s Emily Davies turned her attention to getting girls to sit Cambridge University Local Examinations. She met constant resistance. In 1869 she and Florence Nightingale's cousin, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, founded a college at Hitchin, on the grounds that it was almost as near London as Cambridge, and that if Cambridge did not adopt it, London might. The initial five students took exactly the same Cambridge exams as the men (the Little-Go followed by the Tripos) - this was an important point of principle. But the college situation was awkward. In May 1872 the articles of association for Girton College were founded, and Emily Davies was nominated Secretary. In October 1873 the students arrived at a half finished building.

Others contested the Girton argument that the women should take the same exams as the men. At Leeds in 1867 Anne Jemima Clough (1820-92) helped establish the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, whose president was Josephine Butler. The Council developed the system that came to be known as ‘university extension’ - a lecture programme for women and special university-based examinations which would give an entry into teaching. When she became the first principal of Newnham College (1871) she was prepared to accept special provisions for women. As a result, Newnham attracted more students than Girton - though Emily Davies also insisted that they had sold the pass.

Newnham arose out of a series of ‘Lectures for Ladies’ which had been started in Cambridge in 1870. The (blind) professor of economics was Henry Fawcett, MP for Brighton, and husband of Elizabeth Garrett (1847-1912). Their circle in Cambridge included the philosopher, Henry Sidgwick. In 1871 Sidgwick rented a house in Cambridge in which young women attending the lectures could reside. He persuaded Anne Jemima Clough, who had previously run a school in the Lake District to take charge of this house. A purpose-built building, Newnham Hall, opened in 1875. Unlike Girton, which was run on Anglican lines, Newnham had no chapel.

In 1879 Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall were founded. The first Principal of LMH was Elizabeth Wordsworth, daughter of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth. The moving spirits were Edward Talbot, Warden of Keble and his wife Lavinia, daughter of Lord Lyttleton and niece of Mrs Gladstone. In 1884 Oxford voted to admit women to examinations but not degrees.

The resistance to the higher education of women came from a number of groups including (a) doctors who insisted that female students’ health would suffer from serious study (b) parents who feared that their daughters’ lives would be radically transformed.

But in spite of these arguments, higher education for women expanded. In 1878 London University admitted women to degrees on the same terms as men and none of the newly chartered Victorian and Edwardian universities drew sexual distinctions. By 1900 there were 1,476 full-time female students in England and another 1,194 in Scotland and Wales – to say nothing of the hundreds enrolled in teachers’ training colleges. In 1882 a Girton graduate, Constance Maynard, became the first Principal of Westfield, with the support of Lord Shaftesbury. Yet in 1881 women at Cambridge University were allowed only to sit the degree examinations on the same terms as men, but not be awarded degrees.

In 1890, there was a great sensation when Mrs Fawcett’s daughter, Philippa, was ranked above the Senior Wrangler - but she was not awarded the honour! (But in 1897 the proposal to admit women to degrees was rejected. It was only in 1947 that women in Cambridge were awarded degrees on the same terms as men.) Three years late Alice Cooke became the first woman to be appointed to a university teaching post – at Owen’s College, Manchester.

The entry into the professions
Women had a tremendous struggle to enter medicine. Professor Edward Clarke opposed women’s entry into medicine because he thought that such intellectual work would reduce the supply or nervous energy to the female reproductive system, producing

‘monstrous brains and puny bodies; abnormally active cerebration and abnormally weak digestion; flowing thought and constipated bowels’.

The English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley thought the over-expenditure of vital energy in mental activity by women would cause menstrual derangements leading to hysterial, epilepsy and chorea.

Elizabeth Garrett, later Anderson (1836-1917) found that she was only accepted by one medical school, the Company of Apothecaries (because their charter meant that they were unable to refuse any candidate who complied with their conditions). In 1870, just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, she took her MD degree in Paris. In 1873 she was admitted to the BMA.

In 1868 Sophia Jex-Blake (1840-1912) began a regular course of medical study in New York under Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, but was recalled home by the death of her father. She then began to seek medical education at home but found that all avenues were closed to her. After being refused by the University of London, she turned to Edinburgh where her second application was successful. Regulations were made for the admission of women and for their instruction ‘for the profession of medicine’ in separate classes. Five women matriculated at Edinburgh in 1869 but in 1873 they lost the last of a series of legal actions and were debarred from completing their studies. In 1874 Jex-Blake founded the London School of Medicine for Women. In 1877 the London (afterwards the Royal) Free Hospital opened its doors to women students. In the previous year (August 1876) all medical bodies were empowered to examine women, although the Irish college of Physicians was the first to use the power. Meanwhile Jex-Blake had qualified at Berne. In 1877 she gained the right to practise in Britain and in 1878 she settled in Edinburgh. In 1892-3 the BMA admitted women, though by 1900 there were only 434 women licensed to practise as doctors.

The breakthrough into the professions should not be exaggerated. In 1881 there were 25 female medical doctors, but in 1901 there were still only 212 (compared with 22,000 male doctors). There were no women barristers of solicitors – though in 1906 Christabel Pankhurst graduated with a law degree (First Class) from Victoria University (Manchester), having been refused admission by Lincoln’s Inn .

The employment of women was very much a question of class. Those women graduates who entered the professions overwhelmingly became teachers. In the 1850s elementary teaching was an essentially working-class occupation. But from the 1850s it came to be dominated by lower middle-class women. In 1861 there were 80,000 female teachers, in 1891 150,000.

The great expansion of female employment was in the lower middle-class white-collar occupations, such as clerks and shop assistants. (See other blog.)

Women and politics
The male-dominated political parties put forward contradictory messages in their attempts to attract women to their cause. The Conservative party was ambivalent in its attitude, and their appeal to the popular vote emphasised the male pursuits of ‘football, racing and beer’. But in 1883 the Conservatives founded the Primrose League. This was a political and social society designed to appeal to all strata of society. It soon boasted almost 2 million members and became a formidable force, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of its female members, who became involved in electioneering after the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 prohibited the payment of election agents. Tory women were organized in their own Ladies Grand Council. However, it was always stressed that the Council was to play a ‘backroom’ role. One of the first ‘Dames’ of the League was Lady Randolph Churchill, who canvassed the Woodstock election for her husband in 1885. But in spite of her high profile role in politics, Lady Randolph was opposed to votes for women.

The Liberals formed local Women’s Liberal Associations throughout the country during the 1880s and joined together in the Women’s Liberal Federation in 1887. The Bristol branch of the WLA, established in 1881 by Anna Maria Priestman and Emily Sturge, was especially feminist. But disagreements among Liberals came to a head in 1892 when Gladstone declared his opposition to women’s suffrage.

The fear I have is, lest we should invite her unwittingly to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature, which are the present sources of its power.

This was not the only reason why many Liberals opposed women’s suffrage. Some argued that the proposal to give women the vote on the same terms as men would simply extend household suffrage and tip the scales further against working-class men.

The three main socialist groups established in the 1880s and 1890s - the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party - were unusual in opening their membership to women on the same basis as men. But this involved a dilemma: which should be stressed, class oppression or gender oppression? In practice, priority was given to economic rather than gender questions. However, the ILP provided a platform for women: middle-class lecturers spread not only socialism but feminism among working-class women. At the same time Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth, both middle-class socialists, made women’s suffrage into a trade union matter by linking it with women’s work and women’s wages.

The most consistent supporter of women’s suffrage was the Co-operative Women’s Guild. It began as a conservative movement, insisting that woman’s place was in the home and trying to avoid the antagonism roused by women’s rights. However after 1889, when Margaret Llewellyn Davies, a nice of Emily Davies and a staunch feminist, became General Secretary, it was quick to change its role. A suffrage petition was organized as early as 1893.

However, the cause of women’s suffrage had suffered a blow when ‘An appeal against female suffrage’ was published in The Nineteenth Century in June 1889. It was drawn up by (among others) Mrs Humphry Ward (1851-1920). Among the 104 women who signed were Beatrice Potter (later Webb) and Lady Randolph Churchill. In the July issue Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) wrote a rejoinder. The August issue contained the names of 1,200 anti-suffrage ladies.

In 1894 the cause of women’s suffrage gained a significant advance in the passage of the Local Government Act, but which married women became open for all the local government franchises already open to single women and widows. The issue of coverture was now effectively dead, and the way was clear for all suffragists to work together for equal rights for all women to the parliamentary franchise.

In 1897 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett. In that year too (February) a woman’s suffrage bill passed its second reading in the Commons for the first time.

Progress and regression
In 1894 the term ‘the New Woman’ was invented. ‘The label was most convincingly applied to the young middle-class woman who not only had a job but maintained herself and lived on her own or with another young woman, in an apartment or “chambers”. This entailed a complete departure from the domestic obligations traditionally filled by this age group, and was correctly summed up as “the revolt of the daughters” – another coinage by the press of the day.’

But there were not many ‘new women’ and some of the most spectacular advances also highlighted women’s continuing disabilities. Changes in the law did not always expand women’s rights at the expense of men’s. As late as 1899 a jury’s decision in the case of Regina v. Clarence overturned the standard opinion of judges and legal textbooks by asserting a husband’s right to rape his wife (even when, as in this case, the husband was suffering from advanced syphilis). The Vagrancy Act (1898) which outlawed sexual soliciting, prescribed fines of 40 shillings for female offenders compared with six months’ imprisonment and hard labour for men; but the Act was massively enforced against women, whereas prosecutions of men were virtually unknown.

Some intellectual trends worked against women. The Darwinian, Herbert Spencer, argued that childbirth precluded the female brain from sharing in ‘the latest products of human evolution’, namely abstract reasoning and the sentiment of justice. (These arguments were used against women jurors.)

Not all developments in popular culture favoured women. The late Victorian cult of both upper- and lower-class ‘clubland’ was an almost exclusively masculine sphere.
Growing fears about Britain’s national defence capability and status as a world power tended to intermesh with fears about the changing role of women and the decline in the birth rate. In the 1860s hostility to women’s suffrage had emphasized mainly their lack of property rights. This was no longer such an issue in the 1890s and was replaced by the notion that a female-dominated electorate would subvert military security. Rising concern for Empire, family, and general biological improvement meant that in certain respects gender divisions became more pronounced.

Feminism was a minority cause for women. In purely numerical terms the most successful women’s organization of the period was the Mothers’ Union (1886). The ideology of the MU was expressed in a poem by Lady Dorothy Neville, which appeared in the Mothers’ Union Journal in 1908. [Quoted Sean Gill, Women and the Church of England. From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (1994), 142.]

The Rights of Woman, what are they?
The Right to labour love and pray,
The Right to weep with those who weep,
The Right to work while others sleep.

The Suffragettes

2009-12-06T09:52:00.001Z

The situation before 1903
The end of the 19th century saw a new emphasis on the distinctive contribution women could make to politics, while at the same time improving themselves through their participation in public life. As elective local government expanded owing to the creation of school boards, county councils and parish, urban and rural district councils, women were able to stand for office. In the first London County Council elections of 1888 Jane Cobden and Lady Margaret Sandhurst were returned while Emma Cons was nominated as an alderman by the Liberal majority on the council. Jane Cobden (daughter of Richard) sat for Bow and Bromley, where the socialist, George Lansbury had ably managed her election. However, the legality of her position was questioned in a series of actions brought against her, with the result that, while she continued to serve on the council until 1892, she faced financial penalties and was not able to vote at its meetings; only in 1907 would women acquire full rights in local government.

In December 1894 Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) (left) was elected for the Chorlton-upon-Medlock Board of Poor Law Guardians. Women were also active in the Primrose League and (from 1887) the Women’s Liberal Federation. But the vote remained as elusive as ever, and no bills or resolutions for the female franchise came before the Commons between 1897 and 1904.

In part this was because many suffragists campaigned for a limited women’s franchise in which the vote was restricted to householders, who by definition would not be married women; but these tactics played into the hands of those who saw single women as failures. They also alienated many Labour supporters who believed it was wrong to add middle-class women to the electoral register while denying the vote to so many working-class men.

In July 1889 the Women’s Franchise League was formed with a committee that included Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst. It argued that no woman should be disqualified from the franchise by marriage, but it suffered from disputes with the advocates of partial suffrage, notably Lydia Becker and Millicent Fawcett, successively Presidents of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, founded 1897) who believed that only a limited first installment offered a realistic prospect of success.

The South African War highlighted the issue of women’s participation in politics. The war stimulated discussion about the nature of citizenship, but suffragists reacted in different ways. Josephine Butler and Millicent Fawcett thought women should have a role in politics because they would seek to save black South Africans from the Boers; this drew on a gendered model of service. But pro-Boer women argued that if the government were willing to go to war over the question of political rights for the Uitlanders, then women had the right to resist a government that did not acknowledge them as citizens. Dora Montefiore, a middle-class socialist propagandist and suffrage campaigner, resisted paying her taxes, and therefore raised questions about the obligations women had to a state that governed without their consent, and whether women should be governed by laws that they did not formulate. It was the old cry of ‘No Taxation without Representation’.

The NUWSS was a thoroughly respectable body. However, during the 1890s one of its affiliated bodies, the North of England Society tried to shed its image of middle-class gentility by campaigning hard among the female textile workers of Lancashire. Two of its most striking leaders, Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth, came from well-to-do backgrounds. Roper was a graduate of the Victoria University in Manchester, and Gore-Booth came from an Anglo-Irish Society. Both saw the vote as a means of improving the conditions of working-class women, several of whom emerged as campaigners in their own right. In 1901 and 1902 the Society presented the Commons with a petition signed by over 66,000 women factory workers. Pressure from the Society persuaded the NUWSS Convention meeting in 1903 to sponsor to sponsor a parliamentary candidate in the next general election.

On 16 March 1904 the Commons passed a pro-suffrage resolution by the very wide margin of 184/70 – though this was merely a statement of principle and didn’t commit MPs to action. Two years later the Liberal government was returned in a landslide and Mrs Fawcett believed that this had brought into the House as many as 400 sympathetic MPs. But the government nevertheless refused to give the vote to women.

The WSPU
In October 1903 Emmeline and Christabel (1880-1958) Pankhurst (right) founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in Manchester. In its early days the group devoted its efforts mainly to converting ILP branches to the cause of women’s suffrage. In its early days the WSPU relied heavily on the ILP and much of its membership was drawn from the Lancashire textile workers, notably Annie Kenney, recruited in 1905, who always introduced herself as ‘a factory girl and a trade unionist’.

On 14 February 1904 Winston Churchill, the current Tory member for Oldham but in the process of deserting his party for the Liberals, was addressing a meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Christabel Pankhurst interrupted to ask about women’s suffrage:

‘the first militant step … the most difficult thing I [had] ever done’.

On the eve of the election of 1905, Christabel and Annie Kenney (left) interrupted a Liberal Party meeting addressed by Sir Edward Grey at the Free Trade Hall on 13 October by asking the question

‘Will the Liberal Government, if returned, give votes to women?’

[This was the first time the slogan ‘Votes for Women’ was used.] When the question was not answered and repeated, the two women were roughly ejected from the hall. Christabel deliberately committed the technical offence of spitting at a policeman in order to court arrest. Both were charged with obstruction and sentenced to pay fines or face imprisonment. An anxious Emmeline offered to pay the fines, a gesture that was refused by Christabel. When she and Annie Kenney refused to pay the fine they were imprisoned for a few days. This immediately put the WSPU in the public eye and the movement began to grow rapidly.

After the election, in the summer of 1906, the Pankhursts moved to London and the WSPU began to detach itself from its ILP links. Increasingly, support came from middle and upper-class women. In early 1906 the Daily Mail had coined the term ‘suffragettes’. On 23 October, following a demonstration for the opening of Parliament ten WSPU members, including Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Annie Kenney and Anne Cobden Sanderson, were arrested after a scuffle and imprisoned in Holloway. This raised the whole profile of women’s suffrage, drawing the support of celebrities like George Bernard Shaw, something acknowledged by Mrs Fawcett in an open letter to the Times. At this stage there was considerable overlap between the WSPU and Mrs Fawcett’s National Association of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

Internal disputes
The disillusionment that Emmeline and Christabel (though not Sylvia, who had become Keir Hardie’s lover) felt about the lukewarm attitude of socialists towards women's suffrage came to a head in April 1907 when both resigned from the ILP: the Labour Party now opposed extending the franchise to women if the ownership of property remained a qualification for voting. Although links between the WSPU and the socialist movement were never completely severed, especially at the individual level, the independent policy plus an autocratic style of leadership caused tensions within the union so that rumours of a coup surfaced during the summer. A group of dissenters, including Teresa Billington Greig and Charlotte Despard, formed another militant organization, later called the Women's Freedom League.
Although Emmeline Pankhurst was now regarded as the autocrat of the WSPU, in the years immediately following this split she chose to travel up and down the country speaking for the cause, rather than exercise direct personal control over the organization. The day-to-day running of the union was left to Christabel, to whom her mother always deferred. She was aided by Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who had joined the movement in the autumn of 1906 and became joint editors of the WSPU's paper, Votes for Women, founded in October 1907. This began as a monthly publication priced at 3d in October 1907, but became weekly at 1d from May 1908. By May 1909 circulation had soared to 22,000. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence was the treasurer and such was her skill that by 1907 the WSPU annual income was over £7,000. She also designed the suffragette colours – white (‘purity in private as well as public life’, purple (dignity) and green (hope).

The growth of militancy
Mrs Pankhurst's first imprisonment occurred on 13 February 1908 when, still lame from an injury to her ankle, she led a deputation to the House of Commons and was arrested, along with her companions, for obstruction. She served a month in the second division, alongside common criminal offenders, and not in the first division where political offenders were placed.

Campbell-Bannerman had sympathised with the women’s cause, but Asquith who became Prime Minister in 1908 did not. On 21 June 1908 there was a great demonstration in Hyde Park at which it was estimated there were between a quarter and a half million present. Their methods were a continuation of the protests of Chartists and other radicals, but they did not fit with conventional ideas of female decorum, which provoked vigorous protests from male crowds. In 1908 a Women’s Anti-Suffrage League was founded by Mrs Humphrey Ward. It later combined with a male anti-suffrage committee to become the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, led by Cromer and Curzon.

On 14 October 1908 Emmeline Pankhurst stood in the dock at Bow Street, together with Flora Drummond and Christabel, charged with incitement to disorder, based on a handbill that had been published encouraging the ‘lowest class of London toughs’ to ‘rush’ the House of Commons a tactic that disgusted Mrs Fawcett. The three accused did not employ counsel, but spoke for themselves. Christabel was especially eloquent and sub-poenaed cabinet ministers to appear in her defence. Emmeline was sentenced to three months' imprisonment and Christabel ten weeks.

The hunger strikes
By the summer of 1909 there was an impasse between the suffragettes and the government while the moderate NUWSS had dissociated itself from the tactics of the suffragettes. The impasse was broken by two new developments. On 29 June a group of suffragettes appeared outside the Home Office, the Treasury and the Privy Council and threw stones at the windows. On 5 July when on her own initiative, Marion Wallace Dunlop began the first hunger strike, in a bid to be granted political offender status and therefore be placed in the privileged ‘first division’ of prisoners. After fasting for 91 hours she was released. The hunger strike was soon adopted by 36 suffragettes, who were all released. But on 24 September two suffragettes were force-fed at Winson Green prison. This was condemned with burning indignation by Christabel (‘This is war’) and the other WSPU leaders.

The 1910 elections
January 1910 was taken up with the general election called over the peers’ rejection of Lloyd George’s budget. In the same month backbench MPs proposed a compromise bill for women’s suffrage: a vote for female heads of household and business occupiers of property worth £10 annually. But to its critics the bill appeared to allow wealthy men (Conservatives?) the opportunity to manufacture extra votes by bestowing pieces of property on their female relations; Liberals and Labour preferred to abolish plural voting altogether rather than run the risk of adding to it. The suffragette leaders cautiously accepted the Conciliation Bill and on 31 January Christabel called a truce: militancy was to end for the time being, though Liberal candidates were still to be opposed.

However the issue of women’s suffrage played only a small part in the two elections of 1910. Suffragette protest had hardened into a ritual - arrests, imprisonments, followed by release - and no longer moved the public. In the summer the government refused to support the Conciliation Bill. On Friday 18th November 1910 (‘Black Friday’) a huge demonstration was held on the reassembly of Parliament when women who attempted to rush the Palace of Westminster received rough treatment at the hands of an over-zealous constabulary. Mrs Fawcett privately railed against

‘those idiots [who] go out smashing windows and bashing ministers’ hats over their eyes’.

On 22-23 November in the ‘Battle of Downing Street’ Asquith’s car was damaged and he had to be spirited away in a taxi. On 25 November hostilities were resumed. Liberal ministers were constant targets during the election campaign in December 1910 (Churchill was horsewhipped as he got out of a railway carriage in Bristol). After the December election the vote seemed as far away as ever. But suffragette tactics were as inventive as ever: on 23 January 1911 the WSPU took over the Albert Hall for the launch of Ethel Smyth’s ‘The March of the Women’.

The escalation of militancy
By the end of 1911 internal Liberal divisions on the issue became so serious that Churchill warned Asquith that unless he took a grip soon his government

‘might come to grief in an ignominious way and perish like Sisera at a woman’s hand’.

On 7 November 1911 Asquith re-introduced his Conciliation Bill. He announced that the government would abolish plural voting and enfranchise the four million men currently excluded from the franchise; women’s amendments could be tabled as the bill went through committee stage. Millicent Fawcett later remarked that this would inevitably provoke militancy. Christabel denounced the bill as disreputable, and appealed for one thousand women to march to Westminster two weeks later. While the demonstration was taking place, however, a smaller group armed with bags of stones and hammers broke windows of government offices and businesses; 220 women were arrested. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson resigned from the WSPU in protest.

On 15 December Emily Wilding Davidson set three pillar boxes alight (a tactic that had not been authorized by the WSPU). On 1 March 1912 the suffragettes for the first time attacked private property in the West End (Emmeline Pankhurst had been taught by Ethel Smyth how to throw stones!) On 4 March suffragettes went on the rampage in Knightsbridge. On 28 March the Commons rejected a third Conciliation Bill by 208/222, chiefly because the Irish Nationalists switched sides: they did not wish to destabilize the government on the eve of the Home Rule Bill. In May Emmeline was tried for conspiracy and sentenced to nine months in the second division. The sentence was regarded as harsh but she was not forcibly fed and she was released after five weeks on health grounds. However Mrs Pethick-Lawrence was forcibly fed but suffered so much that she was released on the same day as Mrs Pankhurst. George Lansbury denounced Asquith as the man who would go down in history for the torture of innocent women.

From now on, militancy was driven further underground as widespread destruction of letters in mailboxes became common as well as arson, window breaking, and other acts of vandalism – much of it directed by Christabel from Paris. The government responded by prohibiting WSPU meetings and raiding its central offices. In October 1912 the Pethick-Lawrences were thrown out of the WSPU. After Lansbury lost the Bromley and Bow by-election in November, Sylvia began to break away from the WSPU and to campaign for universal suffrage for both men and women.

On 27 January 1913 during the committee state of Asquith’s bill the Speaker made a surprise ruling that amendments in favour of female suffrage were out of order because it fundamentally altered the purpose of the bill. This was effectively the end of efforts to enact votes for women before 1914. Instead the government withdrew the Franchise Bill and introduced a Plural Voting Bill (which had earlier been defeated in the Lords), which extended the male franchise from 7½ to 10 million, and which ended the Conservative advantage of plural voting.

The final phase
The final phase of the WSPU’s pre-war campaign took the form of a prolonged campaign of arson. In February 1913 suffragettes smashed the orchid house at Kew, set a railway carriage alight and bombed Lloyd George’s house. Emmeline boasted about it at a public meeting in Cardiffand was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude; she refused food, but was not forcibly fed and was released after a few days. In April the home secretary, Reginald McKenna, rushed through the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Bill, nicknamed the Cat and Mouse Act. This was a very notorious measure, but arguably it worked.

On 4 June 1913 Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of the King’s horse at the Derby and died five days later – but most of the sympathy was for the horse, which had to be put down. The WSPU became increasingly isolated from the rest of the women’s suffrage movement and within the Society itself dissent was firmly suppressed. One in five women defected to the Women’s Freedom League; Sylvia Pankhurst was expelled because of her Socialist convictions. From Paris, Christabel wrote a pamphlet arguing that men were essentially wicked and the source of all the world’s problems. Millicent Fawcett believed that the WSPU had become a more serious obstacle than the anti-suffragists in the cabinet.
Although the suffragette tactics were counter-productive, the medium-term prospects for women’s suffrage were promising. The Liberal government had compelling reasons for ending a dispute that was tearing the party apart. Churchill:

‘It would be appalling if this strong Government and Party … was to go down on Petticoat Politics.’

A general election was due in 1915 and Asquith’s resistance to women’s suffrage was increasingly seen as a hindrance. There were fears that women Liberals were drifting to Labour and that Labour would form an alliance with the non militant suffragists. If war had not broken out, it is possible that the government would have committed itself to some form of women’s suffrage.

Britain 1902-11

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The following posts deal with a particularly turbulent period of British political history: the fall of the Conservatives, following a nearly unbroken twenty years in power, the Liberal landslide, following their catastrophic split in 1886, the introduction of a proto-welfare state, and the titanic clash between the governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith over the House of Lords.

Later posts will look at the suffragettes and the coming of the First World War. To refresh your memory of the Irish crisis, see here.

The Conservatives: from victory to disaster

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In January 1901 Victoria died and was succeeded by Edward VII. In May 1902 Lord Salisbury's Conservative government signed a treaty with the Boers, ending the Anglo-Boer War. On 11 July 1902 he retired, having served the fourth-longest premiership after Walpole, Pitt the Younger and Liverpool. He was also the last Prime Minister to sit in the Lords. He died at Hatfield in August 1903. The end of his premiership can be seen as a symbolic marker of the end of the Victorian period.

There was never any doubt that Salisbury would be succeeded by his nephew, A. J. Balfour (left) hence [possibly] the phrase, ‘Bob’s your uncle’ - though it might have an earlier origin). Joseph Chamberlain, the only possible rival, was unacceptable to large sections of Conservative opinion (and was recovering from a fall through a plate glass window at the time).

The greatest achievement of the Balfour government was the 1902 Education Act, though the government got little credit for it. The act swept away the 2568 school boards set up by the 1870 Education Act and made county and borough councils the local education authorities (LEAs) for both elementary and secondary schools. The Act provided some much needed rationalization, and set up a statutory system of secondary education, but Nonconformists were furious at what they saw as the privileged position given to Anglican schools. Many, who had supported the Unionists (Conservatives) since the Home Rule crisis of 1886, now returned to the Liberals. The divided Liberal party gained a new lease of life as those who had deserted the party over Ireland began to return to the fold. Retrospectively the Act can be seen as a major advance in the provision of secondary education, but politically it was an unqualified disaster.

Tariff Reform
Chamberlain had been absent from the debates on the act as a result of his accident. He felt betrayed by its final provisions (which denied church schools the right to opt out of LEAs) and as a consequence the former Liberal felt released from any reciprocal obligation to the Conservatives. It enabled him to embark on a campaign of ‘imperial preference’ which split the Conservatives in a manner reminiscent of Peel’s abandonment of agricultural protection.

There were two main factors behind the campaign.

1. Chamberlain’s passionate imperialism. Worried about British isolationism and unpopularity (as shown by the international reaction to the Boer War), he at first attempted to force an alliance with Germany. When this fell through he envisaged instead a grand union of the British Empire - seeing this as essentially a project for the Anglo-Saxon races.
2. Some disturbing economic facts. Between 1870 and 1900 Britain’s share of world manufacturing production had slipped from over 30% to less than 20%. The United States had overtaken her in 1880 and Germany in c. 1900. These two rivals had large domestic resources and markets, acquired through processes of unification. In 1896 Ernest Williams published Made in Germany. By 1902 the focus of hostility had shifted to America, but the principle remained the same - Britain was suffering from foreign competition.

In a speech in Birmingham in May 1902 Chamberlain declared:

‘The days are for great Empires, not for little states.’

In a speech in Birmingham on 15 May 1903 he opened his campaign, challenging the premises of free trade and calling for closer economic unity of the Empire. The Times likened this to Luther’s challenge to the Church of Rome at Wittenberg. The Liberals could hardly believe their luck. Herbert Henry Asquith:

‘Wonderful news today and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep the country.’

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the economic arguments, imperial preference had huge political problems that were in some ways a rerun of the debates of the early 1840s. Chamberlain was advocating a fundamental change in the country’s commercial policy. Free trade had been the mid-Victorian gospel, and a group of Conservatives immediately went into action to defend it. Lord Hugh Cecil and Winston Churchill declared that if the Tory party became protectionist it would lose its soul.

Throughout the summer of 1903 Balfour tried to hold the party together and work out a compromise position. But he was unable to prevent the formation of rival groups. In the autumn Chamberlain travelled the country arguing for imperial protection (duties levied on foreign but not colonial imports). But this reminded many Conservatives of the way the party had split on the corn laws in 1846. On 24 October Winston Churchill wrote:

'I hate the Tory party. … I feel no sort of sympathy with them. … It is therefore my intention that before Parliament meets [late January or February] my separation from the Tory party and the government shall be complete & irrevocable & during the next session I propose to act consistently with the Liberal party.’

Meanwhile Asquith went on a similar speaking round arguing against imperial preference. The Liberal argument was the simple Anti-Corn Law League one: protection (in this case imperial preference) would mean dearer bread.

The Fall of the Unionists
By 1905 Chamberlain accepted that the Unionists were going to lose the next election (though the Liberals were unable to believe that they would win it) but he hoped that after the election he could reconstruct the party round tariff reform. By this time the party was in a state of almost open civil war. In December 1905 Balfour resigned and the King sent for Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman (right), Balfour was the last Prime Minister to resign to an opposition leader without first being defeated in a general election.

The 1906 general election

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On assuming office in December 1905 the elderly Henry Campbell-Bannerman formed a cabinet:
Herbert Henry Asquith: Chancellor of the Exchequer;
Sir Edward Grey: Foreign Secretary;
R.B. Haldane: Minister for War;
Herbert Gladstone: Home Secretary
Two younger men came into the government. David Lloyd George, aged 42, became President of the Board of Trade. Winston Churchill, recently defected from the Tories, became Under-Secretary for the Colonies. The Lib-Lab John Burns became President of the Local Government Board, the first working man to reach the cabinet.

The general election of 1906 was a landslide, giving the Liberals an absolute majority of 130 seats (nearly 50% of the vote). With their allies they had a majority of over 350.

Conservatives 157 (they had over 400 in the Khaki Election)
Liberals (and their allies) 400 (184 in 1900)
Labour 53. This was a sensation. 24 were closely allied to the Liberals and the other 29 were elected under the independent auspices of the LRC (now renamed the Labour Party) and of these only four had been involved in a fight with a serious Liberal opponent. The Labour MPs sat on the Opposition benches but their dependence on the Liberals made it hard for them to operate as a genuine opposition party.
Irish Nationalists 83.

Otherwise impregnable Conservative seats – Cheltenham, Eastbourne, Chelsea – fell to the Liberals. Balfour suffered the humiliation of losing his own East Manchester seat (he was later returned in a by-election for the City of London). He saw the result in wildly apocalyptic terms:

‘the faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin’.

The British electoral system - as so often - exaggerated the result in giving the Liberals such a huge majority with less than 50% of the vote, but even so it was a remarkable result for them. Twenty-seven Liberal candidates were elected unopposed. The Unionists were in disarray, constituency parties were depleted, Lancashire swung firmly behind the Liberals on the question of free trade (Churchill had captured North-West Manchester), Home Rule played well in the Irish areas.

Balfour was returned in a by-election in March (City of London) and his control over his party was assured when Chamberlain suffered a massive stroke in July 1906 and retired from active politics. He was determined to give the Liberals a very hard time indeed.

The Liberals in power (1906-14): I the problem of the Lords

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Though the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (right) was elected in a landslide victory, it made little initial progress in its general legislative programme. During the election campaign (in a speech delivered at Nottingham on 15 January 1906) the Conservative leader, A. J. Balfour had said:

‘the great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or whether in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire’.

This was no empty threat. At the beginning of the new Parliament there were 602 peers, including 25 bishops. Of these only 88 were Liberals, 124 were Liberal Unionists and 355 were Conservatives. In December 1908 only 102 peers took the Liberal whip as against 459 Unionists.

For several decades the Lords had been developing a theory of ‘plebiscitary democracy’ – asserting their right to hold up controversial bills until they had received the explicit endorsement of the electorate. In 1893 a Conservative dominated Lords had rejected the second Home Rule Bill. Between 1909 and 1909 the Upper Chamber rejected or wrecked ten Liberal bills.

The Education Bill: In April 1906 the government introduced an Education Bill, designed to appeal to its Nonconformist supporters by restricting Anglican privileges. It was its flagship piece of legislation and it dominated the 1906 Parliament. But the bill never passed into law as the Lords amended it, after consultations between Balfour and Lansdowne, the Unionist leader in the Lords, in a way that completely overturned its provisions. The bill was withdrawn in December.

Outraged, Campbell-Bannerman considered an immediate dissolution with a campaign on the straight issue of the supremacy of the Commons. But cabinet opinion was firmly opposed.

The Trades Disputes Bill: The Lords did not destroy the Trades Disputes Bill, because a prior mandate had been sought. Brought in under pressure from the Labour members, it granted unions immunity from legal action. In future a trade union was not liable for civil wrongs committed on its behalf. This established that peaceful picketing was legal even when its objects were to incite to breach of contract. But the Lords destroyed a plural voting bill, a major item in the government’s legislative programme. The result was that after a year in office the Liberals, for all their huge majority, had achieved little.

The King’s speech in February 1907 referred to

‘unfortunate differences between the two Houses’.

He was not exaggerating. A Licensing bill was postponed and replaced as the main legislative business of the early part of the session by compromise measures on Ireland - but they had to be withdrawn for lack of support.

It was a horrible paradox for the Liberals. They were being pressed by the Labour members to pass laws they did not really approve of and were prevented by the Conservatives in the Lords from passing their own legislation. And they were beginning to suffer electorally as there were sharp swings to the Unionists and Labour in by-elections. In 1908 Lloyd George declared:

‘The House of Lords is not the watchdog of the constitution. It is Mr Balfour’s poodle.’

There were two possible solutions to the problem of conflict between the two Houses:

1. To alter the composition of the Upper House, mainly by reducing the hereditary element. This had strong conservative elements, for a reformed second chamber would be on stronger moral and political grounds in applying the brake on the first chamber. (Does this sound familiar?! ) For this reason in 1907 some Tory peers introduced a (failed) bill to alter drastically the composition of the House: the hereditary peers were to elect a quarter of their number to represent them and the places so vacated would be filled by the government of the day with life peers. But if passed, it would weaken the power of the Commons and invalidate its claim to be the sole representative of the will of the people.
2. Campbell-Bannerman’s preferred solution was to curb the power of the peers by ruling that a bill passed three times by the Commons would become law without the consent of the Lords.

The Liberals in power: II Asquith becomes Prime Minister

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Early in 1908 Campbell-Bannerman’s health began to fail. He resigned on 3 April), and died two weeks later). On 4 April the King summoned the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Henry Asquith (left) to Biarritz.

Asquith was succeeded at the Treasury by David Lloyd George, (right) a man born outside the British elite. He had been an effective and high profile President of the Board of Trade: he had settled a threatened rail strike, had prepared legislation for the establishment of the Port of London Authority to take over the management of a vast area of London’s dockyards. The new President of the Board of Trade was Winston Churchill. The elevation of these two men gave the government a new aggressiveness which goaded the Conservatives into a succession of political errors. But all was not well for the government. Churchill, standing for re-election on his appointment as President of the Board of Trade was defeated in North-West Manchester and forced to find another seat in Dundee.

If you want to lower the tone and learn more about Lloyd George's - ahem - colourful private life, then you might be interested in Ffion Hague's The Pain and the Privilege (2008).

The Licensing Bill
The session of 1908 was intended to give the temperance movement its due with a Licensing Bill. The main provision was the establishment of a fixed ratio of the number of public houses to the population in each licensing area. The Liberals had as clear a mandate for this as they had for their Education Bill (both bills appealed to the same constituency) but this was not a popular cause and the brewers were a powerful lobby. It was fought hard in the Commons and the Lords declined to give it a second reading.

The government was now in a dilemma. It had little to show for its impressive electoral victory. An economic slump meant that unemployment was rising and the Unionist cause of tariff reform (now official policy) was becoming more popular. As in 1907 the government was beginning to lose by-elections.

Economically the government was pulled in two directions. Since going to the Exchequer in 1905 Asquith had laid the groundwork for a taxation policy designed to finance social reform, notably old age pensions. But it was faced with the possible further increase in arms expenditure. The Liberals had cut defence spending when they came to power but in 1908 they were faced with fierce pressure from the Dreadnought building programme (see later post). The potential conflict between social reform and defence spending was painful and divisive for Liberals.

The Liberals in Power: III Old Age Pensions

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Pensions were the main plank of the 1908 budget. The pensions bill received its second reading in the Commons on 15 June 1908. It was introduced by Lloyd George (though Asquith had devised the scheme) and came to be popularly known as ‘the Lloyd George’. The measure was a disappointment to those who had wanted universal pensions. It was finally agreed that: British citizens over 70 with incomes of up to £21 pa would receive the full non-contributory pension of £13 p.a. (5s per week) for single persons and of £19.10.00 (7s. 6d. per week) for married couples. Incomes of up to £31.10s would qualify for a pension reduced by one shilling a week for each shilling of income above £21. The minimum pension would be one shilling. Those with incomes as low as £26 p.a. would receive only 3s a week (this caused Labour members to vote against the amendment). Asquith estimated that about half a million persons would qualify for the pensions and that the annual cost would be £6m; but by 1912 the government was spending £11.7m. and by 1914 £12.5m.

The pensions provisions reduced some peers to paroxyms of anger. The former Liberal leader, Lord Rosebery described them as

'so prodigal of expenditure as likely to undermine the whole fabric of the Empire'.

The scheme’s main defect in the eyes of its critics was the high qualifying age. The Labour Party began campaigning for improved pensions: a minimum of 5s non-means-tested and applied to men and women of 60. But for all its inadequacy it was a milestone in social legislation, since it made it easier for the aged poor to avoid the workhouse and avoided the language of opprobrium associated with the poor law.

On 1 January 1909 ('Pensions Day') c. 490,000 people drew a pension – a relatively low number because of those disqualified from entitlement (paupers, some criminals, aliens and the wives of aliens and those deemed guilty of ‘habitual failure to work’). Most of the recipients were women. All had to learn the new procedure of completing forms available at the post office. The costs rapidly escalated and the numbers of pensioners rose after the removal of the pauper disqualification in March 1911.

Other social legislation
Between them Lloyd George and Churchill made major social innovations: the establishment of labour exchanges and trade boards (Churchill), the introduction of health and unemployment insurance (Lloyd George). The Board of Trade also produced the Trade Boards Act of 1909, which set up boards for the four trades in which, largely owing to the lack of trade unions, ‘sweated’ labour was found to be prevalent. The boards were to fix minimum wages, which then had to be confirmed by the Board of Trade. In 1908 the Coal Mines Act had established a statutory eight-hour day for miners, the first occasion in which the working hours of adult males had been limited by statute. However this was poorly received in some collieries where the miners were already working less than eight hours.

The Liberals in power: IV the 'People's Budget' and the fight with the Lords

2009-11-29T10:46:00.000Z

This was the title Lloyd George gave his 1909 budget and it sprang from his temperance, Nonconformist background. It was in part the product of the government’s greatly increased need for income: the Dreadnought building programme and the increased social security costs. Because it was also extremely redistributivist, it was not a traditional Liberal budget (Gladstone would have regarded it with horror).

Income tax was increased from a shilling to 1. 2d on every £ over £3000
Supertax was introduced for incomes over £5000 pa at a rate of 6d on every £ over £3000
Death duties on estates over £5,000 were increased
There were heavier duties on tobacco and spirits, and the liquor licence duties were raised
Special taxes on petrol and motor-car licences
Stamp duties were increased
A 20 % tax on the unearned increment of land values

Lloyd George also announced the impending introduction of a great measure of National Insurance, based on compulsory contributions.

The Conservatives launched a furious attack, not only in the Commons but also in the country, and resolved to mobilize their majority in the Lords against it, though this was clearly unconstitutional. Lloyd George retaliated in his Limehouse speech of 30 July.

‘I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them: - “Here, you know these poor fellows have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives ... they are broken ... won’t you give them something to keep them out of the workhouse ...” They scowl at you and then turn their dogs onto us, and every day you can hear them bark.’

The duke of Beaufort then played into Lloyd George’s hands when he stated that he would

‘like to see Churchill and Lloyd George in the middle of twenty couple of dog hounds’.

But by August most of the Conservative press was coming out in favour of rejection of the budget. Balfour, vulnerable and outmanoeuvred, accepted that defeat would have to come at the hands of the Lords. While the budget was being debated (with the Irish Nationalists hostile to the liquor taxes) Lloyd George declared in Newcastle:

‘The Lords may decree a revolution, but the people will decide it. ... The question will be asked whether 500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, should over-ride the judgment ... of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country. Who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?’

In November 1909 the budget passed the Commons. The Lords promptly rejected it.

The Battle with the Lords
The subsequent general election of January 1910 was fought on a range of issues: the budget, tariff reform, and the Unionist accusation that the Liberals had allowed Britain to lose naval supremacy. The election result left the Liberals and Conservatives nearly level: Liberals 275, Conservatives 273. There were also 40 Labour members and 82 Irish Nationalists. The Nationalists thus held the balance of power.

The new Parliament opened with the Liberals in a depressed mood. Asquith frequently used the phrase ‘wait and see’ - though he meant it as a threat rather than procrastination. Over the next few weeks the government drew three resolutions which would form the basis of a Parliament Bill:

the Lords would not be able to amend or reject a money bill;
an ordinary bill, if passed three times in successive sessions by the Commons could be presented for the royal assent without the agreement of the Lords, provided at least two years had elapsed between the bill’s introduction and final approval in the Commons;
the maximum duration of a Parliament was to be reduced from seven to five years.

The cabinet also decided that if the three resolutions were passed by the Commons and the Lords then threw out the bill, they would seek an election with prior guarantees from the king about the creation of peers. The king gave a secret (and reluctant) agreement to create the required number of peers.

In April the Commons passed the three resolutions and the People’s Budget got a second reading. On 7 May Edward VII died. Unwilling to embroil the new king, George V, in party controversy, it was agreed to set up a Constitutional Conference of four leaders from the two major parties. This conference held 21 sessions between June and November but the shadow of Irish Home Rule loomed over the meetings. The Liberals could not accept any scheme that would allow a veto on Home Rule, but the Conservatives insisted that this was special constitutional legislation and should be treated differently. On 10 November the Conference broke down. The government asked the king for a dissolution, and in December a second election was held.

This election was fought not on the People’s Budget but on the problem of the second chamber. The result showed little change, with the two parties still almost exactly balanced. But it was traumatic for the Unionists, who had now lost three general elections in a row. In these circumstances a ‘last ditch’ mentality developed among many of them: they would oppose the Liberals at whatever cost. The all-out resisters were soon called the ‘ditchers’; those who wanted a compromise the ‘hedgers’.

In the spring of 1911 the Parliament Bill reached the Lords, where it was amended out of recognition. In July the government made public the king’s undertaking to create peers if necessary. Asquith had agreed to postpone the actual creation of peers until the Lords were given a final chance. But when he rose to announce the government’s intentions in the Commons on 24 July he was shouted down for half an hour by supporters of the ‘ditchers’ in the Lords: these were Lord Hugh Cecil and F. E. Smith. Balfour disapproved but did nothing to stop them.

On 9-11 August during a blazing heat wave, the Lords passed the Parliament Bill: 114 ditchers voted against, but 81 Liberal peers were joined in the government lobby by 37 Unionists led by Curzon and by 13 bishops.

In the autumn of 1911 a humiliated Balfour resigned the leadership of the Unionist party. In an unusual step the party balloted the candidates for his succession and the winner was the unknown Glasgow businessman, Andrew Bonar Law (1858-1923). It was a sharp break with the House of Cecil.

Ireland in song

2009-11-25T06:41:00.000Z

If you want to hear 'The Wearing of the Green' on Youtube, go here. If on the other hand you want 'The Sash my Father Wore', this is the place.

Ireland 1798: The Year of the French

2009-11-22T09:51:00.000Z

The following posts on Ireland owe a great deal to R.R.Foster's classic Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (Penguin, 1988)

The Protestant Ascendancy
In 1800 the population of Ireland comprised:
Roman Catholic Irish: 3,150,000
Protestant Anglo-Irish 450,000
Presbyterians 900,000

The 18th century was the period of the Protestant Ascendancy, buttressed by harsh penal laws modelled on those in England.

1695: Acts restricting the rights of Catholics to education, to bear arms or to own a horse worth more than £5; priests were forbidden to exercise their functions and Catholics were preventing from inheriting of buying land or sending their children abroad unless they abjured their religion.
1697: Catholic clergy banished by act of Parliament.
1704: a further penal law restricted land-owning rights for Catholics and imposed `tests' for public office.
1720: the Declaratory Act defined the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland.
1727: Irish Catholics were deprived of the right to vote.

The mouthpiece of the Protestant ascendancy was the Irish Parliament in Dublin. The English government was represented by the Lord Lieutenant, who was approved by the government of the day. The parliament was dominated by the Anglo-Irish, an exclusive group that monopolized political power and saw themselves as both English and Irish. Deprived of a political role, the Catholic gentry tended to go into trade. The alternative to trade - land-owning was made very difficult for them - they were confined to 31 year leases. The result was that in 1700 Catholics owned 14% of the land, in 1776 5%. (On the other hand, lease-holding was the norm in Ireland, even for Protestants and the 31 year lease gave a reasonable security of tenure.)

The largest grievance was the poverty of the rural labourers (except in Ulster where there was a flourishing linen industry). It was less easy to resolve the economic problems than to revoke the penal laws. Ulster Presbyterians and other Protestants had fewer grievances but until 1780 they were excluded from corporations, and though not legally barred from Parliament, only a handful of Dissenters was ever returned.

In the later 18th century the harshness of the penal laws was toned down. Freedom of worship was allowed in by the back door. Catholic chapels were built and the land tenure laws were liberalised. In the 1780s the Dublin parliament gained legislative independence, though it was still composed entirely of Protestants.

The United Irishmen
The French Revolution had a profound effect in Ireland. In 1790-1, the Catholic Committee, a movement of members of the Irish Catholic middle class, began to campaign for the abolition of the remaining penal laws.

On 18 October 1791 the Belfast Society of United Irishmen was founded. Among the founders was Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), a young Protestant lawyer from Dublin. He had already published An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics (August 1791) even though he did not at that stage know any. For Tone radical political reform and nationalist identity went hand in hand, with no place for sectarian divisions. The first resolutions of the United Irishmen asserted

That the weight of English influence in the Government in this country is so great, as to require a cordial union, among ALL THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND. ... No reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which does not include Irishmen or every religious persuasion.

In his posthumously published autobiography Tone described his aim as

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connexion with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means.

(However, recent studies have shown that Tone was not an ‘active separatist’ until 1795.)

The United Irishmen sought to forge a new political alliance between the middle-class politically aware Presbyterians of Belfast and Dublin and the rural Catholic majority. In fact the two groups were largely incompatible. Lawyers and skilled workers looked to an enlightened non-sectarian republic; rural Catholics wanted revenge on the Protestant ascendancy. The future lay with the rural Catholics rather than the Presbyterian radicals.

Pitt and Ireland
The outbreak of war with France caused republicans like Tone, Napper Tandy and Thomas Addis Emmet to pin their hopes on a French invasion to coincide with a home-grown rebellion. This made the United Irishmen a potentially subversive body. One of their leaders, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, first cousin of Charles James Fox, had corresponded with Paine in 1792. But when the French sent an agent to Ireland in May 1793, he was not impressed by the preparedness of the Irish.

Both the French and the British knew that the weakest link in Britain's defences was going to be Ireland. In 1784 the duke of Rutland, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had told him,

‘Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us, and to near to be dependent on a foreign state, and too little to be independent.’

In order to conciliate the Catholic majority he introduced a Catholic Relief Bill in 1793 which gave Catholics the vote on the same terms as Protestants, permitted them to bear arms and allowed them to occupy most civil and military posts. There was now only one major disability facing Catholics: exclusion from membership of Parliament. In practice, the small number of Catholics who became army officers or lawyers did not succeed in tilting the balance of power. However one promising young Catholic lawyer was called to the Irish bar in 1798: Daniel O'Connell.

The extension of the franchise was mocked by Tone as merely buttressing

‘a disgrace to our constitution and our country, the wretched tribe of forty-shilling freeholders, whom we see driven to their octennial market by their landlords’.

Pitt's repression of dissent also applied to Ireland. Between 1793 and 1796 a Militia Act was passed, a new Protestant Yeomanry formed and an Insurrection Act, making oath-taking a capital offence and increasing the power of magistrates to search for arms, became law. Finally Habeas Corpus was suspended. Pitt had thus reluctantly acquiesced in strengthening the grip of the Protestant ascendancy.

In 1795 following his coalition with the Portland Whigs in the previous summer, Pitt sent the Portland-ite Earl Fitzwilliam to Ireland as Chief Secretary. Fitzwilliam rapidly went native. Without any authority from Westminster he promised full Catholic emancipation. As a result he was recalled and replaced with the more amenable Lord Camden. Fox declared that this placed the Irish ‘in a state of degradation beyond any former period’. Fitzwilliam's dismissal ended all hopes of legitimate reform in Ireland. Tone left for America and then headed for France to seek French aid, arriving there in February 1796. He took the nom de guerre of citoyen Smith in a vain attempt to elude Pitt's spies, and entered into negotiations with Lazare Carnot, one of the Directors who governed France at this time. In a memorandum produced for French agents he described Ireland as

‘a conquered and oppressed and insulted country’

where

‘the name of England and her power is universally odious.'

Even while Fitzwilliam was trying to implement his reforms, sectarian passions were rife in parts of Ireland as Catholic ‘Defenders’ clashed frequently with Protestant ‘Peep O’ Day Boys’ who sought to terrorise Catholics and frighten them off their land. Both sides employed secret oaths, maimed cattle, terrorised juries and murdered those who infringed their codes. After some particularly vicious fighting in 1795, which reached its climax in September in the Battle of the Diamond (a piece of ground near Armagh now marked by a memorial monument) the Peep O’ Day Boys formed an Orange Society. The initial oath reflected a highly conditional loyalism: ‘To support the King and his heirs as long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy’.

The Bantry Bay expedition
On 16 December 1796 a French expedition of a 43 ship fleet and 15,000 men under General Lazare Hoche sailed from Brest for Ireland, accompanied by Wolfe Tone in the uniform of a chef de brigade. By December 22 they were in sight of Bantry Bay, Co. Cork. There were only 11,000 troops in the area and the effect of a successful landing is incalculable. But storms prevented a landing and the expedition was abandoned. Perhaps it was one of the great near misses of British history. Tone:

‘England has not had such an escape since the Spanish Armada’.

However, for the next two years Ireland was a vital part of French strategy. In response the number of British troops in Ireland increased to 65,000, but they had to be scattered over the whole country.

In Ulster General Lake ruled with extreme ruthlessness, carrying out martial law, free quarterings, house burnings and floggings on the flimsiest of suspicions. The fear that the United Irishmen would be completely suppressed forced them into desperate action. They would have to rebel, with or without French aid and in preparation they were forging pikes and concealing guns and ammunition.

Links between Irish exiles in Paris and Britain with subversive forces in Ireland were maintained by a Catholic priest, James Coigly, who was arrested with two members of the London Corresponding Ssociety as he prepared to cross from Margate to France in 1798. Coigly was carrying an Address from the `Secret Committee of England' ensuring support for a French invasion to maintain `the sacred flame of liberty'. He was tried in May and executed on 12 June 1798. Following Coigly’s arrest, virtually all the leading members of the United Irishmen in Britain and the LCS were arrested and, following a new suspension of Habeas Corpus, were kept in prison until 1801.

1798
The rising of 1798 has been described by the historian Roy Foster as

‘probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history’.

It had been prepared for over a year, with United Irishmen forging pikes and concealing guns and ammunition. It was fixed for 23 May with Lord Edward Fitzgerald commander in chief. However on 19 May he was betrayed by a government spy, arrested and fatally wounded as he was captured. He died on 4 June. The Catholic Church promptly dissociated itself from the rebellion.

Meanwhile Dublin and the adjacent counties rose on 24-25 May. On 30 May the rebels captured Wexford town. The rebellion spread from Wexford and Wicklow in the east to Sligo and Mayo on the west. Ulster and the south west were barely affected, apart from some action in Antrim and Down (6-13 June) from those who still adhered to the cause of radical Presbyterianism. Local pressures and local antipathies seem to have been more important than ideology. The Dublin outbreak was controlled in a week but Wexford, an area of poor Catholic/Protestant relations, with a higher than average proportion of Protestant settlers saw ferocious fighting.

The insurgents took Enniscorthy and attempted to spread out the rebellion into Wicklow, but failed. The campaign was marked by horrific atrocities on both sides. Protestants only saved their lives by converting to Catholicism. The United Irishmen set up a camp on Vinegar Hill (see picture) outside the town and on an old windmill there set up a green flag. A hundred Protestant prisoners were massacred in a barn at Scullabogue. The main part of the rebellion ended with the rout of the insurgents on Vinegar Hill and the capture of Wexford on 21 June. One of those rounded up and executed was Father John Murphy, who was hanged, his body burned in a tar barrel and his head set on a pike.

By this stage the rebellion was interpreted on all sides as a straightforward Catholic-Protestant conflict. The icons of the rebels were the apparently incompatible rosary and cap of liberty.

On 21 August General Jean Humbert landed at Killala Bay in County Mayo with a force of 900 men. He defeated a numerically superior English force under General Lake at Castlebar (‘the races of Castlebar’) on 23 August and set up a provisional government in Connaught. He recruited and armed many thousands of Irish peasants and reached the centre of Ireland, halfway on the road to Dublin when he was surrounded at Ballinamuck by two numerically superior armies of English and loyal Irish under the newly appointed commander-in-chief, Cornwallis, and forced to surrender on 8 September.

On 6 September another French fleet of one flagship, eight frigates and 3000 men sailed from Brest, with Tone on board. Unaware that the English knew of their movements the fleet headed for Lough Swilly in Co Donegal, where they found eight British frigates waiting for them. In the ensuing chase most of the French ships escaped. Tone was urged to escape with them, but he remained on board the flagship Hoche. At the end of a five hour battle on 12 October his ship was almost a total wreck. The commander surrounded and went to dine with the English at Letterkenny. It met with an impressive local force but it was forced to surrender to the British, and Tone was captured. He claimed that he was a French officer and at his court martial he appeared in French uniform. In spite of this, on 10 November he was sentenced to be hanged – an indignity he had not anticipated. On 12 November he cut his throat with a penknife and died seven days later on the 19th.

In the twentieth century Tone's grave at Bodenstown, Co Kildare became 'a permanent fixture in the republican calendar. Here IRA followers become "re-dedicated" to their republican faith and to the "armed struggle to break the English connection and set up a secular Republic... the dream of our founding father, Wolfe Tone". While constitutional nationalist go to Bodenstown to re-state their commitment to Irish unification, preferring to single out "the common name of Irishman" theme in Tone's wriitng in the hope of some day reconciling the Ulster Protestants to their ultimate aim of a united Ireland.' (Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence, Yale, 1989, p. 416.)

In the aftermath of 1798 the revelations of the extent of the French connection in Ireland stunned contemporaries. The deaths of Fitzgerald and Tone established a potent Irish martyrology. Look at W.B. Yeat's poem, September 1913:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son'
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

For the first time the idea of an independent Irish republic had been planted.

The legal mopping-up operation continued until 1801. Courts martial tended to punish the leaders harshly but to give amnesties to the followers. Many were transported to Australia, exiled to the United States or made to serve in regiments in the unhealthy West Indies rather than executed. But the statistics of execution will never show the numbers killed. Roy Foster estimates the death-toll on both sides from various causes as 30,000 - a figure comparable to the deaths in the Reign of Terror.

The Act of Union (1801)

2009-11-22T09:50:00.000Z

One of the most direct results of the uprising was that in 1801 the Dublin Parliament was abolished and a single Parliament at Westminster ruled both countries. From 1801 until 1918 there were a substantial number of Irish Members of Parliament at Westminster. As we will see, Daniel O' Connell was to campaign for repeal of the Act and Gladstone would come to think it was a mistake.

Daniel O'Connell and the Catholic Question

2009-11-22T09:45:00.000Z

For the formation of the Catholic League see here. Go here to refresh your memory of the County Clare election.

The Irish Famine

2009-11-22T09:44:00.000Z

The BBC has a very good account of this difficult and very contested subject. There is another account here.

About a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55). Comparison with other modern and contemporary famines establishes beyond any doubt that the Irish famine of the late 1840s, which killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population, was proportionally much more destructive of human life than the vast majority of famines in modern times.

In most famines in the contemporary world, only a small fraction of the population of a given country or region is exposed to the dangers of death from starvation or infectious diseases, and then typically for only one or two seasons. But in the Irish famine of the late 1840s, successive blasts of potato blight - or to give it its proper name, the fungus Phytophthora infestans - robbed more than one-third of the population of their usual means of subsistence for four or five years in a row.

This was not an artificial famine as the traditional Irish nationalist interpretation has long maintained - not at any rate at the start. The original gross deficiency of food was real. In 1846 and successive years blight destroyed the crop that had previously provided approximately 60 per cent of the nation's food needs. The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out.

Thus there was an artificial famine in Ireland for a good portion of the late 1840s as grain imports steeply increased. There existed - after 1847, at least - an absolute sufficiency of food that could have prevented mass starvation, if it had been properly distributed so as to reach the smallholders and labourers of the west and the south of Ireland.

Why, then, was an artificial famine permitted to occur after 1847, and why didn't the British government do much more to mitigate the effects of the enormous initial food gap of 1846-47? In many contemporary famines a variety of adverse conditions make it difficult or impossible to deliver adequate supplies of food to those in greatest need. Such conditions include warfare and brigandage, remoteness from centres of wealth and relief, poor communications, and weak or corrupt administrative structures. Ireland, however, was not generally afflicted with such adversities.

Though it had a rich history of agrarian violence, the country was at peace. In addition, its system of communications (roads and canals) had vastly improved in the previous half-century, the Victorian state had a substantial and growing bureaucracy (it generated an army of 12,000 officials in Ireland for a short time in 1847), and Ireland lay at the doorstep of what was then the world's wealthiest nation. Why, then, was it not better able to deal with the problems caused by the failure of its potato crop?

In Britain in the late 1840s, prevailing ideologies among the political elite and the middle classes strongly militated against heavy and sustained relief.

What could the government have done?

The government might have prohibited the export of grain from Ireland, especially during the winter of 1846-47 and early in the following spring, when there was little food in the country and before large supplies of foreign grain began to arrive. Once there was sufficient food in the country (imported Indian corn or maize), from perhaps the beginning of 1848, the government could have taken steps to ensure that this imported food was distributed to those in greatest need.
The government could have continued its so-called soup-kitchen scheme for a much longer time. It was in effect for only about six months, from March to September 1847. As many as three million people were fed daily at the peak of this scheme in July 1847. The scheme was remarkably inexpensive and effective. It should not have been dismantled after only six months and in spite of the enormous harvest deficiency of 1847.
The wages that the government paid on its vast but short-lived public works in the winter of 1846-47 needed to be much higher if those toiling on the public works were going to be able to afford the greatly inflated price of food.
The poor-law system of providing relief, either within workhouses or outside them, a system that served as virtually the only form of public assistance from the autumn of 1847 onwards, needed to be much less restrictive. All sorts of obstacles were placed in the way, or allowed to stand in the way, of generous relief to those in need of food. This was done in a horribly misguided effort to keep expenses down and to promote greater self-reliance and self-exertion among the Irish poor.
The government might have done something to restrain the ruthless mass eviction of families from their homes, as landlords sought to rid their estates of pauperized farmers and labourers. Altogether, perhaps as many as 500,000 people were evicted in the years from 1846 to 1854. The government might also have provided free passages and other assistance in support of emigration to North America - for those whose personal means made this kind of escape impossible.
Last, and above all, the British government should have been willing to treat the famine crisis in Ireland as an imperial responsibility and to bear the costs of relief after the summer of 1847. Instead, in an atmosphere of rising 'famine fatigue' in Britain, Ireland at that point and for the remainder of the famine was thrown back essentially on its own woefully inadequate resources.

There were three reasons in particular why this did not happen

the economic doctrines of laissez-faire,
the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence
the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of 'moralism'.

Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible. Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London, though there were some British relief officials in Ireland who gave contrary advice.
The influence of the doctrine of laissez-faire may also be seen in two other decisions. The first was the decision to terminate the soup-kitchen scheme in September 1847 after only six months of operation. The idea of feeding directly a large proportion of the Irish population violated all of the Whigs' cherished notions of how government and society should function. The other decision was the refusal of the government to undertake any large scheme of assisted emigration. The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as 400,000 pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on 'privately' at a great rate.

Recent historians of the famine, while not neglecting the baleful role of the doctrine of laissez-faire, have been inclined to stress the potent parts played by two other ideologies of the time: those of 'providentialism' and 'moralism'. There was a very widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgment-an act of Providence-against the kind of Irish agrarian regime that was believed to have given rise to the famine. The Irish system of agriculture was perceived in Britain to be riddled with inefficiency and abuse. According to British policy-makers at the time, the workings of divine Providence were disclosed in the unfettered operations of the market economy, and therefore it was positively evil to interfere with its proper functioning.

A leading exponent of this providentialist perspective was Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant chiefly responsible for administering Irish relief policy throughout the famine years. In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan described the famine as

'a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence',

one which laid bare

'the deep and inveterate root of social evil,'

The famine, he declared, was

'the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected... God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part...'

This mentality of Trevelyan's was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions - and this had the obvious effect of radically restructuring Irish rural society along the lines of the capitalistic model ardently preferred by British policy-makers.

Finally, 'moralism' - the notion that the fundamental defects from which the Irish suffered were moral rather than financial - played a large part. Educated Britons of this era saw serious defects in the Irish 'national character'-disorder or violence, filth, laziness, and worst of all, a lack of self-reliance. This amounted to a kind of racial or cultural stereotyping. The Irish had to be taught to stand on their own feet and to unlearn their dependence on government.

'Moralism' was strikingly evident in the various tests of destitution that were associated with the administration of the poor law. Thus labourers on the public works were widely required to perform task labour, with their wages measured by the amount of their work, rather than being paid a fixed daily wage. Similarly, there was the requirement that in order to be eligible for public assistance, those in distress must be willing to enter a workhouse and to submit to its harsh disciplines-such as endless eight-hour days of breaking stones or performing some other equally disagreeable labour. Such work was motivated by the notion that the perceived Irish national characteristic of sloth could be eradicated or at least reduced.

This set of ethnic prejudices, which have now been abundantly documented, had the general effect of prompting British ministers, civil servants, and politicians to view and to treat the Catholic Irish as something less than fully human. Such prejudices encouraged the spread of 'famine fatigue' in Britain at an early stage, and they dulled or even extinguished the active sympathies that might have sustained political will - the will to combat the gross oppression of mass evictions, to alleviate the immense suffering associated with reliance on the poor-law system, and to grapple with the moral indefensibility of mass death in the midst of an absolute sufficiency of food.

The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has insisted that famine is almost always a preventable occurrence if only the government in question has the political will to prevent it. This dictum applies as much to Ireland in the late 1840s as Sen meant it to apply to India a century later. Just as in the case of the Bengali victims of famine in the early 1940s, so too with those of the Great Famine in Ireland, the mass death of enormous multitudes of people stemmed partly from their perceived status as the cultural and social inferiors of those who governed them. This status, imposed by British rulers on their colonial subjects, made their plight seem much less urgent in Britain and caused it to be misperceived.

It seems doubtful that the British governing classes learned much from their Irish experience in the late 1840s. In British India, during the years 1876-79, famine claimed the lives of between six and ten million people. And between 1896 and 1902, an almost certainly even higher toll from starvation and disease (the estimates range from six to nineteen million) was recorded there.

Gladstone and Ireland

2009-11-22T09:43:00.000Z

The December issue of History Today (out now) has a useful article on Gladstone and Ireland.

When William Ewart Gladstone (seen here engaged in one of his favourite activities) became Prime Minister in 1868 he famously declared: ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’, though he had already acknowledged to John Bright that this might ‘lead the Liberal party to martyrdom’. This mission was to rend and distort British politics for the next thirty years and his failure to carry it out was a disaster.

It would be hard to imagine any people for whom the English had less sympathy than the Irish: they were poor, married too young, priest-ridden, lived on potatoes. They crowded into the largest British cities bringing with them their lax and alien habits and their false religion, and undercutting wages.

Ireland was also associated with terrorism. In 1865-7 the Fenians caused death and disturbances in Chester, Manchester, and Clerkenwell. It was Fenian violence which triggered off Gladstone’s decision to begin his mission forthwith.

The problems fell into three categories:
1. Religion: The established position of the Church of Ireland was hard to defend in a country with a large Roman Catholic majority and a significant Presbyterian minority.
2. Politics: A substantial number of Irish people wanted ‘Home Rule’ - a return to the Dublin parliament which had been abolished in 1800.
3. Land: The Famine left a bitter political as well as economic legacy.
(a) The endless sub-division of peasant holdings left the tenants in a precarious position.
(b) The situation was exacerbated because ‘the owners were Protestants while the tenants were Catholics’.

The First Gladstone Administration, 1868-1874
Gladstone’s aim in his first administration was to make the Irish choose between constitutionalism and Fenianism. Accordingly in 1869 he dealt in part with the religious grievance when he disestablished the Church of Ireland and confiscated its endowments worth about £16m. It is difficult to conceive now how controversial this move was at the time and how much it was resented by Anglicans under both sides of the Irish Sea. The Lords only gave way and passed the bill as a result of energetic efforts by the Queen to avert a constitutional clash. Gladstone’s own reputation suffered because up till this point he had passionately opposed disestablishment, and now he seemed to be yielding to terrorism.

Gladstone’s next move to was to pilot through the Irish Land Act of 1870. It gave legal sanction to the so-called ‘Ulster custom’ by which departing tenants in good standing received generous ‘compensation’ from incoming tenants. But it did not exclude eviction for non-payment of rent and thus gave no protection against rack-renting or against the inability of tenants to pay their rents. Gladstone had trouble getting the bill accepted by cabinet colleagues such as Robert Lowe and the duke of Argyll (who saw it as an attack on landlordism in general), but it passed fairly easily through the Lords and Commons because it was realized that it would make very little difference in practice.

Gladstone’s hope that the Land Act would pacify the Irish countryside proved false. Acts of 1870 and 1871 virtually suspended Habeas Corpus in Ireland.

The Beginnings of ‘Home Rule’
The 1874 election returned 58 Irish MPs, under the leadership of the Protestant barrister Isaac Butt, elected to support ‘Home Rule’. Butt had invented the phrase and the movement was launched under his inspiration at a Dublin meeting in 1870. During Disraeli’s premiership Butt annually introduced a Home Rule Bill but it was invariably tossed aside with never more than a handful of English MPs giving it their vote.

In 1878 Butt resigned the leadership of the Home Rulers under pressure from those who felt that the constitutional path was leading nowhere. He was replaced by the Member for Meath, the maverick Protestant landlord, Charles Stewart Parnell, who already by 1877 had begun to show his skill at disciplining the Irish groups into the concerted tactic of deliberately obstructing the whole business of the Commons. This was a new tactic and caused a sensation at the time when there was no mechanism for dealing with obstruction. The obstructionism is one of the reasons for the lack of legislation at the end of the Disraeli government.
When Parnell declared that he did not believe ‘that any murder was committed at Manchester’ (where a policeman had been killed by Fenians), he became the most hated man in the Commons, though a hero to the Fenians.

The Land League
It is surprising that Gladstone did not anticipate the effect in Ireland of the agricultural crisis - especially as his own rents at Hawarden fell by 15% in 1879. During the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s harvests were bad and prices falling. The countryside was in crisis, with misery and starvation unprecedented since the Famine. The number of families evicted rose from 463 in 1877 to 2,100 in 1880 and 5,201 in 1882. The explosion of anti landlord feeling began among the smallholders on the west coast in Co. Mayo and gradually spread among tenant farmers throughout the whole country. Mass meetings were held, tenants refused to pay their rents and landlords and their agents were subjected to assaults and intimidation.

In the autumn of 1879 the Irish Land League was founded by the Fenian, Michael Davitt, who had been released from a 12 year sentence penal servitude for treason-felony at the end of 1877. Its President was Parnell when told ‘It will take an earthquake to settle the land question’ replied

Then we must have an earthquake.

Campaign money poured into the League from the USA and Australia.

Parnell was careful not to advocate violence but he advised the members of the League to pay no rent at all if landlords refused to accept what their tenants regarded as a fair rent. The resulting Land War lasted for three years. It was a revolutionary and frightening campaign, even though its objects were essentially conservative (protection of tenants’ rights) and it had little support among landless labourers. Assaults by night on landlords’ cattle, ricks, and homes, became commonplace, all of them, it was alleged, the work of ‘Captain Moonlight’. Individuals woke to find graves dug before their doors. The wider aim of the Land Leaguers was to strengthen their position by winning from the landlords the ‘three Fs’.

The Second Gladstone Administration, 1880-1885
When he became Prime Minister in April 1880 Gladstone inherited the problem of rural violence, symbolized by the murder of Lord Mountmorres in Co. Galway. In September the Land League introduced a new tactic when Parnell urged that anyone taking a farm from which a tenant had been evicted should be

isolated from his kind as if he were a leper of old.

The first person to be so treated was Captain Boycott, the agent of a large landowner in Co. Mayo. An expedition to relieve him organized from Ulster only served to advertise the success of the method which soon became a universal weapon.

At the end of 1880 Parnell and thirteen others were prosecuted for conspiracy, but the trial ended in January 1881 when the jury failed to agree.

Coercion: The new Chief Secretary for Ireland was W. E. Forster. With the support of the viceroy, Lord Cowper, he insisted on introducing a new Coercion Bill (the Protection of Person and Property Bill) for Ireland against the wishes of the Prime Minister. Parnell replied with a renewed campaign of parliamentary obstruction so effective that the bill was delayed for a month. When it became law in March 1881 it gave the authorities in Ireland complete powers of arbitrary arrest, all rights of habeas corpus being suspended. The debate on the bill lasted for 41 hours and was only ended on the Speaker’s initiative when the ‘guillotine’ was introduced for the first time.

The Second Land Act: Gladstone only accepted coercion because he was working on a new land act, which he introduced without consultation with Parnell in April 1881 - it became law in August. This provided tenants with the ‘3 Fs’: fair rents, fixity of tenure, and ‘free sale’ (of their holdings). These were drastic incursions into the rights of landlords, and constituted ‘a very severe interference in the principle of freedom of contract’; the duke of Argyll resigned in protest from the cabinet in May. His defection underlined the growing uneasiness of the ‘Whigs’ in the Gladstone government. The objections to the bill were two-fold: (a) it was confiscatory (b) it was a concession to violence.

The arrest of Parnell: The bill put Parnell in a dilemma as he feared it would take the steam out of Home Rule. He persuaded most of his followers to abstain from supporting the bill on the second reading. Two days after it passed the Commons he deliberately provoked a scene and got himself expelled, and he went on to deter tenants from dropping their agitation on the grounds that the Act did nothing for the 100,000 Irish tenants, who, since they were heavily in arrears with their rent, were still liable for eviction. He delivered speeches of a more and more extreme kind in order to show the incorruptibility of his principles, and Land League violence continued. On 7 October Gladstone deliberately provoked Parnell by telling a large public meeting in Leeds that ‘the resources of civilization’ were by no means exhausted should it

appear that there is still to be fought a final conflict in Ireland between law on the one side and sheer lawlessness on the other.

Parnell in turn denounced the Prime Minister at a meeting in Wexford as

this masquerading knight-errant, this pretending champion of the rights of every other nation except those of the Irish nation.

On 13 October he was arrested (along with many others) under the Coercion Act and imprisoned in Kilmainham Jail. ‘The arrest ... of the leader of a parliamentary group of more than forty members ... who was rapidly becoming ... one of the half-dozen dominating House of Commons personalities of the century was a strenuous step for any government to take, particularly as it was based on little more than the hope that it might reduce agrarian crime.’
Relations between the Irish Nationalists and the Liberals had sharply deteriorated. Chamberlain, once a sympathiser, now began to talk about

war to the knife between a despotism created to re-establish constitutional law, and a despotism not less completely elaborated to subvert law and produce anarchy as a precedent to revolutionary change.

Parnell was in custody for six months until April 1882 under the fairly lax conditions appropriate to an uncharged and unconvicted prisoner. He had a sitting room with two good armchairs and a fire. But he felt his imprisonment keenly because of his passion for Mrs O’Shea.

In December 1881 the Land League was proscribed. Its members were arrested or fled abroad.

The Kilmainham Treaty: With the breaking of the League Gladstone was able to devote more attention to the remaining grievances of the Irish tenants. On 10 April 1882 Parnell was permitted leave from prison on compassionate grounds. While he was released he made contact with Captain O’Shea through whom he communicated with Chamberlain (President of the Board of Trade) and Herbert Gladstone, the Prime Minister's son. Both sides wanted a settlement. A secret, informal bargain was struck: the government should bring in a bill to cancel the debts of tenants who owed large arrears; Parnell should use his influence to end crime and disorder.

When Parnell was released, Cowper and Forster resigned and their places were taken by two Whigs: Lord Spencer (5th earl) and Lord Frederick Cavendish, younger brother of Lord Hartington, who had married a niece of Mrs Gladstone.

The Phoenix Park Murders: On Saturday 6 May Spencer arrived in Dublin. After the pageant of his entry, Cavendish was walking in Phoenix Park with T. H. Burke, the under-secretary, when a band of men, part of a club called ‘The Invincibles’ surprised the pair and hacked them to death with surgical knives.

Parnell was horrified and probably in fear of his own life. A fortnight after the murders there began a long series of letters between Gladstone and Mrs O’Shea, who became a secret go-between. Gladstone sent a new Secretary, G. O. Trevelyan, but also passed a newer and stiffer Crimes Bill. In the Commons, the Tories, led by Arthur Balfour, strenuously argued against the virtual alliance between the Liberals and Home Rulers created by the Kilmainham Treaty. This ensured the stormiest possible passage for the Arrears Act. On 17 August an entire household - parents, three sons and a daughter- were stabbed and battered to death at Maamtrasna.

1882 had seen violence at a new high: 26 murders, 58 attempted murders. But just before the year closed the new Coercion Act bore fruit in the arrest of the Invincibles. Two of them turned Queen’s evidence. In April 1883 they were tried; five were hanged and three sent to penal servitude for life. For all its horror, the Phoenix Park massacres did not change the political situation.

The fall of the government: By 1885 Gladstone’s government was battered. It was torn by internal tensions between Joseph Chamberlain who resented the inattention to social reform and by the Whigs who detested the Irish policy. The Gordon affair administered the coup de grace.

In the spring of 1885 the Cabinet began to quarrel once more over whether or not to renew the Coercion Act of 1882. Chamberlain and his fellow radical Sir Charles Dilke wanted coercion dropped and a system of elected county councils in Ireland. Almost all the Whigs in the cabinet opposed the plan. In May Chamberlain and Dilke resigned.

In June the government was defeated by 12 votes over the budget - largely as a result of heavy Liberal abstentions. The new electoral registers were not yet ready, so there could be no general election for months to come. Gladstone resigned and Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the first time, at the head of a minority Conservative administration.

Home Rule splits the Liberals

2009-11-22T09:42:00.002Z

Gladstone’s Conversion
In his brief period out of office Gladstone came to the conclusion that the Irish, like the Italians, the Afghans, the Zulus and the Sudanese were a people rightly struggling to be free, and that Parnell’s demand for Home Rule ought to be conceded. The conversion was a bombshell comparable to Peel's conversion to free trade.

The election of 1885: The conversion to Home Rule was not a single moment of decision and was not the result of an inner struggle. He believed he needed time to educate his party and for this reason his manifesto for the election was vague on Ireland. Most Liberal candidates ignored the Home Rule issue.

All this sent out the wrong signals to Parnell. On 1 August he held a secret meeting in Mayfair with the new Irish Viceroy, Carnarvon, and came to believe that he might get something substantial from the Tories - a supposition confirmed by a speech delivered (cynically?) by the Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury at Newport in October. Accordingly, he urged his followers to vote Conservative and in a speech delivered on 21 November in his election campaign he roundly abused the Liberals as ‘perfidious, treacherous, and incompetent’. The Catholic clergy in Ireland also urged their flocks to vote for the Conservatives. Many Liberals were deeply resentful of the way they were attacked by the Nationalists.

Thanks to the newly enfranchised county voters, in the election of November - December 1885 the Liberals won 335 seats and the Conservatives only 249. But Parnell was the real winner as his party won 86 seats (85 out of 103 Irish seats and one in Liverpool), which exactly equalled the Liberal majority over the Conservatives. The result confirmed Gladstone’s view that Pitt’s Act of Union had been a mistake and that the Irish desire for home rule was unstoppable. But since in the absence of any statement from Gladstone the Parnellites were still in nominal alliance with the Conservatives, and Salisbury remained in office.

The ‘Harwarden kite’: Gladstone reached the conclusion that it was Salisbury’s duty to bring in a Home Rule Bill, which would reach the statute book since it would be supported by the Gladstonian Liberals and the Irish Nationalists. He did not wish it to be a party political isse. With this in mind he had discreet consultations with his political opponents rather than his political allies. But Salisbury was aware that Home Rule would split his party (he himself had resigned from Derby’s cabinet in 1867). He therefore told Churchill that Gladstone’s ‘hypocrisy makes me sick’.

In December Herbert Gladstone, who was acting as his father’s private secretary, inadvertently flew ‘the Hawarden kite’ in which he went to London and spoke with prominent Liberals with contacts in the press. On 17 December the Evening Standard published what it described as Gladstone’s plans for Home Rule; the Pall Mall Gazette went further

Mr Gladstone has definitely adopted the policy of Home Rule for Ireland.

Gladstone unconvincingly dismissed the articles as speculative, but his Liberal colleagues (especially Hartington) were horrified to find their names and (apparent) views discussed in the papers. This widened the rift between him and Gladstone.

In the new year, Gladstone then secured the agreement of his colleagues, apart from Hartington, that the government be brought down on a domestic (not Irish) issue. In January the government was duly defeated, but Hartington and 17 other Liberals voted with the Conservatives and 70 other Liberals, including John Bright, abstained; the abstainers knew very well that the real issue was Home Rule. The government was therefore overthrown by a mere 79 votes.

On 28 January Salisbury resigned and within 48 hours Gladstone was Prime Minister, much to (guess what?) the Queen’s dismay.

The Third Gladstone Administration, 1886
Gladstone thus headed a Liberal government about to implement a policy for which it had no mandate. Hartington refused to serve, though Chamberlain took office in the minor post of President of the Local Government Board. At the same time British opinion was hardening against Ireland both because of Parnell’s speeches and a recurrence of Irish outrages in London. Gladstone fatally misread the public mood and the mood of many in his own party.

The Home Rule Bill: On 20 March the Government of Ireland Bill was printed for cabinet distribution. On 26 March Chamberlain and Trevelyan resigned.

Gladstone’s principles behind his Home Rule proposals were (1) to preserve imperial unity, (2) to provide safeguards for the minority. This was shorthand for buying off the Protestant landlords, not for conciliating the Ulster Unionists and would entail considerable expenditure.
On 8 April the Bill was introduced. It was based on the Canadian model and had the effect of strapping Ireland firmly to the United Kingdom.

There would be a unicameral Irish legislative body which would consist of two ‘orders’ (a) representative peers and others elected on a £25 occupier franchise and (b) the existing 103 Irish MPs plus another 101 members elected along similar lines.
From the two orders an executive would gradually emerge via Privy Councillors as the Viceroy became like the Canadian Governor-General.
London was to retain control over defence, foreign policy, and international trade.
Ireland to bear one-fifteenth of imperial costs.
There would be no Irish MPs at Westminster, though Gladstone had agonized over this question. To exclude them would encourage separatism, but their inclusion in the Westminster parliament would raise what is now known as the ‘West Lothian question’.

The details of the bill mattered less than the fact that politicians on all sides were forced to realign their relationships.
Salisbury was determined to destroy Gladstone. With Lord Randolph Churchill’s help he raised the temperature so high that compromise became impossible. On 22 February Churchill had visited Belfast. Some weeks later he coined the slogan,

Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right.

On 2 March Salisbury defended Orange resistance in a speech in Crystal Palace. On 15 May he told an audience in St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, that the best way to govern Ireland was twenty years of coercion. He declared that ‘some races’ (he mentioned ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Hindoos’ but he also meant the Irish) were inherently incapable of self-government. He said that the best use for public money in Ireland was in promoting emigration.

The Liberals split: Gladstone had presented his party with a ‘take it or leave it’ bill.
On the introduction of the Home Rule Bill (8 April), Lord Hartington, the former leader of the party, declared his opposition. He insisted that Britain had a responsibility to secure law and order in Ireland and to protect property—not least that of Protestants with capital to invest in economic development. Gladstone claimed that his scheme guaranteed the continuing supremacy of the imperial parliament over Irish affairs, but Hartington regarded this as naïve.

The radical Liberal, Joseph Chamberlain also threw himself into the fight against Gladstone's proposals, for a combination of reasons, imperial, domestic, and personal: because they threatened to weaken the central government of the United Kingdom, because they took precedence away from his radical programme, and because they undermined his own standing in the Liberal hierarchy.

On 31 May and 1 June, Chamberlain and Hartington respectively held meetings with dissident Liberal MPs. In the early hours of 8 June the votes on the second reading were taken. Gladstone spoke of Ireland standing

at your bar, expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant.

Members voted 341/311 against Home Rule; 94 Liberals had gone into the lobby against Gladstone, and another half dozen had abstained. Gladstone wrote in his diary:

The defeat is a smash.

In July Gladstone decided to call an election rather than resign and allow Salisbury to form another minority government. This led the dissident Liberals to form a distinct Liberal Unionist group under Hartington's leadership and to fight the ensuing election in tandem with the Conservatives.

Gladstone fought the campaign as another Midlothian, developing the theme of class division. In a speech in Liverpool he listed ten major reforms enacted during the previous half century and declared that

on every one of them without exception the masses have been right and the classes have been wrong.

In spite of Gladstone’s rhetoric, the Conservatives won 316 seats, the Liberals 191, the Liberal Unionists 78, and the Irish Nationalists 85. Scotland, Wales and Ireland all produced Home Rule majorities by almost three to one. Only England voted the other way. The central element in the Liberal defeat was the collapse of the Liberal agricultural vote.

Outside Westminster the Home Rule crisis accelerated the shift of middle and upper middle-class voting support from the Liberals to the Conservatives - helping to create Salisbury’s ‘villa Toryism’. The ‘unique duality of Ireland as both a domestic and an imperial concern’ meant that Conservatism became ever more stridently attached to empire. Salisbury was to be prime minister for 13 of the next 16 years. The transformation of British politics was part of a general European trend: the arrival of mass politics favouring right-wing governments.

In the Irish debates, Gladstone argued

This, if I understand it, is one of those golden moments in our history; one of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return, or if the return, return at long intervals, and under circumstances which no man can forecast.

Home Rule: a second attempt
In February 1893 Gladstone introduced a second Home Rule Bill with a 2 ½ hour oration. It differed from the bill of 1886 in that there were to be 81 (not 103 as in the 1886 bill) Irish members, who were to be left at Westminster but allowed to vote only on Irish affairs (the ‘West Lothian question’ again). But the committee stage amended this on the grounds of its impracticality and gave the Irish MPs the full right to vote on all UK affairs. Like the 1886 bill, the bill of 1893 ignored the potential problem of Ulster. In July Chamberlain delivered a vicious attack on Gladstone, whom he accused of behaving like an imperious and cruel god; this led to an outbreak of fighting on the floor of the House. On 1 September the bill passed its third reading by the narrow majority of 34 votes, after 85 Commons sittings. On 8 September it was rejected by the Lords by 419/41. An excited mob cheered Salisbury through the streets as he made his way home.

The defeat was predictable but it left the government in a quandary. The bill had much more legitimacy than the 1886 bill. It had gone through all stages in the elected house, had emerged as a complete measure, and would have become law but for the Lords veto. Yet there was no immediate outrage.

On 23 February 1894 Gladstone resigned: a combination of failing health and a dispute with the Admiralty, who wanted to increase naval estimates. His stand against ‘militarism’ set him at odds with many of his younger colleagues and made him feel out of tune with his times. He had ended his career in a downbeat fashion. He died at Hawarden on 19 May 1898 and was buried at Westminster Abbey.

A retrospect

In 1930 George V told Ramsay MacDonald.

What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. The Empire would not have had the Irish Free State giving us so much trouble and pulling us to pieces.

Was he right?

Kevin Haddick Flynn, 'Gladstone and his Cloud in the West', History Today (December 2009: 25):

'Gladstone was the only senior figure of his age who made a serious attempt to settle the Irish Question. That he should fail after such a spirited effort may, in some views, be a cause of regret; few will deny however that his appeal to think int he long term was anything but prophetic.'

The Liberals and Ireland 1912-14

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Of the three rebellions which presaged the ‘strange death of Liberal England’, Home Rule and Ulster were undoubtedly the most intractable.

The Liberals were committed by their need for Nationalist votes to pass a Home Rule act, but this had never been approved by the British electorate, and it involved coercing a quarter of the population of the island of Ireland into (as they saw it) giving up their British allegiance.

In the meantime the South African War had radicalized Irish politics, with many Irish Catholics supporting the Boers. On his return from South Africa Arthur Griffith developed an ideology of Irish self-sufficiency and ‘abstentionism’ - the withdrawal of support from British institutions. In 1905 he began the process of bringing the various nationalist factions and societies together as Sinn Féin. In its early stages it was a feminist and pacifist organization, but after 1916 it would morph into a very different party.

One pressing problem was over how Irish Home Rule would affect the rest of the United Kingdom. Churchill advocated the division of the UK into ten or twelve separate ‘provinces’, each of which would have its own assembly, but his proposition was greeted with derision: why should Britain be dismembered just to please the ‘disloyal’ Irish. However, Asquith continued to home that Home Rule would be a first step towards a wider devolution.

Unionist opposition: Another problem was what to do about Ulster, a province that, in spite of its large Catholic minority, was fast becoming socially, economically and culturally distinct from the rest of Ireland.

Unionists were not united about how to react to Liberal proposals. Lansdowne, who had estates in the south, wanted to stop Home Rule altogether, but Bonar Law, whose roots lay in Ulster, was prepared to accept it provided Ulster, suitably defined, was excluded. But there were other reasons for Unionist opposition: a desire to expunge the humiliation suffered over the Lords’ veto and to avoid a fourth successive general election defeat.

Well before the passage of the Parliament Act removed the legal barrier to Home Rule, Ulster was girding its loins to resist. In 1910 the Ulster Unionist Council brought in the charismatic Dublin lawyer, Sir Edward Carson (1854-1935). On 23 September 1911 shortly after the passage of the Act, Carson addressed the first great demonstration on Ulster (100,000 people) held at Craigavon, the home of the Unionist, James Craig (1871-1940):

‘we must be prepared ... the morning Home Rule passes ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant province of Ulster'.

To propitiate the Ulster loyalists, Lloyd George and Churchill proposed in Cabinet on 6 February 1912 that the predominantly Protestant counties should be allowed to opt out of Home Rule, but they were over-ruled even though a minority of Liberal MPs continued to support the idea of a Protestant opt-out. Arguably, the government was turning down an opportunity to diffuse the issue, but they did not want to alienate the Irish Nationalists, who were set on a united Ireland. They were also mindful of the interests of the Catholic minority in Ulster.

On 9 April 1912, on the eve of the introduction of the Home Rule bill, at a great Unionist demonstration near Belfast, Bonar Law gave a pledge of support to Ulster. He then shook Carson’s hand. At a later gathering of 15,000 Unionist stalwarts at Blenheim on 29 July he pledged the support of the unionists of England:

'if an attempt were made to deprive these men of their birthright - as part of a corrupt Parliamentary bargain ... I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them, and which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.'

These words, for which he has been much condemned, became known as the ‘Blenheim pledge’. In spite of his inflammatory words, he did not want armed conflict. He wanted to pressurize the cabinet (by frightening the king) into a suicidally premature dissolution.

The third Home Rule Bill was introduced on 11 April 1912. Although it offered only a mild degree of devolution to the proposed Dublin Parliament, the House had to be adjourned in disorder, amid cries of ‘traitor’ and ‘civil war’. Churchill, taunted with shouts of ‘rat’, waved his handkerchief at the Opposition and had a book thrown at him. The bill completed its passage through the Commons the first time on 16 January 1913. Two weeks later it was rejected by the Lords. The second passage and rejection took place in the short parliamentary session which lasted from March to August 1913.

Meanwhile, on 28 September 1912 (‘Ulster day’) another huge and emotional demonstration led by Carson initiated the signing of a Solemn League and Covenant.

One feature was the high turn-out of women to sign the Declaration - 228,991 women signed in Ulster compared to 218,206 men, and 5,055 women signed elsewhere as against 19,162 men, making a grand total of 471,414. The men and women who eventually signed it (three quarters of all Ulster Protestants over the age of fifteen) pledged themselves to refuse the authority of a Home Rule Parliament if it was forced upon them.

In January 1913 the Ulster Volunteer Force of 90,000 men was embodied. Steps were taken to set up a Provisional Government to take charge after the passing of a Home Rule Bill. Military drill was undertaken by the Orange Lodges and the Unionist Clubs.

In private the party leaders were trying to negotiate. Carson was prepared to accept the exclusion of Ulster but it would have to be the whole 9 county province. This meant that a proposal to exclude Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down from Home Rule would not be accepted. And John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, would not accept any partition.

In the meantime the situation was deteriorating in Ireland. The government was aware that Ulster Volunteer Force was preparing to import arms. This provoked a counter-move in the south, the formation of the Irish Volunteers. By early 1914 just before the Home Rule Bill was due to go on its third and final tour through Parliament, the possibility of civil war in Ireland was more real then ever. In the Commons Churchill spoke of Carson and his associates as

‘a self-elected body ... engaged in a treasonable conspiracy’.

The Curragh Mutiny: In March there occurred the Curragh Mutiny. It arose when Brigadier Hubert Gough, an Ulsterman, and 57 of his officers in the 3rd cavalry brigade took the option of dismissal rather than move north to quell any possible rebellion in Ulster. This highlighted the fact that many officers and their commanders were of Anglo-Irish stock and that Bonar Law was kept constantly informed of what was going on. Gough was reinstated and returned to Ireland in triumph. This led to outrage on the Left that the government had condoned the unlawful conduct of army officers.

In April another incident, a gun-running at Larne by Ulster Volunteers, further emphasized the difficulties of controlling Ulster.

On 24 May the Home Rule Bill passed the Commons. In June the Lords amended it, putting in the permanent exclusion of the nine counties of Ulster. On 21 July 1914 a conference was held at Buckingham Palace and the substance of the discussions was the area of Ulster to be excluded (for a period of years) from Home Rule. However the negotiations broke down on what Asquith called

‘that most damnable creation of the perverted ingenuity of man - the County of Tyrone’.

On 26 July Irish Volunteers landed guns at Howth. When the volunteers reached Dublin shooting broke out between a crowd and British troops. Three civilians were killed and 38 injured.

Home Rule postponed: On 15 September the Home Rule Bill was put on the statute book, with its operation suspended for the duration of the war. The Lords’ exclusion amendment was left in suspension. In a retreat from his previous position, Asquith declared the coercion of Ulster to be

‘an absolutely unthinkable thing’

which he and his colleagues

‘would never countenance or consent to’.

As the Irish historian Roy Foster notes (Modern Ireland, Penguin, 1988, p. 471)

‘Partition had been in principle secured.’

The Labour movement

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Socialism in Europe
Throughout Europe the period from the 1880s onwards saw considerable labour unrest – some of it violent - in the relatively advanced industrial regions. Much of this discontent arose out of the changes in industrial society: the growth of communications, transport, urbanization and the dissemination of news; newspapers were cheaper, the provincial and national press was growing, and deference was weakening; old craft unions now co-existed with newer unions of the unskilled.

To many workers and intellectuals Socialism – the organization of society on a more collectivist, humanitarian and egalitarian basis - seemed to provide a coherent and relevant alternative economic system. In the 1880s separate working class parties, largely Marxist in ideology, were formed. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest and most effective of the European Socialist parties, was founded in 1875, outlawed in 1878, and began to attract large numbers of votes in the 1880s. By 1890 it attracted nearly 1.5 million votes and elected 35 representatives to the Reichstag. In the elections of 1912 it became the largest single party in the Reichstag.

In 1889 French socialists issued invitations for two congresses in Paris (one for the Marxists the second for the others!), out of which came the Second International. Resolutions were passed in favour of the eight-hour day and the extension of the suffrage, condemning standing armies and advocating the celebration of 1 May by labour demonstrations. By the 1890s it was clear that the Second International was going to be firmly Marxist. From 1889 to 1914 socialist parties grew in strength in every country.

Socialism in Britain
Socialist ideas met with more resistance in Britain. Most British Socialists were not working class and were frequently hostile to the unions. Henry Hyndman, the Old Etonian who, along with Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl), founded the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1883, openly despised what he saw as their narrowly reformist agenda. Other middle-class socialists were William Morris, leader of the Socialist League and the anarchist Edward Carpenter. The Fabians, founded in 1884, were middle class intellectuals (George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland) with little contact with trade unionism.

On the other hand, the Liberal party apparently had much to offer the skilled artisan, nonconformist in politics and proud of his independence. The two first working-class MPs had been elected in 1874 as Liberals. Thomas Burt still revered Gladstone and believed that ‘labour’s’ most realistic chance of success was to function as a group within the wider Liberal Movement. After the 1885 general election there were 11 ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs. This being the case, one of the great questions of the period is why the Liberal party was unable to position itself as the party of ‘labour’.

1. Part of the answer lies in the failure of the Liberals to find seats for working men. The Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 had made elections cheaper but they were still very expensive. The middle classes were moving away from Liberalism and this made party organizations in the constituencies financially weak, if not moribund. Constituency parties were often dominated by minorities and wealthy candidates of good standing were preferred to working-class candidates without resources.
The Liberal party at the centre was acutely aware of the problem. Gladstone donated money for this purpose and proclaimed the urgency of increased labour representation at the Newcastle Conference of 1891. But in spite of all the efforts little was achieved. It was of critical importance in the establishment of the Independent Labour Party that in the late 1880s and early 1890s, men like Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald (1866-1937), and Arthur Henderson (1863-1935) experienced rebuffs at the hands of local Liberal associations, and decided that their future lay elsewhere.

2. The Liberal party was equally slow and indecisive in adapting to the demands of labour measures. The demand for an eight hour day aroused an acute dilemma. Most Liberal employers opposed the demand and many Liberal parliamentarians had ideological scruples about state-imposed limitation of hours. By the time the National Liberal Federation met at Newcastle, the question had not been resolved. The ‘Newcastle Programme’ adopted at that conference put the emphasis on ‘old’ Liberalism: veto on the sale of intoxicating liquors, land reforms, public control of denominational schools, the extension of employers’ liability.

The ‘New Unionism’
Up to the late 1880s trade unions were almost entirely confined to the skilled craft workers. But between 1888 and 1891 a number of strikes demonstrated the future trend of labour politics.

In 1888 the Bryant and May match girls' strike aroused much public sympathy and involved figures of the Left like Annie Besant, now a Fabian Socialist.

In the summer of 1889 the gas workers and the London dockers (10,000 men) struck. The five-week London dock strike, conducted with great flair by John Burns (1858-1943), Tom Mann (1856-1941) and Ben Tillett (1860-1943), caught the public imagination. The dockers demanded four hours continuous work at a time and a minimum rate of 6d an hour (‘the dockers’ tanner). Organizations such as the Salvation Army ran soup kitchens for the strikers. Trade unions in Australia sent over £24,000. The dock strike ended in what Beatrice Webb called a ‘brilliant victory’, partly negotiated by Cardinal Manning. After it the dockers formed a new General Labourers’ Union, electing Tillett as General Secretary.

These events were manifestations of what the Webbs called the ‘New Unionism’ in which unskilled workers became prominent in the union movement. ‘The whole movement was a reflection of the growth of employment in large impersonal units, where there was a tendency for skill differentials to become obscured.’ The dock industry was particularly affected by the contrast between the relatively skilled and regularly employed stevedores and lightermen and large numbers of unskilled casual workers. In the coal areas there was a marked differentiation between those areas producing mainly for the home market and those producing for export, where sliding wage-scales were often in operation. In 1889 the regional mining unions came together in the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. The development of unionism was also much affected by the attitude of employers, the degree to which they were prepared to grant recognition to unions and the extent to which they themselves were organized.

At first the numerical increase in trade union membership was dramatic. At the TUC in 1889 nearly 885,000 members had been represented; in 1890 nearly 1½ million, and though it dropped back in the face of aggressive actions by employers, it then steadily recovered.

A new generation of working-class activists, many of them socialist, challenged the old TUC establishment, represented in Henry Broadhurst, a man totally identified with the Liberals. He resigned his position as secretary of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee in 1890.

Keir Hardie
The new activism was represented politically by one of Broadhurst’s critics, the former miner, James Keir Hardie (1856 - 1915), the illegitimate son of a servant from Lanarkshire. In 1886 he was appointed secretary for the Scottish Miners’ Federation. In 1888 he stood as the ‘Labour and Home Rule’ candidate for the mining constituency of mid-Lanark, and finished bottom of the poll; the Liberal won, but with a good deal of working-class support going to the Tories.

Following mid-Lanark, Hardie declared:

‘If the Liberal Party desired to prevent a split, let it adopt the programme of the Labour Party.’

He put forward this view at successive meetings of the TUC, and made the eight-hour day the centre-piece of an independent Labour programme. This created ideological problems for the Liberals and for those in the Labour movement who found it difficult to accept a statutory limitation of hours for adult male workers. The idea of an independent Labour programme and representation found support in many parts of the country, particularly in the north of England.

1892 was a general election year. Hardie decisively abandoned the Liberal party and stood as independent candidate for the constituency of West Ham. His appeal to the voters was deliberately broad. Little was said about socialism (which would have alienated the Irish Catholic vote), but a great deal about unemployment (a newly coined word). The strength of support was such that the official Liberal candidate, a Liberal, withdrew immediately before polling day. Hardie thus had a straight fight with a Unionist and won 57% of the vote. (The election was financed in part by a donation from Andrew Carnegie.) His entry into the Commons caused a sensation because he wore a deerstalker (not, as is often wrongly reported, a worker’s cap), which was to become his trademark in public life.

His most striking contribution to parliament was his speech made on the occasion of the birth of the future duke of Windsor in the summer of 1894. It drew emotional force from the fact that the Salisbury government had refused a request from Hardie to propose a motion of condolence for the relatives of 250 miners who had been killed in a colliery explosion a few days earlier. Hardie wrote an angry newspaper article and on 28 June outraged parliament by what he later called his ‘Royal Baby Speech’. Even the Liberal radicals were unable to support him openly, though in private they agreed with him.

The Independent Labour Party
In January 1893, following the bitter Manningham Mill strike in Bradford, 120 delegates from various local socialist societies, mostly with working-class memberships, came together in Bradford to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Though the word ‘socialism’ was not in the programme (and it was unanimously voted not to call the new party the Socialist Labour Party), the party committed itself ‘to secure the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’. This was a much more socialist programme than the one put before the West Ham electors. But like the Fabians, the ILP were gradualists, seeking to win power through the ballot box. Their ‘ethical socialism’ was very different from the revolutionary Marxism of Hyndman, Eleanor Marx or William Morris. Significantly, the ILP included many husband and wife partnerships: the Pankhursts, the MacDonalds, the Snowdons, and was committed to women’s suffrage. Its leaders, Keir Hardie and Tom Mann, realized that to capture power at local and national level they would have to link up with the wider trade union movement.

In 1895 the ILP had 35,000 members. However in the 1895 general election it put up 28 candidates, but won only 44, 325 votes. All its candidates finished bottom of the poll, including Hardie. Greatly humbled, ILP strategists determined that future success depended on drawing more substantial support from the trade unions. As a result it began to be successful in local elections and in 1898 it joined with the Social Democratic Federation to make West Ham the first local authority to have a Labour majority. At local level, the ILP was doing a good job in pressing for the reform of public services, but parliamentary success was still elusive.

The Labour Representation Committee
In the final years of the 19th century the ILP faced a stark choice. Either it could combine with the SDF or it could back-pedal on its socialism by linking with the trade union movement. Circumstances favoured the latter option. Many trade unionists were worried about the long-term prospects of the movement in the wake of more aggressive attitudes on the part of employers, who were increasingly resorting to lock-outs. Some unions, notably the miners, already had their sponsored Lib-Lab MPs, but others needed little persuading to vote for the resolution at the TUC Congress of 1899 that ‘a better representation of the interests of Labour in the House of Commons’ was desirable. The resolution went on to call for a special congress of unions and socialist societies to secure that objective. Significantly the resolution came from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, which was still struggling for recognition and was aware that many directors of railway companies sat in Parliament.

The congress convened on 27 February 1900 at the Farringdon Street Memorial Hall, and established the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). The key resolution stated that ‘a distinct Labour Group’ should be established in Parliament, ‘who should have their own Whips and agree upon their policy’. There was no mention of socialism, and no ‘Marxist’ slogans about nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The LRC was thus an uneasy compromise between trade unions, who were mostly suspicious of socialism, and the three socialist societies, the ILP, the SDF and the Fabians. But the unions were bound to win arguments and votes: there were about 1.2 million trade unionists affiliated to the TUC (25% of adult male manual labourers), while the socialist societies had tiny memberships.

The newspapers were taken up with the Boer War and gave little attention to the congress. Most of the miners and cotton operatives boycotted it, and most regarded the new body as ephemeral. ‘That it turned out differently was mainly due to the work of Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first secretary to the Committee, and to the Taff Vale decision .

The Taff Vale Judgement
In July 1901 the House of Lords handed down their decision in the Taff Vale case. A South Wales railway had successfully sued the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants through its officials for damages sustained through picketing in the course of a strike in August 1900. The decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal, but reinstated by the Law Lords. When the damages were finally settled in January 1903 they amounted to £23,000. This reinforced working-class opinion that the law was something imposed from above.

The case gave the LRC a boost. Ramsay MacDonald told the unions, pointing that their very existence was at stake and that this made a Labour party in Parliament ‘an absolute necessity’. By early 1903 the number of affiliated unions had risen to 127, with a membership of 850,000. A parliamentary fund was set up based on a penny levy per affiliated member.

There were still many tensions. The SDF withdrew from the LRC over Labour’s refusal to accept the doctrine of the class war. The ILP remained within the LRC but continued to argue for full-blooded socialism, while MacDonald wanted to maintain contacts with the Liberals.

This seemed a realistic strategy as the Liberals were beginning to stand aside in elections for Labour candidates. Already in August 1902 a Labour MP was returned unopposed for Clitheroe. In March 1903 Will Crooks, sponsored by the Woolwich Trades Council, captured the Conservative seat of Woolwich. Two months later the President of the Ironfounders’ Union, Arthur Henderson, who was to be the leader of the Labour Party from 1914-22, was returned for Barnard Castle.

In the spring of 1903 negotiations began between MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Chief Whip. In the summer they reached an informal (and secret) understanding that each party would use its influence to prevent the running of ‘wrecking’ candidates’ whose intervention would risk handing seats over to the Unionists. It was provisionally agreed that in 23 seats Labour should be given a free run. Was the pact a grave mistake for the Liberals, allowing Labour a toehold inside Parliament in the next general election?

Click here for James Connell's socialist anthem, The Red Flag.

The Reform Acts

2009-11-14T17:55:00.002Z

The always admirable Victorian web has a series of useful posts on the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century. Start here and then follow the links at the foot of the page.

THE SECOND REFORM ACT

[Disraeli in 1873]

The First Reform Act (1832) had widened the franchise to include (roughly) the middle classes. But official statistics showed that over 26% of borough voters were working men.
Counties:

40/- freeholders
£10 leaseholders
£10 copyholders
£50 occupiers

Boroughs:

£10 householders

But aristocratic dominance remained. So did small electorates - in 1865 Marlborough, Wells, Thetford, and Knaresborough had fewer than 300 voters. But Tower Hamlets had 29,000 voters. Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, and Bradford were still under-represented. Bribery and intimidation were common.
Tories and most Whigs were untroubled by this. Democracy was still thought of as an evil. Walter Bagehot had argued that the best government is conducted not by the many but by ‘the select few’. The Chartist attempts to bring about manhood suffrage and the secret ballot had failed.

The Revival of Reform

By the end of the 1840s Lord John Russell (right) had been converted to moderate reform. ‘Finality Jack’ was arguing that a larger proportion of the population deserved the vote in view of

‘the improvement and intelligence of the people and the general spread of information since 1832’.

But as late as 1860 he agreed to withdraw a reform bill, admitting to Palmerston that ‘the apathy of the nation is undeniable’. But two events of the 1860s revived interest in politics:
(1) The American Civil War. John Bright related the American struggle to the British domestic scene by drawing modern parallels:

'The class which has hitherto ruled this country has failed miserably. It revels in power and wealth, whilst at its feet lies the multitude that it has neglected. If a class has failed, let us try the nation.'

But what did Bright mean by ‘the nation’? Even he was not prepared to accept full manhood suffrage. In 1851 he had said:

‘I have never adopted the phrase “universal” or “manhood” suffrage in connection with the franchise … nor do I think what is expressed by them the best to give a chance of the best government.’

(2) Guiseppe Garibaldi’s visit to England in 1864. Garibaldi was identified with anti-papalism and romantic democracy. He addressed a crowd of 20,000 at the Crystal Palace. The collaboration of a Working Man’s Garibaldian Fund Committee and a middle-class City of London Demonstration Committee led to joint action in favour of franchise and other reforms.

In February 1865 the Reform League, composed of ex-Chartists and trade unionists, was set up to press for an extension of the suffrage and a programme of radical reform. A similar, more middle-class organization, the Reform Union, based in Manchester and composed of former Anti-Corn Law League members, was already in existence (formed March 1864).

The emergence of Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone emerged as the figure around which the events of reform came to focus though he had come late to the cause. From 1860 his budgets had made him ‘The People’s William’ – he had ended the duty on newspapers and supported the popular cause of Italian unification. In1862 he began a series of speaking tours in the provinces (Manchester, Bradford, Newcastle, Middlesborough) and secured his refashioning as a populist politician. Though he deprecated radical agitation and believed in individual self-help, Gladstone was especially impressed with what he saw as the heroic conduct of the Lancashire cotton operatives during the cotton famine. He believed that powerful changes were taking place in the working classes, both in ‘character’ and ‘intellect’. The refusal of the workers to riot or to condemn the blockade which the North was imposing made him feel that it was

‘a shame and a scandal that men such as these would be excluded from the parliamentary franchise’.

In May 1864 when speaking in a debate on a private member’s bill to extend the franchise, he spoke, as instructed, against any ‘sudden and sweeping measures’. Then on his own initiative, he added that the existing franchise was unsatisfactory, and concluded

'I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution. ... What are the qualities which fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors ... I admit the danger of dealing with the enormous mass of man; but I am now speaking only of a limited proportion of the working class ... a select portion.'

Did this mean he supported household suffrage? Palmerston denounced the speech as more like one of Bright’s. He sent him a friendly remonstrance pointing out that every man was already ‘within the pale of the constitution’. The Queen called it ‘a strange, independent action’ for a cabinet minister. Disraeli accused him of reviving the politics of Tom Paine, but this was merely party political positioning.
    As a result of his speech, Gladstone received many messages of congratulation and support from local Liberal associations and from Liberal reformers. Although he had qualified what he had said - ‘fitness for the franchise’ existed only in a select proportion of the working class’ - he had gone on record as a defender of the moral right of the responsible working man to vote.
    Everyone knew that reform was not going to take place while Palmerston was alive. In 1864 he addressed a workingman’s meeting where he was received in silence and presented with an address stigmatizing him as ‘the greatest possible obstruction to every means of reform’.

The death of Palmerston
In July 1865 Palmerston went to the country. Most members ignored reform in their election addresses – church rates was a more contentious issue in urban seats. Palmerston’s government increased its majority, John Stuart Mill was elected for Westminster. Thomas Hughes and Henry Fawcett, also Liberals, were also returned.
    Gladstone’s support for reform cost him his Oxford University seat. He set out to contest a county seat in industrial South Lancashire. He began his campaign in the Free Trade Hall by declaring that he had come to the North ‘unmuzzled’ and he was elected the following month.
    Palmerston’s last months were taken up with the problem of Fenian terrorism; he wanted all passengers from the US to be searched and he ordered more troops to be sent to Ireland. He died on 18 October, two days before his eighty-first birthday and was given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey. Disraeli said:

‘The truce of parties is over. I foresee tempestuous times and great vicissitudes in public life’.

Sir Charles Wood (soon to be Viscount Halifax): ‘Our quiet days are over; no more peace for us’.

The Liberal Reform Bill
The inevitable choice for Prime Minister was Earl Russell (now aged 74). As Lord John Russell (until his elevation to the Lords in 1861) he had been one of the architects of the First Reform Act. Russell was the greatest embodiment of Whiggism and he saw a second bill as the crowning of his life’s work. Gladstone kept his old post as Chancellor of the Exchequer and was also made Leader of the House. He would therefore have the task of steering the bill through the Commons.

But the Liberals were divided on the question of reform. At one wing of the party was John Bright (above left) who was regarded as too extreme for a cabinet post, at the other the Benthamite elitist, Robert Lowe, (right) who was very pessimistic for the future of his party.

'If they unite their fortunes with the fortunes of Democracy ... they will not miss one of two things - if they fail they will ruin their party, and if they succeed, they will ruin their country.'

In February 1866 the Commons met for the first time after the election. In March Gladstone introduced a rather incoherent bill designed to enfranchise some 400,000 electors, about half of them working class: a £7 rental qualification in the boroughs and £14 in the counties. The plan was to give the vote to the respectable working class, but not the ‘residuum’. This was immediately opposed by Lowe and a substantial section of the Conservatives. Lowe gathered round him more than thirty disgruntled Liberals whom Bright called the Cave of Adullam. In a speech of 13 March, Lowe said

'If you want venality, if you want ignorance, if you want drunkenness and the facility for being intimidated, or if, on the other hand, you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where do you look for them in the constituencies? Do you go to the top of the bottom?'

Bright responded in a speech in Birmingham:

‘Let us arouse the spirit of the people against the slanderers of a great and noble nation’.

On the Conservative side, Lowe was supported by Lord Cranbourne, the future Lord Salisbury (then MP for the family seat of Stamford). But the majority of the Commons were convinced that reform was inevitable. Most of them wanted a balance of classes - the working classes should be represented but not allowed to preponderate. The debate was not about whether or not to have reform but what kind of reform and how far it should go.

    The Conservatives had been out of office (apart from two periods of minority government) for twenty years. Its leaders, Lord Derby (right) and Benjamin Disraeli, were both eager for power and eager to bring down the government.
    Thus the government was opposed by the Conservatives and the Adullamites, and forced to rely on its Radical wing. Bright was not happy with the modest provisions of the bill but he remarked that beggars could not be choosers. The bill was passed, but by such a narrow margin that it was certain it would face great difficulties in the committee stage.

The fall of the Liberals
In May 1866 the great London banking house of Overend and Gurney crashed. The bank rate rose by 10%. Unemployment was widespread and the period of mid-Victorian prosperity seemed over.
    On 18 June an Adullamite wrecking amendment was carried by 11 votes - 48 Liberals voted with the Conservatives. Bright urged Russell to call an election and fight it on a reform ticket. But Russell resigned - the Liberals were now out of office barely a year after a convincing electoral victory. Russell’s last hopes of retiring with a substantial legislative achievement under his belt were over. (He resigned the leadership of the Liberals early in 1868, and died in 1878.)

The Conservative Reform Bill
For the third time in his political life, Derby found himself head of a minority Conservative administration. Disraeli became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the house. Derby wrote to Disraeli:

‘I am coming reluctantly to the conclusion that we shall have to deal with the question of reform’.

A new urgency was given to this by threats to law and order. In July 1866 a rally planned by the Reform League in Hyde Park was banned by the police. Defying the authorities, the League marched from Trafalgar Square and skirmished with the police in Park Lane. For two days Hyde Park was the scene of disorder and riots. The railings were torn down and the Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, was in tears. (However, the violence was less than had been seen in the general election the previous year.) This coincided with a bad harvest, a cholera outbreak, and Fenian outrages.

Bright, now converted to manhood suffrage, embarked on his own crusade, the second in his career. In August he addressed a mass meeting in his Birmingham constituency, the first of a series of mass meetings said to have been attended by 100,000. The theme was: let us trust the nation. He became the spearhead of a broad movement of agitation throughout the country in the autumn and winter of 1866-7.
The Queen, worried about the dangerous social disharmony, urged a moderate reform on the cabinet. This was congenial to Disraeli, who knew that the Conservative party would never succeed as the party of landed reaction. In September Derby pragmatically opted for reform, his plan being to take advantage of Liberal disunity without splitting the Conservatives. To do this he had to bring forward a different reform bill! It was generally accepted that the next layer of voters in the borough below the £10 franchise was solidly Liberal. Only by going further down could the Tories hope to win further support. In December 1866 Derby first hazarded the notion of household suffrage without any qualifications, but modified by plural votes for such qualifications as savings or a superior education.

Lowe:

'I hold Bright and his mob in such sovereign contempt that I require no external support to fortify me against their abuse. What I am afraid of is ... the Tories, and, above all, Dizzy, who I verily believe is concocting a very sweeping bill.'

In February 1867 the Queen’s speech forecast measures which

‘without unduly disturbing the balance of political power shall freely extend the electoral franchise’.

But behind the scenes, the cabinet was divided. At an emergency cabinet meeting on 25 February, Lord Cranbourne and two other ministers threatened resignation, just before Disraeli was due to present his bill before the House. The cabinet hastily abandoned this bill and substituted a rating franchise of £6 in the boroughs and £20 in the counties - this bill was dubbed the Ten Minutes Bill because of its rapid birth! It was nothing more than ‘a pathetic imitation’ of Gladstone’s bill and was quickly shot down.

The Conservatives were now in deep crisis. The Adullamites couldn’t be expected to support something so similar to the bill they had destroyed last year. Would the government survive? Disraeli saw that this was Gladstone’s opportunity to unite his party. The Tory strategy was to limit reform by limiting it to those who paid their rates personally (not those who ‘compounded’ to do it through their landlords). During an angry cabinet meeting Disraeli managed to push his proposals through with the result that three ministers (Cranbourne, Carnarvon, Peel) resigned.
On 18 March Disraeli introduced a new bill - in the boroughs, household suffrage limited by two years residence and personal payment of rates; in the counties a £15 rental; ‘fancy franchises’ (Bright) given to university graduates, those with £15 savings, payers of £1 a year income tax, members of the learned professions. This bill would have enfranchised some 400,000 (the same as Gladstone’s bill). Gladstone refused to support this on the grounds that Disraeli would abandon his safeguards if politically expedient.
But the majority of Tories were now prepared to accept whatever Disraeli put forward. Some Radicals also decided to support it. On 12 April the support of 45 Liberals secured a government majority of 310/289. Gladstone: ‘a smash without example’. That night Disraeli was toasted at the Carlton Club as

‘the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick!'

The coming of reform
In his desperate search for majorities Disraeli was increasingly ready to accept amendments. On 17 May an amendment by an obscure Liberal back-bencher outlawed compound householding. Disraeli accepted this without cabinet approval and at one stroke this introduced direct household suffrage (with a residence qualification of one year) and another half million men were enfranchised. In other amendments the various ‘fancy franchises’ were ditched. Virtually the only expansionist amendment of consequence which Disraeli did not allow was Mill’s proposal for female suffrage. When the bill emerged through the Commons it was far more democratic than anything Disraeli had initially envisaged. It went through the Lords with few important changes.
Derby described this as

‘a leap in the dark’.

In fact neither he nor Disraeli had been converted to reform. They continued to hope that the electoral system remained sufficiently anomalous and undemocratic to give them a chance to benefit from the changes they had introduced. This was not unrealistic. The county franchise was only reduced from £15 to £12. This involved electoral calculation. Most of the new voters were corralled within the largest towns. Disraeli had written off the boroughs as Liberal strongholds - therefore it would do no harm to increase the electorate. On the other hand, he did not wish to risk enfranchising Liberals in the counties. Therefore while the number of borough voters in England and Wales rose by 138% from 514,026 to 1,225,042, the number of county voters did so by less than 46% from 542,663 to 791,253.
Fifty-two seats were reallocated and three-member constituencies were created for Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds. Scotland had seven new seats. Of all males aged 21 and above a third now enjoyed the vote in England and Wales, just under a third in Scotland (which enjoyed the greatest proportionate increase in the numbers of voters) and just under a sixth in Ireland. Over all, about a million were added to the electorate.

Intellectuals such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold predicted doom and gloom. George Eliot was dubious. But a great deal did not change. Many small boroughs continued to return MPs. Almost 80 seats were still controlled by patrons. From 1832 to 1880 a Grosvenor was returned for Chester; a Peel represented Tamworth for the same period. But fundamental changes did follow: the secret ballot, (a few) working-class MPs, the enfranchisement of the rural working class. ‘The exclusive world of the Duke of Omnium crumbled within thirty years of the second Reform Bill; the age of mass politics took its place.’

LATER REFORMS

A major move towards the abolition of privilege was the Ballot Act of 1872. The Corrupt Practices Act (1883) restricted treating at elections and could be seen as a prelude to further reform. The Third Reform Act of 1884 essentially created a uniform householder and lodger franchise based on that introduced for the English boroughs in 1867. An amendment to give women the vote was defeated 271/135.
The Redistribution Act in the following year engineered the most extensive reform of the constituencies since 1832.

seventy-nine towns with populations smaller than 15,000 lost their right to elect an MP;
thirty-six with populations between 15,000 and 50,000 lost one of their MPs and became single member constituencies;
towns with populations between 50,000 and 165,000 were given two seats;
larger towns and the country constituencies were divided into single member constituencies.

The majority of seats were now single-member and of roughly equal size though the largest cities received between three and six new MPs apiece. Because this disaggregated city constituencies into smaller units, many of them suburban, the Conservatives were the main beneficiaries.
Following these reforms the United Kingdom electorate increased from 2.53 million in 1871 to 5.68 million at the end of 1884. By 1891 61% of adult males had the vote.

The Great Exhibition: a hymn to free trade

2009-11-10T22:31:00.003Z

See here, and here for good discussions.

See also Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Batsford, 1998); Judith Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (HarperPerennial, 2007), especially chapter 1.

Is the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ on 1 May 1851 the great symbolic Victorian event? Certainly this is how the queen seemed to see it in her letter to King Leopold. Palmerston:

‘a glorious day for England’.

The prayers uttered by the archbishop of Canterbury at the opening were the prayers of a successful people, whose God had multiplied blessings on them. His prayer was appropriately followed by the Hallelujah Chorus.

The Exhibition came at a useful time for the government of Lord John Russell, as it was in crisis over ecclesiastical policy and would have fallen if the Conservative Protectionists had been able to present a convincing alternative government. Disraeli saw the Exhibition as

‘a godsend to the Government ... diverting public attention from their blunders’.

But the very idea of the Exhibition was controversial. There was no national funding and Prince Albert (right) had to seek private sponsorship. The Hyde Park site was fiercely attacked and there were complaints that Paxton’s structure was not only high enough to enclose vast elm tress in full summer leaf but that it obstructed the riders in Rotten Row. Protectonists attacked its free trade ideology. Colonel Sibthorpe:

‘an industrial exhibition in the heart of fashionable Belgravia to enable foreigners to rob us of our honour’.

Many prophesied public indifference and financial failure.

The Exhibition lasted from May to October 1851 and received 6 million visitors (out of a population of 27m.). It was a tribute to the country that had created the Industrial Revolution. By coincidence it took place in the same year as the census which revealed that for the first time more people were living in the town than the country. At this period, Britain was the world’s shipbuilder, the world’s carrier, the world’s banker, and the world’s clearing-house.
But the title showed that the Exhibition was not intended to be a chauvinist display of British prowess alone. It was intended to celebrate free trade - so it looked back with thankfulness to the repeal of 1846. Peel was the posthumous hero. It has a moral as well as an industrial purpose.

Two themes were repeated more than the rest: the gospel of work and the gospel of peace. The two predominant metaphors and symbols were the working bees in the hive and the gigantic olive tree planted in the centre of the Palace. It was believed that out of the honest rivalry of industry and skill, countries would find a new brotherhood.

Albert set out the philosophy of the Exhibition at a gargantuan Mansion House banquet on March 21 1850. It was a symbol of free trade, the division of labour, and human brotherhood.

Planning
The ambitious project of a Great Exhibition developed out of very humble origins. The Royal Society of Arts, which had exhibited its prize awards for agricultural and industrial machinery since 1761, held two special tiny exhibitions in 1844 and 1845; it was interested in the possibility of ‘wedding high art with mechanical skill’. Henry Cole, a civil servant with a taste for administrative centralization, submitted a model for a tea set, and not only won the silver medal but became a leading member of the Society. (Cole was also the inventor of the Christmas card.) It was Cole’s idea that there should be a Royal Commission to prepare the Exhibition. When the Commissioners for the Exhibition met for the first time in January 1850, Albert was President and Cole the chief organizer.

The Building
The centrepiece of the Exhibition was an enormous glass and cast-iron edifice, more than a third of a mile long, 408 feet broad, and 66 feet high - with transepts 108 feet high, perhaps the world’s first, and certainly the world’s largest prefabricated building.

The designer was Joseph Paxton (1803-65), gardener of Chatsworth, who had taught himself biology and engineering. He produced the design on what quickly became the most famous piece of blotting paper in history. It triumphed over 233 designs, and was completed in nine days. He had in mind the glass lily house in the Chatsworth garden over which he presided, built at a time when glass was still heavily taxed; his great lily, introduced into Britain in 1837 had been named Victoria Regia. (Click to enlarge; the child standing on the lily is his daughter, Annie.) He had already planned Birkenhead New Park in 1843 and he had devised the much-admired Coventry Cemetery in 1846. He had begun work in 1850 on the great Rothschild house, Mentmore.

The heaviest pieces of cast iron were the girders, which were 24 feet in length and none of which weighed more than a ton. The wrought iron consisted chiefly of round and flat bars, angle irons, bolts, screws, and rivets. The panes of glass produced by Charles Brothers of Birmingham were the biggest yet manufactured. The cast-iron columns were painted blue, red and yellow – which the Times feared would be ‘a huge vulgarity.’ Other novel features were the use of standard sign boards and standard lettering throughout the building, the uniform crimson colour proscribed for hangings and stall coverings, an the vertical rather than horizontal displays.

The speed with which it was erected was remarkable. From the first flash of the idea it took Paxton just a month to draw up the blueprints (11 June - 15 July 1850). The ground was handed over to the contractors on 30 July. The first column was raised on 26 September. The building was completed in six months. The secret was prefabrication. All the material was interchangeable: girders, columns, gutters, and sash bars were identical throughout the whole building.

The building was immediately thought of as a palace. It was thought to offer a solution to the difficult problem of finding a distinctive 19th century architectural style. Glass was one of the newly freed commodities from which a prohibitive tax had been lifted; it was also the substance which more than any other dazzled, and sparkled, and glittered. The term ‘crystal palace’ was coined by Douglas Jerrold, former editor of Punch. But it was also seen as a people’s palace open to all. Dostoevsky:

'You gasp for breath. It is like a biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy ... coming to pass before your eyes’.

Even the grudging Disraeli called it ‘that enchanted pile’.

The Exhibits
There were over 13,000 exhibitors, one half of the total Exhibition being occupied by Great Britain, the other half by foreign states, of which France and Germany were the most important. The foreign exhibits were placed in the eastern half of the building and classed under their respective countries. British exhibits filled the western end.

The Commissioners had accepted and modified a suggestion from the young scientist, Lyon Playfair, and agreed on five major divisions of exhibits: Raw Materials: Machinery; Manufactures - textile fabrics; Manufactures - metallic, vitreous and ceramic; Miscellaneous; Fine Arts. Within this broad classification there were to be thirty classes, each of them with a separate jury not only to award prizes but to report on the state and prospects of the class in question. The Machinery Court was the noisiest and most popular spectacle.

The whole business of how to classify the objects was complicated and involved some philosophical controversy. Did the French commissioner’s handsome walking stick fit into ‘Miscellaneous Objects’ or ‘Articles of Clothing’? Or ‘Machines for Direct Use’ which included landaus, broughams and sledges? What about the pocket umbrella submitted by Samuel Plimsoll? One wig-maker was annoyed that his exhibits were placed under ‘Miscellaneous Manufactures’ rather than ‘Art’. ‘Nature’ included a remarkable stuffed elk from the zoological museum at Turin.

The Indian section, assembled by the East India Company was much admired by the queen. However, in retrospect, it seemed backward looking and against the spirit of the Exhibition.

The United States section, on the other hand, seemed disappointing to many visitors. The Americans had commissioned too much space and had difficulty filling it. Among their exhibits were stuffed black-eyed squirrels and 6,000 fossils. But for those with eyes to the future there was a McCormick reaper, a Hobbs lock, a Colt revolver, and two tiny sewing machines, worked by one small girl, who could turn 600 stitches a minute.

France produced an impressive display. In one of the five French courts was a sewing machine adapted for coarse cloth; there were cameras and a calculating machine. However, such was the pull of the stereotype that reports concentrated on ornamental furniture, carpets and jewels.

The presence of paper was ubiquitous - in the form of catalogues and tickets, most of them to be thrown away, as well as exhibits designed to be permanent. One of the queen’s favourites was the De La Rue envelope-making machine, folding and gumming 60 envelopes a minute. There were also wallpapers, some of them since 1841 machine printed, papier-mâché chairs and tables, trays and boxes.

In the Austrian section, as a special gift from the Emperor to the Queen, there was a huge carved-oak Gothic book-case.

Many of the objects were more clever than useful. One of the most bizarre was a garden seat for Osborne made from coal. Other gadgets included ‘an alarm bedstead, causing a person to arise at any given hour’, and a ‘cricket catapulta, for propelling the ball in the absence of a first-rate bowler’.

I. K. Brunel’s huge hydraulic press was on display, locating the Exhibition symbolically in the steam age. Brunel wished to keep out all electrical machines on the grounds that as yet they were just ‘toys’.

Farmers could view double-action turnip cutters, horse seed dibblers and portable mills for grinding and splitting produce (all from Oxfordshire) and agricultural steam engines from Lincolnshire. A strikingly modern phenomenon was a package of lucifer matches.
The queen marvelled at the electric telegraph and sent appropriate messages to her loyal subjects in Edinburgh and Manchester.

Yet there was a philosophical dilemma running through the Exhibition. Pugin’s Medieval Court ‘for the display of the taste and art of dead men’ was set apart from the rest of the Exhibition. The massive ecclesiastical ornaments made the commissioners afraid of cries of ‘No Popery’. When the queen visited the Guild Hall in July to celebrate with the City of London the Great Exhibition, supper was served in the crypt, which was fitted up for the occasion as a baronial hall, with lights carried by figures in medieval armour.

Visitors
The prime reason for the Exhibition’s success was that it took place at a time of peace and relative prosperity. But the memory of a series of disturbances going back to Peterloo led to some apprehension before it opened. Would there be mob action on the lines of the Chartist demonstration? How would criminals react, confronted with all those treasures. Government took precautions on the opening day and regiments were brought down from the provinces. 6,000 policemen were mobilized. But there was no breakdown of law and order - only a rash of pickpocketing.

When the Exhibition opened, the entry fee was 5/- , but after the first few weeks, admission prices were reduced to 2/6 on Friday and 1/- from Monday to Thursday. (There was no Sunday opening because of Sabbatarian pressure on the Prime Minister.) With the onset of the ‘shilling day’ a different sort of visitor arrived at the Exhibition. 4.5 million (three quarters of the total attendance) came on the shilling days, and behaved very well. During the whole period, there were only 25 prosecutions for offences committed inside the building. Had Britain now obtained a lasting social peace? Newspapers thought working men ‘more intelligent, more self-reliant, more energetic… ashamed of their former prejudices’. Had the ‘dangerous classes’ disappeared from the scene, to be replaced by the ‘labouring classes’? Had the working classes become respectable?

But with the admission fee of a shilling only the upper levels of the working classes – artisans and master craftsmen – could have afforded a visit. And for those who had to travel to London it would have been unthinkable to have spent what would have been the cost of one or two weeks’ entire earnings in a single day. For this reason The Times’ warning that

‘Summer excursion trains will bring the artisans and mechanics in upon London like an inundation’

was ridiculous and the Duke of Wellington was being paranoid when he thought that at least 15,000 soldiers would be needed to keep order.

However, the Exhibition showed that the railway age had arrived and that cheap seats meant that the relatively poor could travel to a degree that had been impossible in previous generations. The London and North Western Railway carried three quarter of a million people to the Exhibition while the shilling days were in force. Thomas Cook negotiated with the Midland railway for reduced rail fares and accommodation in London. Some employers allowed time off work, others paid for the cost of the trip.

Verdicts
Of the critics, Ruskin (1819-1900) thought the Crystal Palace showed mechanical ingenuity at the expense of true art. He also deplored the division of labour which Albert had hailed as the mark of industrial progress. William Morris (1834-96) who was to turn to Marxism for his inspiration thought the Exhibition ‘wonderfully ugly’. Dickens said he had

‘an instinctive feeling against the Exhibition of a faint, inexplicable sort’.

Pugin called the Crystal Palace ‘a glass monster’. But Macaulay’s optimism better reflected the mood of the times. Most people who visited were impressed. William Whiteley, aged 22, was so inspired by the glass building that he began to dream of large retail stores, ‘universal providers’ shops’, with plate-glass fronts.

Further Exhibitions
The Great Exhibition spawned imitators: the Paris exhibition of 1855, the Exposition of 1867, the Exposition of 1889 (especially when viewed from the Eiffel Tower). Nearly half a million visited the Manchester Exhibition of 1857. New York had an exhibition in 1853, Philadelphia in 1876. The Chicago and Vienna Exhibitions of 1893 both had impressive domes. The Paris Exhibition of 1900 was hailed as the exhibition of the century.

The closing day of the Exhibition was wet and depressing and by the end of the year even before the contractors had begun to dismantle the fabric of the Crystal Palace, the electric telegraph should have brought the news of a coup d’état in France.

The age of Peel and Palmerston

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Below are a series of posts dealing with the major issues of the 1840s and 1850s. The posts on the 1840s in particular are quite detailed and you should use the details or not as you choose.

I can recommend the Victorian web as an admirable guide through the period. Dr Marjorie Bloy's Peel web is also invaluable and gives you access to many primary sources. The standard text books are Boyd Hilton's volume in the New Oxford History of England, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? and Eric J. Evans' The Forging of the Modern State in the Longmans series.

The 'condition of England question'

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The phrase was coined by Thomas Carlyle [above] in his essay on Chartism in 1839. Coming at the end of a decade of social reform, it reflected a mood of pessimism, of huge social problems that had not been solved.

Historians have disagreed about living standards and even more so about the nebulous category of ‘quality of life’. When people moved from the countryside to the town their wages probably rose, though their quality of life deteriorated. It has been estimated that the 1830s and 1840s may have been the worst ever decades for life expectancy since the Black Death. The arrival of cholera in 1831 contributed to the demographic crisis though endemic disease such as typhus, whooping cough, measles, dysentery and diarrhoea had even higher mortality rates and were responsible for 40% of the deaths in the growing industrial towns. In London about a third of the population died of TB. The national average life expectancy at birth was 40-41, but in Manchester it was only 27 and in Liverpool 28. In 1840s Liverpool the gentry and professional classes had an average life expectancy of 35, tradesmen 22, mechanics, servants and labourers 15.

Between 1770 and 1845 the average height of 20 year-olds in the army rose steadily but in the next generation (those born between 1826 and 1850) it fell by two inches and only began to rise after 1870. In 1840 the per capita consumption of sugar was only half what it had been in 1801 while that of tea and bread probably fell as well.

An increasing proportion of the population lived in cities and industrial towns. The population of Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester was increased by migrants from Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. The population of London more than doubled during the first half of the century. The male migrants crowded into common lodging houses, families into cellars or (if they were more fortunate) back-to-backs. Dickens’s Artful Dodger was a sanitized representation of the gangs of feral children that terrorized the respectable. Juvenile delinquency began to be conceptualized as a specific problem.

Concerns about the safety of drinking water prompted Parliament in 1830 to deregulate the beer and cider trades. This led to the proliferation of alehouses that were set up without the consent of magistrates. The British and Foreign Temperance Society was set up in 1831 and was especially popular in the Methodist strongholds of Lancashire and Cornwall.

The 1830s and 1840s saw a rash of social commentaries by (eg) Friedrich Engels [left] and Alexis de Tocqueville. But there were also racy, morally neutral descriptions of London life such as Pierce Egan’s Tom and Jerry (1820s).

The Chartists

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Above is a fascinating early photograph depicting the Chartist meeting on Kennington Common, 10 April, 1848.

There are some useful web sites on Chartism.

In 1839 Thomas Carlyle’s pamphlet Chartism stated,

‘a feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the working classes is rather ominous at present; that something ought to be said and something ought to be done, in regard to it.’

The Chartist movement was the first radical working-class (as opposed to artisan) movement in Britain. It was born out of several factors:

The tradition of articulate politically conscious artisan radicalism in London with the encouragement of radicals among the higher classes. This can be dated back to the agitations of the 1770s and was greatly reinforced in the 1790s with the foundation of the London Corresponding Society, the publication of Rights of Man and radical post-war publications such as the Black Dwarf.
The increase in radical agitation in the 1820 and 30s. In 1824 a group of working men founded the London Mechanics Institute. These included Henry Hetherington (1792-1849) a radical printer and Owenite socialist and the Cornish cabinet-maker William Lovett (right) (1800-1877). At the height of the Reform Bill agitation in 1831 they founded the National Union of the Working Classes to spearhead the working-class campaign for a real reform bill.
The war of the unstamped. Hetherington’s most famous publication was the Poor Man’s Guardian, issued from 31 July 1831 as a periodical in defiance of the Stamp Act (thereby risking imprisonment). Shortly afterwards he was joined by a young Irish lawyer James Bronterre (‘Inebriate’) O’Brien who edited the paper and rapidly established himself as the foremost theorist of working-class radicalism. Led by the Guardian, the unstamped press flourished in London and the provinces, feeding working-class radicalism. In 1835 the stamp was reduced to 1d - this was still too expensive for working-class pockets. The battle over the stamp led to the setting up of a network of organizations and a chain of command that could be revived when the occasion required it.
The industrial revolution and the economic and social problems of Britain in the 1830s and 1840s. The heartland of Chartism was not London (the site of much previous radicalism) but industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire, though it was a movement of industrial outworkers rather than factory operatives.
The ‘great Whig betrayal’. The post-1832 borough franchise disenfranchised many who had previously had the right to vote under the very varied borough franchises of the old system. Along with this went resentment at practically everything the Whigs did between 1830 and 1841, in particular the Poor Law Amendment Act.

The most important aspect of the legacy of the 1830s to Chartism was the sense of unity and purpose built up by a multiplicity of grievances that created a new, radicalized working class presence in the industrial areas. It was symbolized in the formation in June 1836 of the 'London Working Men’s Association for benefiting ... the useful classes’. Behind it lay the belief that social evils were due to bad legislation and were curable by parliamentary reform. In 1836 the LWMA published The Rotten House of Commons, being an exposition of the present state of the Franchise. Bronterre O’Brien argued:

'Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property that you are unrepresented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property. Your poverty is the result not the cause of your being unrepresented.’

The Peoples’ Charter
The idea of a people’s ‘Charter’ was rooted in the myth of Magna Carta which was held to have been a statement of popular rights against the arbitrary authority of the king. It also referred to the French Constitution of 1814. In May 1838 the People’s Charter was published, primarily the work of William Lovett and the radical tailor, Francis Place. It contained the Six Points

manhood suffrage
annual parliaments
the ballot
payment of MPs
equal electoral districts
the abolition of property qualifications for parliament

At a great rally in Birmingham on 6 August 1838 these arrangements were formally adopted. Similar meetings were held throughout the country. The movement also had a newspaper, the Northern Star (founded 1837), published in Leeds and edited by the demagogue Feargus O’Connor (left), a new voice in the Chartist movement. By the end of 1838 the Northern Star (priced 4½d) was selling 50,000 copies a week.

It is evident that the peaks of activity coincided with troughs in the economy. The harvest of 1838 was the third bad one in succession. Wheat prices were 64% higher than they had been in 1835. The first major outdoor meeting in the North met at Kersal Moor near Manchester on 24 September. The ostensible purpose was to enable the people to elect their delegates to a National Convention to be held in London early the following year, and the work of the winter was directed towards this end, with further mass meetings and lecture tours. The aim of the Convention was to organize the National Petition and see it through Parliament. With tactics based on those of the Birmingham Political Union, lecturers toured the country stirring up support for the petition.

Methodism played a major part in Chartism. A number of the Chartist leaders were Methodists or had been reared in Methodist homes. They included Thomas Cooper: journalist and Sunday school teacher; John Skeffington, Leicestershire Chartist: a Primitive Methodist itinerant preacher; George Russell of Warwick: a Chartist hymn writer and temperance advocate. Meetings were held in Methodist chapels and Chartist crowds were addressed by Methodist ministers. The movement had hymns such as ‘The Charter springs from Zion’s hill’ and 'The Chartist's Song'. The movement also had a secular, Owenite wing, but Methodism was probably predominant.

The National Convention
About 50 delegates finally assembled at the British Hotel, Cockspur Street (London) on 4 February 1839 for the National Convention of the Industrious Classes (calling itself the People’s Parliament). By far the largest contingent represented the industrial North. Only one, George Loveless, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, was named for an agricultural district (he never took his seat).

After two days, the Convention moved to Bolt Court, Fleet Street. In the discussions on the nature of the Petition, deep divisions emerged. It became apparent that delegates were united on the Charter but little else. Some speakers advocated violence; others wore the red cap of liberty. The rest urged moderation. The Chartist movement never resolved the dilemma of whether to rely on ‘moral force ‘or to contemplate physical force. And it had no strategy about what to do next if Parliament rejected the Petition.

On 7 May the National Petition was ready to be presented: it was three miles long and contained 1,280,000 signatures. But it coincided with Melbourne’s resignation and the ‘Bedchamber Crisis’. Fearing arrests from a Conservative government, the Convention transferred to Birmingham in August, where Charles Darwin, attending the meeting of the British Association found the city surrounded by troops and almost under martial law. Mass meetings were held in various parts of the North and many Chartists were arrested. Some of the Chartist leaders feared that the movement was succumbing to violent demagogues.

On 1 July the Convention reassembled in Birmingham but on 4 July a demonstration in the Bull Ring was broken up by a posse of police brought up from London. The police clashed with the crowd, a riot broke out and two leaders were arrested.

In July the Petition was finally presented to the Commons but Thomas Attwood’s motion that the House should go into committee to consider it failed 235/46. The Chartists’ bluff was now called. In September the Convention disbanded.

The Newport Rising
A confused period now followed, with much talk of fighting. Speakers, newspapers and handbills called on the people to procure arms and be ready to march when the signal was given. There is evidence of pikes being manufactured and small stores of arms accumulated.

On the night of 3/4 November some 7,000 colliers and ironworkers, led by John Frost, a draper, ex-mayor and ex-magistrate, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones led an armed march on Newport, a monster demonstration against the arrest of Henry Vincent, a popular Chartist leader in Wales and the West. But the march was mismanaged and the attack on the town did not take place until after daybreak. The Chartists were fired on by a company of the 45th Foot. 24 people were killed or died from their injuries (more than twice the death toll at Peterloo) - this made it ‘the most celebrated armed rebellion in nineteenth-century Britain’. 125 were arrested and 21 were charged with high treason. Frost and the other leaders were sentenced to death. However as a result of a series of meetings and demonstrations throughout the country, the death sentences were commuted to transportation for life.

After the Newport rising the attitude of the government hardened. Police powers were reinforced and more troops sent in. Between June 1839 and June 1840 at least 543 Chartists were detained for periods of between a few weeks and a few years.

The Second Phase of Chartism
In spite of the failure of the early years Chartism did not die. New leaders and new forms of organization appeared to continue the struggle. On 20 July 1840 a conference of 23 delegates gathered in Manchester to form a new Chartist organization for England. The outcome was the National Charter Association. By the end of 1841 there were 282 localities with 13,000 members. In August 1841 Feargus O’Connor, ‘the lion of freedom’ came out of his gaol at York Castle. He toured the country in triumph addressing public meetings. Through sheer force of personality and through the influence of the Northern Star, he displaced Lovett from the leadership of the movement. The NCA centralized the leadership, provided machinery for collecting subscriptions (1d per week) and mobilized support in the smallest units of the association – wards and ‘classes’ of ten (modelled on the Methodists).

Chartist militancy was helped by the economic climate. 1842 was the worst year of the century, with the new poor law unable to cope. 20 % of the population of Leeds were on poor relief, ‘a state more lamentable than the oldest inhabitant can remember’. In Paisley, 17,000 people were said to be dying of slow starvation.

On 2 May 1842 a second Chartist petition, six miles long, was presented to the Commons with what were claimed to be 3.3m. signatures. The House voted 287/49 not to consider it. Roebuck called O’Connor a ‘malignant and cowardly demagogue’; Macaulay said that universal suffrage would be

‘fatal for the purposes for which government exists’

and

‘utterly incompatible with the existence of civilization’.

The summer of 1842 saw a wave of strikes sweep the industrial districts. In Lancashire and Yorkshire gangs of workless men went about armed with sticks and iron bars demanding relief. There were attacks on shops and clashes with the police and yeomanry - though it is not clear how far any of this was associated with Chartism. In the summer the Plug Plot (so-called because the strikers pulled out the boiler plugs) was a general strike mainly affecting the Potteries. Were these strikes purely industrial? There was considerable support for Chartism among the strikers, even among those who preferred to keep political and economic issues apart. Many of the local leaders have been identified as Chartists. During 1842 membership of the NCA grew to 50,000.

With an improved harvest in 1842 some of the greatest misery eased. Meanwhile in the summer the authorities rounded up the leading strikers and brought them to trial. Chartism was once more defeated, but it did not die.

The Third Phase of Chartism
1847 was a general election year and the Chartists turned once more to politics. Feargus O’Connor became the first and last pure Chartist MP. In February1848 Louis Philippe fell and the French proclaimed the Second Republic. This in turn sparked off revolutions in Vienna, Berlin, Poland, Spain, Italy and Hungary. These events were followed closely by the leading Chartists and Chartist orators once more addressed large and enthusiastic crowds in mass meetings. On the evening of 6 March after a meeting in Trafalgar Square a crowd marched to Buckingham Palace smashing lamps and windows on the way. On the same day similar disturbances occurred in Glasgow and in Manchester the following day.

The following week a crowd of possibly 20,000 people gathered on Kennington Common, along with some 4,000 police in order to hear Chartist leaders. On St Patrick’s Day a fraternal meeting of Chartists and Irish addressed by O’Connor filled the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.

On 4 April the Chartist Convention, widely seen as a counter-Parliament, began to sit. A peaceful rally was planned for Kennington Common on 10 April, followed by a procession to present the Petition to the Commons. Public opinion in London was now very tense and property owners genuinely feared that the revolutions now convulsing Europe were about to spread to Britain. Appeals to the middle classes produced 10,000 special constables.

On 10 April crowds from all over London assembled behind banners and marched to Kennington where they were addressed by O’Connor. O’Connor claimed, with great exaggeration, that 5.7 million signatures had been appended to the Petition. (However, the actual figure, of c. 2m. was very impressive.) It was loaded into three cabs and taken to Parliament. But by 2pm the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, was able to inform the Queen (who was at Osborne) that the crisis was safely over. Faced with 4,000 police and 85,000 volunteer special constables the demonstrators dispersed. But Russell was wrong to assume that Chartism was finished. In May there were serious disturbances in London in June, with even more serious ones in Manchester, Liverpool and Bradford. For the Bradford disturbances extra regiments had to be drafted in from Lancashire in order to keep the population under control. But the ‘constitutional’ Chartists had been wrong-footed, and when Parliament rejected the Petition, it was difficult for them to decide on tactics.

In June the radicals of the Second Republic in France were crushed. The authorities noted that middle-class opinion in Britain had turned against radicalism and moved to arrest some leading Chartists. The movement was finished, having proved powerless against the forces of the state. Feargus O’Connor’s Land Plan for the resettlement of urban workers on small plots of land was wound up in 1851.

Importance of Chartism

Chartism did not present an immediate threat to the political status quo, but it was an important stage in the political education of the working classes. Most of its leaders believed it to be a class movement with two enemies: the tax-consuming rich and the perfidious middle classes who had betrayed them over parliamentary reform and the new Poor Law.
Chartism had its own associations and rituals which created a distinctive Chartist culture. Many Chartists were also Sunday school teachers, temperance workers or members of benefit clubs. There were Chartist hymns, sermons, libraries, discussion groups, choirs and sports teams.
Women played a significant role in Chartism. In many of the textile districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire they comprised a majority of the work force and their political organisations contributed substantially to the development of Chartism. The Chartist Elizabeth Neeson pointed out the anomaly of a constitution which allowed a woman to inherit the throne but denied them political rights. However many Chartists were embarrassed by the issue of female suffrage and were worried at the thought that women might steal men’s jobs.
Chartism culminates the long process whereby radical leadership moved north to the major centres of productive industry. London Chartism was relatively unimportant. The northern Chartists were prepared to use the language of violence. The Methodist minister of Ashton-under-Lyne was disowned by the Methodist Conference when he urged working-class men to defend their constitutional rights against the violence of authority.
Chartism was a mass movement only in times of depression. Peaks of activity coincided with troughs in the economy. However, Chartism could not be reduced to the simple assertion that it was ‘a knife and fork question, a bread and cheese question’. The effects of the depressions of 1837-39, 1841-42 and 1847-48 were not uniform in a fragmented economy and not all the active centres of Chartism were in depressed areas.
Nevertheless the heartland of Chartism was industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire. Broadly the movement appealed more to industrial outworkers than to factory operatives and more to textile operators, especially weavers, than to others. Among the outworkers, the ‘aristocrats’ of labour, a strong tradition of political literacy persisted.
These workers were the strongest advocates of ‘moral force Chartism’. Lovett had been appalled by the violence at Newport. He wanted to continue links with middle-class reformers and to promote education and temperance movements. Some ‘physical force’ Chartists such as Engels’s friend Julian Harney, turned to socialism. Bronterre O’Brien wished Chartism to become the agency whereby workers extracted their full ‘labour value’ from masters.
Fundamentally, however, the demagogery of O’Connor was going to fail. His rhetoric encouraged aspirations that his organization could not meet. His mob oratory suggested a revolutionary potential that did not exist.
Chartist ideals survived into the second half of the century. Chartism gave its adherents a cultural identity and a strong sense that things would improve for working people.

The Anti-Corn Law League

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This movement achieved a more important place in national life than any previous radical body. Unlike the Chartists, it represented the interests of an urban middle class. Unlike them, too it was well funded and had precise and limited objectives.

The Corn Laws were a generic term for a whole system of legislative protection of agriculture. In 1815 there was a prohibition on the import of foreign agricultural products until the price at home reached a high figure (80s a quarter in the case of wheat). In 1828 this absolute prohibition was replaced by a sliding scale of import duties. This legislation was not solely dictated by class interests – there was also the desire to be independent in time of war.

However there was a strong body of opinion opposed to legislative protection for agriculture. In 1830, Ebenezer Elliott, the Sheffield ‘Bard of Free Trade’ published Corn Law Rhymes. But at first this opposition was local and sporadic. This situation changed in the depression of the late 1830s when food prices rose. Elliott stated:

It was born ‘of empty pockets in a respectable neighbourhood’.

Manufacturing free traders could argue that the Corn Laws had damaging effects throughout the economy: British workmen would agitate for higher wages, which would be spent on food rather than on manufactured goods. The only beneficiaries would be the aristocracy.

After the 1837 election the Corn Laws moved to the top of the agenda, not because of the politicians but because, with the onset of an acute manufacturing depression, the cause attracted support in the country. The topic was brought annually before the Commons by Charles Villiers, Radical MP for Wolverhampton. But the Whig government refused to support him. Melbourne was against any more radical change and declared ‘before God’ that to leave the whole agricultural interest without protection was

‘the wildest and maddest scheme that has ever entered into the mind of man to conceive’.

The Beginnings of the League
The heart of resistance to the Corn Laws was not London but Manchester. On September 10 1838 a small gathering of Manchester Radicals, including Archibald Prentice, met in a room above the stables of the York Hotel to hear Dr John Bowring, an ardent free-trader, who had recently returned from a commercial mission to Germany.

In October, the list of the provisional committee was published. It included the Rochdale manufacturer, John Bright (left). Its President was George Wilson, who became MP for Wolverhampton in the late 1830s. Richard Cobden (below, right), the man who was to head the League, was abroad at the time, but he joined as soon as he returned.

The Manchester Association soon won the support of local businessmen, and the Chamber of Commerce. It corresponded with similar associations up and down the country. In January 1839 a meeting of all the associations was held at the Manchester Corn Exchange, with 14 MPs present.
During its first year the League drew nine tenths of its funds from the Manchester district. Cobden:

‘The League is Manchester’.

The Tory press treated the League as an agent of urban sedition.

The League provided the rallying point for Radicals, replacing the campaign for the ballot. The Tories were committed to agricultural protection. Behind the League’s arguments lay a great deal of class hostility. The Corn Laws were the visible legislative symbol of the predominance of the landed interest. The fundamental target of the League was political: the control of the aristocracy.

Many factors favoured the League:
The prevailing trend of economic thought was against protection. Those who supported it were against the trend of the times.

The depression of the late ‘30s and early ‘40s increased the desirability of free trade. Much of the finance of the League was provided by the factory owners.
The Dissenters supported the League, seeing the Church of England as wanting to keep the price of bread high. Cobden in 1842:
‘The Church clergy are almost to a man guilty of causing the great distress by upholding the Corn Law – they having themselves an interest through tithes in the high price of bread.’
There was strong Nonconformist element in Manchester. The Wesleyans stood aloof from the League but other denominations were enthusiastic.
The areas of greatest population growth were the areas of strongest support for the League. The population of Manchester rose from 40,000 in the 1780s, to 70,000 in 1801 and 142,000 in 1831.
Humanitarians were attracted by the plea for cheap bread. The leaders of the League were all sincere Christians. Protectionists were forced into being the party of high prices at a time of great economic distress.
Free trade was a cause of international idealism. Cobden:
‘a means, and, I believe the only human means of effecting universal and permanent peace. … Free trade, by perfecting the intercourse and securing the dependence of countries one upon another must inevitably snatch the power from the governments to plunge the people into wars.’
He played on the belief that aristocracies are naturally bellicose.

‘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 conditions and destinies of this country.'
There were practical advantages – the new penny post introduced in 1840 was employed to collect funds and distribute tons of tracts. Transport was quicker and cheaper than ever before.

But there were also factors against it.

The fundamental argument was flawed. Britain was a net importer of grain, mostly from northern Germany and Poland. From the 1830s there was a general European harvest failure. There was no cheap corn ‘out there’ that was only being kept from the people by an unjust law. When the Corn Laws were abolished wheat prices were not markedly affected.
Repeal did not seem to be practical politics. The landed interest was dominant in parliament, and the electorate remained obstinately deferential. In the Manchester by-election of 1840 the seat was filled by Milner Gilson, a Suffolk landowner. Cobden:
‘What wonder we are scorned by the landed aristocracy when we take such pains to show our contempt for ourselves? We save our enemies the trouble of tramping on us by very industriously kicking our own backsides.’
In 1843 Macaulay wrote to an Edinburgh Leaguer:

‘People who know anything of the way in which this country is really governed know that there is in fact a certain small class of men who have a veto on all public measures which they agree to oppose. … The Corn Laws will not be repealed until a ministry takes the matter up.’
He was right.

The Organization of the League
The formal control rested in a council of the large subscribers. Each subscription of £50 carried one vote. The League organised lecture tours. It had a paper, 'The Anti-Corn Law Circular' – everyone who contributed a £ to the League received it free. Other copies were given away. The paper made a loss, but this was thought worth the price.

Women were involved in the movement – compare with anti-slavery. Cobden:

‘We have obtained the co-operation of the ladies; we have resorted to tea parties’.

At Anti-Corn Law League bazaars customers could buy free trade handkerchiefs, breadplates, teapots and pin cushions.

In January 1840 a temporary wooden building was opened in Manchester (built by 100 men in 11 days). 200 delegates were represented, and 77 towns. At the end of 1840 the League entered party politics. In January 1841 it contested the Walsall by-election. The candidate lost to Gladstone’s brother, but it was an impressive result. The League was now a force to be reckoned with.

Richard Cobden
He was the acknowledged leader. Born in 1804 at Midhurst, the son of a small farmer, be became a clerk in a London warehouse. In 1828 he set up in business on borrowed capital. He became one of Manchester’s first aldermen. Though a manufacturer, he did not like cotton mills and wanted

‘to mitigate as far as possible the evils that are perhaps not inseparably connected with this novel social element.’

He used language that he privately admitted was harsh.

‘Do not judge me by what I way at these tumultuous public meetings. I constantly regret the necessity of violating good taste and kind feeling in my public harangues.’

He was single-minded in his attack on aristocracy and deference. When he entered parliament, he was a fierce speaker.

The Election of 1841
In 1841 a Conservative, Whig protectionist and anti-slavery vote in the Commons defeated a proposal to reduce the preference on colonial over foreign sugar. This led Melbourne to dissolve Parliament and to go to the country on a variety of free trade issues. Russell persuaded Melbourne to pledge to replace the existing sliding scale of duties with a much lower fixed tariff, and a small number of Whig aristocrats supported this position. But this late conversion failed to convince the electorate, and Peel’s Conservatives swept back to power with an overall majority of 367/291 and a lead in England of almost 100, winning more than 85% of the county seats. The League captured Walsall and both the Manchester seats, and Cobden was returned for Stockport. But some prize northern seats went to the Tories, including Bradford, Leeds, and Warrington. The borough patrons were still influential! In the new Parliament an alliance was formed between Leaguers and Irish against the Chartists. The Chartists were very hostile to the League, seeing cheap food as a manufacturers’ excuse for keeping wages low. When Feargus O’Connor came to Manchester, there was a physical fight between him and Irish/Free Traders.

John Bright
In the late spring of 1841 Bright emerged as Cobden’s most able lieutenant. Both pledged themselves not to rest until the Corn Laws were repealed. Unlike Cobden he was a northerner. Born in 1811 he was the son of a Rochdale textile manufacturer, and entered his father’s business after leaving school. He was a prominent Quaker. His enemies accused him of being headstrong and impetuous and setting class against class. Friends and supporters saw him as a prophet and one of the great orators of the day. He was a strong individualist, who disbelieved in state subsides to education and state interference in the conditions of work of adults. He shared Cobden’s view of the beneficent moral results of free trade.
He sympathised with other radical causes. In April 1842, he attended a Birmingham conference of the Complete Suffrage Union founded by his fellow Quaker Joseph Sturge. Cobden regarded this as a diversion of energy from what should be a single-issue campaign.
In 1843 Bright was returned in a by-election as MP for Rochdale.

The Advance of the League
In 1841-2, when harvest were bad and unemployment widespread the League made remarkable advances both in propaganda and organization. Cobden in 1842:

‘We have at the end of four years got a pretty strong hold on public opinion.’

In 1842, there was a possible flirtation with coercive tactics when the League’s conference considered a tax strike by free-traders and an employers’ lock-out of the mills. The Plug Plot of August 1842 was a strike by workmen against wage reductions. The League had not been involved, but League lecturers had been up and down the country and the government held the League morally responsible for much of the disturbances. At Peel’s request, the Home Office collected a dossier on the League’s activities. In December 1842, the Quarterly Review published an article denouncing the League as a subversive, immoral and unconstitutional body.

But much more characteristic was the conference of nearly 700 ministers of religion at Manchester in August 1841 that led to a diffusion of repeal ideas from scores of pulpits. It was argued at the conference that the Corn Laws were ‘anti-scriptural and anti-religious, opposed to the laws of God’.

No public building in Manchester was big enough to hold League meetings. In January 1843 the Free Trade Hall was built in six weeks on the site of the Peterloo Massacre and capable of holding 7,000 to 8,000 people. A gigantic Anti-Corn Law Banquet was held to celebrate the event. [The present one was opened in 1856.] By this time the League had a centralized fund of £50,000. By 1844 this had doubled.

In 1843, the League moved its offices to London – a tactical decision. 136 meetings were organized there, many of them at the Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatres. The move had great psychological importance as it helped to win over the London press, who had previously been dismissive of the ‘Cant and Cotton men’.

In 1844 the League turned its attention to the countryside. League sympathizers ere encouraged to buy property qualifying them for a county vote. Though the purchase price of property that carried a vote, at £30 to £60 a time, deterred all but the most prosperous and committed artisans, Cobden was encouraging an expansion of the numbers eligible to vote. But Bright deplored these back-door tactics, believing they were a diversion from the campaign for manhood suffrage.

Cobden’s propaganda was directed at tenant farmers and labourers. He stressed that protection was no substitute for inefficient farming. Again, he raised class interests: tenant farmers’ interests were different from those of their landlords, village labourers were among the most oppressed sections of the population. He condemned the Tory Ashley for concentrating on conditions in factories.

The Anti-League
The League’s campaigns inevitably drew organized replies from protectionists. The initiative came from a group of tenant farmers staring in Essex and Lincolnshire and spreading to most of the Midlands. In 1843 a Central Agricultural Protection Society – soon known as the Anti-League, was formed, its president the Ultra-Tory duke of Richmond and its vice-president the Tory duke of Buckingham. Its success in rallying the farmers was undoubted. It painted the League’s lecturers as clever outsiders hostile not only to landlords but to rural society in general. Anglican clergymen were prominent Anti-Leaguers and the organization developed into a country gentleman’s association, encompassing the substantial tenant farmers. Their views those of the Tory back benchers.

However it is too simple to posit a simple urban/rural, Anglican/Dissenter, radical/Tory split. The urban vote was split on the question of protection, with Tory manufacturers prepared to take the party line. The Manchester Guardian opposed the League.

Summary
The League was the most sophisticated pressure group yet seen in Britain. Yet how successful was it? The Corn Laws were repealed, not because of League pressure, but because Peel no longer believed in them. The main significance of the League was social and political. The aristocracy were criticised as never before – on economic, social, political, and moral grounds.

In the long run, the League may have harmed British agriculture.

Peel as Prime Minister

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See here for a useful overview. See here for the text of of the Tamworth Manifesto, the document usually regarded as the foundation of modern conservatism. Note that Peel accepted that the reforms of 1832 were there to stay. This can be seen as sensible realism but also as his second major U-turn. His first had been on Catholic Emancipation.

The 1840s is usually seen as ‘Peel’s decade’. In August 1841 he became Prime Minister, having won a general election. Coming after the disaster of 1832, this was rightly seen as a triumph for the Tories for which Peel was given the credit: The Annual Register wrote: ‘

No man ... ever deserved better of his party’.

There was a strong personal vote for him as the most effective Prime Minister the country could find at a moment of acute national difficulty. However the victorious Conservative party was overwhelmingly English and very strongly rural. More headway was made in established cities like Liverpool, Bristol and the City of London than the newly enfranchised industrial towns. The only industrial area where they did well was the West Riding where their support for factory reform won votes. It was not a victory for 'new' conservatism. Analysis of the borough seats shows that Peel's success was concentrated in the small English boroughs, with fewer than 1000 electors, and that in the large English boroughs, with more than 2000 electors, he had actually won two fewer seats—15 to his opponents' 43—than in 1837. 'The triumph and the tragedy of the ministry of 1841–6 were written into the results.' (John Prest New Oxford DNB)

Political opinion in the election was much swayed by the issue of the Corn Laws. The Whigs had promised their supporters that they would consider the existing levels of protection for corn. Such news was electoral suicide in the counties. Local papers in Kent and Buckinghamshire argued that they had to be retained. However, Peel was equivocal. He certainly showed no enthusiasm for the Corn Laws, but said that the details of trade policy should be left to ‘the dispassionate consideration’ of Parliament. In reality his position was far closer to that of the outgoing Whigs than he was prepared to admit to his own party. Boyd Hilton’s verdict (A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?) is harsh: Peel’s government was

‘elected on a lie.’

The nature of Peel’s government
In administrative terms Peel’s government ranks along with Gladstone’s of 1868-74 as the ablest of the nineteenth century. Unlike Melbourne’s government it was composed of technocrats. Peel dominated the Commons by sheer brainpower and grasp of the facts rather than by oratory. But his position was more vulnerable than it looked. He was firmly locked into the traditional Conservative party and it would be more difficult for him to rise above party politics than he realized.

He was determined to strengthen the authority of the Prime Minister. Ashley described

‘a Cabinet of Peel’s dolls.’

He took charge of financial policy from the start. He introduced his own budgets, though he had an able Chancellor (Henry Gouldburn). In February 1842 he passed a Corn Bill reducing the duty on corn though it did not go far enough for Gladstone, Vice-President of the Board of Trade. Peel told him that he would have gone further had he not had to look at opinion in the Cabinet and the Lords. Unaware of this the League saw him as an enemy. They lobbied Parliament with shouts of ‘No Sliding Scale’ and ‘Total Repeal’ and burned him in effigy.

The 1842 budget
In his novel Endymion, Disraeli, who had been returned as Tory MP for Maidstone, was to describe the parliament elected in 1841 as

‘a political economy parliament’.

‘Finance and industry are everybody’s subjects.’ It is certainly true that the government was dominated by economic issues.

Peel’s first budget restored income tax (7d in the £ on incomes of £150 or over) for a period of three years in order to redress a government deficit of £7½ million. This was a well-kept secret and there was total surprise when it was announced. No one thought Peel would dare to reintroduce it in peacetime. His speech contained a plea to the wealthy to take on their shoulders the burden of rescuing the country from its financial troubles rather than imposing fresh burdens on the labouring classes. The Chartists, who admired Peel, welcomed the tax as a measure of social justice. Within two years the government had a surplus of £1.2 m.

Peel went on to argue that with income tax creating a government surplus he could reduce duties on a range of goods, reducing duties on 750 of the 1200 articles in the tariff. The budget also reduced the duty on imported corn by almost half the levels set in 1828. 1842 was a year of great hardship. In August when rioting was at its height, Peel wrote,

‘We must make this a cheap country for living’.

In retrospect, it can be seen that he was already converted to the cause of free trade though he expressed himself in public so ambiguously that he had not committed himself to this policy.

The Canada Corn Act of 1843 initiated a policy of imperial preference. Canadian corn was allowed free entry though American corn was barred. This bewildered many of Peel’s backbenchers as nobody could doubt that the greater part of all the wheat which would come down the St Lawrence would have originated in the United States. At the end of that year Peel told Gladstone that

‘the next change in the Corn Laws would be total repeal.’

This may be because he feared he would lose the next election to the Liberals as they were now unequivocally the free-trade party.

The Bank Charter Act, 1844
The Act restricted the powers of British banks and in an effort to kill speculation [sound familiar?] gave exclusive note-issuing powers to the central Bank of England. Under the act, no bank other than the Bank of England could issue new banknotes, and issuing banks would have to withdraw their existing notes in the event of their being the subject of a takeover.

At the same time, the Bank of England was restricted to issue new banknotes only where these were 100% backed by gold. The act served to restrict the supply of new notes reaching circulation, and gave the Bank of England an effective monopoly on the printing of new notes. This was a victory for the British currency school, who argued that the issue of new banknotes was a major cause of price inflation. Although the act required new notes to be backed fully by gold, the government retained the power to suspend the act in case of financial crisis, and this in fact happened several times, in the years 1847, 1857, and in 1866, during the Overend Gurney crisis. Also, while the act restricted the supply of new notes, this simply led to a greater use of cheques and bills and the creation of new bank deposits, and these would continue to increase in size over the course of the 19th century.

In the late 1840s the discovery of gold in California and Australia caused a sudden increase in the world’s supply of gold, which meant that tying the circulation to the amount of bullion in the Bank of England proved much less restrictive than Peel had intended.

The budgets of 1845 and 1846
These moved the government further in the direction of free trade. The 1845 budget was again introduced by Peel, who renewed income tax for another three years explicitly in order to enable him ‘to make a great experiment’ in reducing other taxes,

‘the removal of which will give more scope to commercial enterprise, and occasion an increased demand for labour’.

He struck off another 400 articles from the tariff list and reduced the duties on many other commodities. Peel believed that the result of this ‘extension of industry and encouragement of enterprise’ would be

‘the benefit of all classes of the community, whether they are directly or indirectly connected with commerce, manufactures, or agriculture’ (Hansard 3, 77.455–97).

But the distinguishing mark of this budget was abolition not rationalization. Peel had dropped the mask, and now appeared as a convinced free-trader. What, then, would happen to the corn laws?

There was now considerable discontent among his back-benchers. Many of them argued that it was only the agricultural interest that received no recompense for the increased burden of income tax. Agriculture was not even mentioned in the budgets. Benjamin Disraeli, back-bench MP for Shrewsbury since 1837, was pursuing a vendetta against Peel.

The government had already suffered two significant defeats in 1844. The first was when ninety-five Conservative members rebelled on Ashley’s motion to limit the labour of women and children between 8 and 13 in the textile factories to ten hours a day. The second was where sixty-two Conservatives voted against the government’s proposal to lower the import duties on free-grown foreign sugar. On each occasion Peel threatened to resign and reversed the defeats.

The Maynooth Grant
But it was religious policy that brought backbench discontent to a head. Ireland dominated the final years of the Peel administration. Remembering that it was a Tory government which had granted Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell renewed his demand for repeal of the Union. He addressed monster meetings - these were orderly but his own language was equivocal.
Peels’ response was partly coercion (sending troops to Ireland) and partly conciliation. In 1844 he brought before the Cabinet plans to make provisions for the private endowment of Catholic clergy and to use the resources of the state to offer better university education for Irish Catholics. Since the Act of Union of 1800 the British government had made an annual grant of £9,000 to the Maynooth clerical seminary. In April 1845 this was widened to more than treble the existing government grant to £30,000 to assist the rebuilding of the impoverished seminary and to make the seminary a permanent charge on the Exchequer.

Peel’s backbenchers were dismayed. Memories were stirred of Peel’s great ‘betrayal’ of 1828. The Times ran a series of vicious editorials denouncing Peel’s inconsistency. An Anti-Maynooth Committee was set up, which gathered a million and a quarter signatures. On 3 February 1845, Gladstone, President of the Board of Trade, resigned. More than 150 Conservatives voted against the grant (148 voted for it), and it was only passed with Whig votes. One of his fiercest backbench critics was Disraeli. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, accurately reported

‘Our party is shivered and angry and we have lost the slight hold we ever possessed over the hearts and kind feelings of our followers. In a party sense it has been fatal.’

In March 1845 a beleaguered Peel wrote: ‘

We have reduced the protection to agriculture and tried to lay the foundation of peace in Ireland; and these are offences for which nothing can atone.’

The diarist Greville wrote (August 1845)

‘Everybody expects that he means to go on and in the end knock the Corn Laws on the head and endow the Roman Catholic Church, but nobody knows how or when he will do these things.’

The Irish Famine
The Irish famine gave Peel his excuse for repeal. It was not the reason.

In Ireland in particular the late summer of 1845 was a textbook case for the conditions promoting the potato blight: a cold, wet spring following a hard foggy winter, then repeated rainfall in July, with high winds and low temperatures. By the middle of October the country was facing a great social calamity and the government was told that at least half the potato crop was ruined. More was rotting in storage, and the harvest next year would probably be infected by the same disease. The Anti-Corn Law League demanded the opening of the ports for the free entry of grain.

On 15 October, Peel wrote to the Lord Lieutenant that the only practical remedy was

‘the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food - that is the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence’.

Peel believed that if cheap American maize were admitted, this would invite an attack on the retention of duties on wheat and oats. It would seem to confirm the arguments of the League that the Corn Laws aggravated scarcity and their abolition would secure plenty. Theoretically Peel could have suspended the Corn Laws by Order in Council. But if duties were abolished for a while, they could only be reimposed at the cost of public disorder. When Peel discussed the matter with his cabinet in November, they were unanimous that suspension was virtually equivalent to repeal.

But this was not the real issue. Cheaper bread was not the answer to the immediate problem. The Irish could not afford to buy any bread. The only thing that could save them was food relief on a massive scale. The Corn Laws were repealed not because of the Irish famine but because Peel no longer believed in them, and had ceased to believe in them since 1842. This is in marked contrast to his change of policy over Catholic emancipation, which had been a matter of concession rather than conviction. Peel believed that free trade was a moral imperative.

The repeal of the Corn Laws

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This is one of the most dramatic stories in British political history.

The Parliamentary Battle
In October 1845, Peel held a series of emergency cabinet meetings. On 6 November he tried to persuade the Cabinet to suspend the Corn Laws by Order in Council and to summon Parliament to reform the existing laws. But only Aberdeen, Graham and Herbert backed him. The Conservative party was already in a fractious state and this was the last straw.

On 22 November Lord John Russell the Liberal leader, announced in his ‘Edinburgh letter’ that he had been converted to total repeal. He put himself at the head of the national movement and made repeal a party issue. The Morning Chronicle published the letter on 28 November.
December 4 Lord Stanley, the Colonial Secretary (later to be 14th earl of Derby) and most vocal of the Tory protectionists, and the Duke of Buccleuch indicated that they would resign rather than consent to the gradual extinction of corn duties that Peel was proposing.

On 5 December Peel resigned, much to the regret of the Queen and Albert. But the Whigs were a minority in both Houses and internally divided. After eleven days Russell told the queen he could not form a government. On 20 December Peel returned to power with a reconstructed cabinet which did not include Stanley. (He resigned formally on 22 December 1845 his parting words to his ministerial colleagues being ‘we cannot do this as gentlemen’.)

On 21 December Disraeli (left) wrote to his friend Lord John Manners:

‘Peel is so vain that he wants to figure in history as the settler of all the great questions, but a parliamentary constitution is not favourable to such ambitions; things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools; especially men without imagination or any inspiring qualities, or who rather offer you duplicity instead of inspiration.’

Yet for all his professed allegiance to party, Disraeli was prepared to destroy a Conservative government, if by doing so he could bring down Peel.

On 27 January 1846 Peel unfolded his plans to the Commons, with Prince Albert looking on, in a three and a half hour speech. Repeal of the Corn Laws was wrapped up in a general reduction of duties on a large range of articles, many of them foodstuffs like sugar, cheese, butter and dried fish. On corn he proposed simply a progressive lowering of duties until February 1849 when they would cease entirely. The speech was cheered by the opposition but was received in silence by his party.

The attack was launched by Disraeli, to the accompaniment of Conservative cheers and laughter;

‘What other excuses has he, for even his mouldy potatoes have failed him.’

Outside Parliament, there was an immediate storm. There were resignations from the royal household and the lower ranks of the administration. Protectionist meetings organized by the Anti League were held all over England. Enormous pressure was put on Conservative MPs in counties and small rural boroughs from gentry, parsons and farmers. The two protectionist leaders in the Commons, Lord George Bentinck and Disraeli, concentrated on Peel’s flagrant disregard of party claims and party loyalty. The attacks became increasingly personal.

On 9 February, the debate began in Parliament. It went on for 32 nights (12 parliamentary nights) and was extraordinarily bitter. In his peroration on 16 February, Peel spoke of the famine: the calamities of ‘a suffering people’ had been

‘aggravated by the laws of man restricting in the hour of scarcity the supply of food’.

On the second reading on 27 February 231 Conservatives voted against the government, 112 for (and about forty of these were office-holders). Albert:

‘This does not look like strong government’.

On 15 May in the debate on the third reading, Disraeli attacked Peel in a speech that lasted three hours. He accused Peel of stealing the ideas of (Disraeli’s phrase) ‘the Manchester school’:

'His life has been a great appropriation clause. He is a burglar of others’ intellects ... there is no statesmen who has committed political petty larceny on so large a scale.'

O’Connell said Disraeli’s speeches were the greatest he had ever heard in Parliament. When Peel rose to wind up the debate, he had to struggle to get a hearing. Personal jeers almost reduced him to tears. But he had one effective jibe:

‘The smallest of all the penalties which I anticipated were the continued venomous attacks of the Member for Shrewsbury.’

The Bill passed the third reading by 98 votes, in spite of Conservative opposition. The Chief Whip told Peel that only 117 members (less than a third of the party) supported him. It had an easier passage through the Lords because Russell told the dissident Whigs that he would resign from the leadership if they voted against the bill. Wellington piloted it through the Lords, arguing that they could not isolate themselves from the Commons and the Crown, and on 28 May it was passed by 47 votes.

The Resignation of Peel
However, it was clear that the ministry could not survive for long. The Conservative protectionists began plotting revenge, and the issue they chose was the proposed Irish Coercion Bill. On 8 June Bentinck attacked Peel as a prime minister who was

‘supported by none but his forty paid janissaries and some seventy other renegades … it is now time that atonement should be made to the betrayed constituencies of the empire’.

On 26 June Peel was defeated by 73 votes on the Irish Coercion Bill a few hours after the Corn Bill passed its final reading in the Lords. The Whigs, Radicals, Irish, and 74 Conservatives voted against the bill. Wellington: Peel had been defeated by

‘a blackguard combination’.

On 29 June Peel resigned. His last speech as Prime Minister contained two remarkable statements. The first was the tribute to Cobden as the real author of repeal even though he had previously censured him completely and had always loathed the tactics of the League.

‘The name which ought to be associated with the success of these measures is not the name of the noble Lord, the organ or the party of which he is the leader, nor is it mine. The name which ought to be associated with the success of these measures is the name of one who, acting I believe from pure and disinterested motives, has, with untiring energy, made appeals to our reason and has enforced those appeals with an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned: the name which ought to be chiefly associated with these measures, is the name of RICHARD COBDEN.’

Predictably, this enraged the already furious Conservative Protectionists. It might also have been factually wrong because, according to some historians, Peel’s decision to abolish the Corn Laws had almost nothing to do with the League. The second statement was his famous peroration:

‘In relinquishing power, I shall leave a name severely censured I fear by many who, on public grounds deeply regret the severance of party ties … I shall surrender power severely censured also, by others who, from no interested motive, adhere to the principle of protection. … I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist … but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by the sense of injustice’.

Greville dismissed the speech as

‘claptrap about cheap bread’.

Both statements reflected Peel’s belief in the ethical imperative for free trade derived from views concerning the operation of providence as revealed above all in the contemporary situation in Ireland. This also accounts for his willingness for martyrdom and the quasi-religious exaltation with which his supporters followed him into the wilderness.

The Whigs in Power
Russell then formed a government and it would be 28 years before a Conservative prime minister again headed a government with a clear majority. In wrecking Peel’s career, Bentinck and Disraeli came very near to wrecking his and their party too.

Peel stayed in politics. He was friends with Prince Albert and government members often asked his advice. His anomalous position made it difficult for a two-party system to emerge. The ‘Peelites’ included nearly all the office-holders and men of ministerial calibre. Among them were Graham, Gladstone, Dalhousie, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, Aberdeen.

The Protectionist wing of the party seemed without a future. Stanley was the nominal leader, but he was hampered by the lack of talent in his party and by the fact that they were held together solely by the issue of protection. Bentinck’s sudden death deprived them of one of their most flamboyant characters, leaving Disraeli as their leader in the Commons. In 1850 Disraeli said that protection was not only dead but damned. So had it all been for nothing?

The election of 1847 was one of the most shapeless in the century. It was fought over issues rather than parties, but the issues varied: in some areas the Maynooth grant, in others education in others the corn laws. The Protectionists were weakened but the Peelites were largely intact. The Radicals also increased their numbers.

In June 1850 Peel died from internal injuries sustained after being thrown from his horse.

Results of repeal

The repeal led to a formal split in the Conservative party, the loss of five consecutive general elections and virtual exclusion from power for almost thirty years. (They had only two periods of minority government in 20 years.) The 1850s and 1860s were periods of Liberal dominance. This has led Boyd Hilton Hilton (A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?) to disagree with the twentieth-century consensus that Peel was the founder of modern Conservatism.
Peel’s fall showed the significance of party – in future all prime ministers would have to carry their parties with them if they wished to carry out legislation. Disraeli said in the debates:

‘Maintain the line of demarcation between parties, for it is only by maintaining the independence of parties that you can maintain the integrity of public men and the power and influence of Parliament.’
Peel’s violent death increased the messianic sense of his followers. He persuaded many of the poor that the state was not indifferent to their fears and aspirations.
The story of British agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was one of relative decline at a time when the industrial and service sectors were growing in importance. However the size of the British agricultural labour force did not reach its absolute peak of c. 2.1 million until 1851. By 1891 the number had fallen to c. 1.6 million, when more people were domestic servants than workers on the land. The repeal was a powerful defeat for the agricultural interest – landowners as a body were now less able to determine the political agenda. Wheat prices remained relatively stable after 1852 because rising consumption was able to absorb rising imports. But from 1873 about half domestic consumption was met by imports as opposed to a quarter just after repeal. This ran against the prophecies of both Disraeli and Bright who, from their different perspectives had been convinced that repeal would lead to falling bread prices. The major agricultural consequence of repeal was a reinforcement of the trend away from grain and towards animal products (as the country became more prosperous). After 1873 livestock producers were able to benefit from the cheaper feeds, but those who had invested heavily in capital-intensive arable farming lost out.

Palmerston as Prime Minister

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The Age of Palmerston
Following the turmoil of the 1840s, the 1850s was a much quieter decade. The success of the Great Exhibition was greeted with huge relief by those who thought the country had been heading to social and political disorder. The period from 1855 to 1865 can be seen as the age of Palmerston. His constituency was not his (Liberal) party grouping but public opinion. Lady Palmerston’s daughter-in-law, Lady Cowper wrote: Palmerston was

‘not popular except out of doors among the people’.

He set about cultivating a man of the people image to challenge the view that he was the last candle of the eighteenth century and to show that he could be a popular liberal domestic politician. He was the first major political figure who learned the value of taking his case to the people. Bright, furious at his visit to Manchester in 1856, called him an ‘aged charlatan’ with ‘unscrupulous ambition’. Disraeli agreed – but recognized that his enemies were powerless.

Even potential disasters could work in his favour. In October 1863 at the age of 79 he was cited as co-respondent in a divorce case. A Radical journalist, Timothy O’Kane, claimed that some months earlier he had sent his wife on a political errand to Palmerston, who had promptly seduced her and had committed adultery with her on several occasions thereafter. Disraeli suggested to Derby that Palmerston had engineered the whole thing to make himself more popular. But the case was dismissed when no evidence was produced.

Social legislation
Although Palmerston’s government has become noted for inactivity in domestic affairs, two important pieces of legislation were passed in 1857:

The Matrimonial Causes Act, which made it easier to obtain a divorce.
The Obscene Publications Act

Foreign policy
Palmerston believed that Britain did not have permanent allies, only permanent interests. He sympathised with the cause of Italian unification but in his period of office Britain remained on the sidelines of European affairs. His bombastic view of Britain's power and greatness can be seen in the famous case of Don Pacifico, where his self-confident nationalism infuriated more squeamish fellow Liberals such as Gladstone.

The formation of the Liberal party
A brief period of Conservative government, with the earl of Derby as Prime Minister and Benjamin Disraeil Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1859 was the catalyst bringing the anti-Tory elements together in a search for stability. The two big beasts of the Whig jungle, Lord John Russell and Palmerston continued to dislike one another but they knew that their protracted feuding was harming the Whig/Liberal cause. An international crisis in 1859 (France, Austria, and Sardinia at war in northern Italy) also concentrated the minds and strengthened Palmerston’s claims.

On 6 June 1859 at Willis’s Rooms (the former Almack’s) in London, a grand conciliation gathering of Liberals, Peelites, and Radicals, took place. Some 280 MPs attended. Palmerston and Russell, agreed that each would serve under the other. This meeting used to be thought of as the foundation of the Liberal party - though this is to exaggerate its importance. Nearly all the Peelites had been convinced since 1852 that a fusion with the Liberals was the only realistic long-term solution. The least Liberal-inclined of the Peelites was Gladstone, and it is not inconceivable that he could have joined the Conservatives. But on the issue of Italian nationalism he found for once an important issue on which he could agree with Palmerston. He also saw the Tories waiting to drop into Disraeli’s palm, a man for whom he later admitted ‘a strong sentiment of revulsion’. There was also the actuarial factor. If he wanted high office with the Liberals, he only had to wait. On the other hand, Disraeli was only 54! The unlikely combination of Gladstone and Palmerston was to solidify the new administration and give it greater authority than any since the resignation of Peel.

Conclusion
The Palmerstonian period (1855-65) strengthened the basis of Liberalism in three crucial ways:

It consolidated a reputation for efficient, fair administration.
It established a successful compromise between the needs of a national foreign policy and the pressure for economy.
In consequence, it marginalized traditional radicalism and created a wider definition of Liberal governing purpose.
It was helped by the disintegration of the Conservatives. Having abandoned protectionism, it was difficult to see what they stood for.

For these reasons (and others), Liberalism can be seen as the dominant Victorian creed.

My oops moment

2009-11-04T06:30:00.000Z

I've just checked the figures for the size of the electorate before and after the 1832 Reform Act. The combined English and Welsh electorate was 430,000 + 4,579 for Ireland. The figures are only approximate because the phenomeon of plural voting (for example university graduates or those owning freehold property in more than one constituency) distorts the figures.

In 1831 13% of the adult male population of England and Wales had the vote. In 1833 the figure rose to 18%. Not such a revolutionary change then?

These figures are taken from Edward J. Evans' invaluable The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783-1870, 3rd edn. (Longman, 2001).

La Marseillaise on youtube

2009-11-02T06:04:00.001Z

If you want to join in the singing of La Marseillaise (with translation provided) go here!

Post Waterloo: the pressure for reform

2009-10-31T21:24:00.001Z

The post-war administration of the Tory prime minister Lord Liverpool was judged harshly by radical contemporaries. Shelley described its members as

‘Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know’.

It cannot be said that ministers were adequate to the challenges facing a post-war government. They might have claimed credit for winning the war with France and for ending the war with America. But peace brought its own problems and the early years of the Liverpool government were extremely troubled as the country made a painful transition to a different kind of society.

Problems of the peace
The radical, Samuel Bamford (seen here in his respectable old age) wrote: ‘

While the laurels were yet cool on the brows of our victorious soldiers ... the elements of convulsion were at work among the masses of our labouring population.’

The immediate post-war years, 1815-21, proved as difficult as any during wartime itself. Unemployment and high bread prices coincided with renewed political discontent.

Adjustments had to be made in line with reduced demand for products associated with the war effort: provisions, timber, clothing, iron, leather, canvas, rope.
During the wars the armed forces of Britain had been increased to 400,000 men (with as many again in the reserves) compared with about 60,000 in 1791. Rapid demobilization put nearly a third of a million ex-servicemen on the already glutted labour market. This depressed wage levels, added to unemployment, increased the burden of local taxation and ensured that the discontented would be led by those with military experience.
Added to this came the strains of technological redundancy. The number of shearing frames in Yorkshire had increased in the past decade from under a hundred to over 1,400 and in October 1817, 3,625 croppers petitioned Parliament for help. In Lancashire the number of handloom weavers continued to rise while their wages continued to fall.

The Corn Laws
Even before Napoleon’s final defeat, the government had bowed to massive agricultural pressure. In 1813 an abundant harvest sent prices tumbling. Peace in 1814 brought foreign grain imports with the promise of more to come. The government came under strong pressure from the landed interest , which argued that a Corn Law to protect Britain from the import of foreign corn was justified in the interests of national security and domestic stability:

Britain might once again need to maximise the domestic supply of foodstuffs to counteract the effects of blockade.
Agriculture was the largest single employer of labour and was already subject to rural depopulation.

In 1815 a parliament overwhelmingly dominated by the landed interest passed a law allowing the free importation of foreign corn only when the price of home-grown corn had reached the price of 80/- a quarter. This decision -together with a run of bad harvests - helped ensure that the average price of corn remained high.

Opponents argued that the Corn Law was a piece of selfish class legislation.

It caused unnecessary suffering for the already hard-pressed urban working classes by artificially raising the price of bread simply in order to maintain the artificially high profits of the landed interest, who comprised the country’s lawmakers.
It damaged industry to the extent that it made the manufacturers’ wage bills unnecessarily high and hindered international trade.
It taught gave the radicals a popular cause.

In March 1815 there were Corn Bill riots. London crowds both petitioned and demonstrated against the new law. Politicians’ windows were broken and Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was burned in effigy. Special constables were enrolled, 1,300 infantry and cavalry were stationed in the capital, and the Life Guards charged the London crowd with drawn sabres.

Worse was to follow. In 1816 Britain faced the triple blows of a stunted harvest, trade depression and a glutted labour market. As wheat prices rose to 100s a quarter at the end of a freak year throughout Europe many of Britain’s biggest iron works were at a standstill. Decline in demand for iron meant diminished demand for coal. Onto an unstable labour market was disgorged a demobilized army of c. 300,000 soldiers and sailors. Many failed to find civilian work. They returned to their home parishes to push poor rate expenditure to unprecedented levels. Those who found work forced down wages in a now sated labour market. The whole situation was tailor-made for a resurgence of radicalism.

The abolition of income tax
The proposal to renew income tax came before the Commons as part of the 1815 budget. It was rejected by a majority of 37 even though income tax had come to account for 20% of government revenue.

The campaign against income tax, taken up enthusiastically by the newspapers, was directed not at its amount but at its ‘unEnglish’ inquisitorial character, justified only by the emergency of war. The decision to abolish it left a huge hole in the government finances and forced ministers into a ruinous policy of borrowing. It postponed the return to the gold standard (paper currency backed by bullion) and ultimately led to additional taxation on articles of general consumption. As with the Corn Laws, this bore down disproportionately on the poor.

The Ely riots, 1816
In 1816 economic distress was widespread - domestic weavers in Lancashire, iron workers in South Wales. At Birmingham nearly 20% of the population were receiving war relief. There was more machine breaking in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire - though these disturbances finally died down in 1817 when 7 rioters were executed.

But the most severe riots were rural rather than industrial. April-May 1816 there were food riots in the fenland towns of Ely and Littleport under the slogan ‘Bread or Blood’. Ricks were burned and threshing and other agricultural machinery was destroyed. One of the rioters was killed during the suppression of the disorders and 24 were sentenced to death.

Fear of revolution
The Ely riots and the disorders that followed showed different degrees of illegality and violence. Some of the participants were amateur revolutionaries, but riot and disorder were the traditional response to distress. Among the protesters there was much confusion of purpose. The government was still using the term ‘Jacobin’ as a term of abuse. To counter the perceived threat of revolution, the Home Office used informers and agents provocateurs, such as Oliver the Spy (aka William Oliver: W. J. Richards), who offered his services to the government in March 1817. In the absence of police forces it was perhaps inevitable that such people should have been used. But they presented partial and inaccurate accounts to government and may have acted as agents provocateurs.

Not all of the propertied classes shared the government’s view. Magistrates were often sympathetic to the people’s grievances and so protestors as ‘deluded’ rather than wickedly conspiratorial.

The radicals
The ending of the war re-invigorated the demand for parliamentary refrom. The political radicals traced their intellectual descent from Paine and other 18th century writers. The war had been a difficult time for radicals because they were suspected of disloyalty and Major John Cartwright, Francis Place, and the radical baronet, Sir Francis Burdett, had each at some point been suspected of seditious activity - though they had all avoided involvement with conspiratorial revolutionaries. William Cobbett had been imprisoned for two years in 1809 for a seitious libel in his Political Register in which he had condemned the use of German mercenary troops to flog mutinous militiamen.

In 1812 at the age of 72 the veteran Cartwright (whose statue is in Cartwright Gardens, WC1) embarked on the first of three tours of the Midlands and the North. His promptings led directly from 1816 towards the establishment of the Hampden Clubs. These provincial clubs were plebeian in composition and democratic in tendency, and were particularly numerous in the weaving villages of South Lancashire. By 1817 there were about 150 of these clubs in Lancashire alone. One, the Middleton club, is credited with directing the societies firmly towards manhood suffrage rather than the household or taxpayer franchises favoured by many middle-class reformers. The northern manufacturing districts were now setting the pace of reform.

The Political Register: Members of the Hampden clubs paid small subscriptions and took in radical periodicals like William Cobbett’s Political Register. The aim of the Register was for readers to understand

‘the true cause of their sufferings - misgovernment’.

In November 1816 Cobbett began publishing reprints of his articles in the form of twopenny pamphlets designed for a wider public, Twopenny Trash. Within a month he increased its sale from between 1,000-2,000 to 40,000-50,000. Samuel Bamford said that the Register was read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts. Cobbett can be seen as a ‘Tory radical’ - in many ways his views were highly traditional. He knew little of the industrial areas and his prescription for their problems - a return to an old-fashioned peasantry was reactionary. However he came round to the belief that Old Corruption (‘the Thing’) could only be halted if parliament was reformed. He condemned machine-breaking as folly and argued instead for manhood suffrage. It was he more than anyone else, who helped turn the thoughts of the discontented working classes to parliamentary reform.

The Spa Fields riot, 1816
Some radicals can be seen as extremist, prepared to resort to violence or conspiracy. The radical London bookseller Thomas Spence had advocated the common ownership of land. After his death in September1814 his ideas were perpetuated in Spencean societies. Leading members of the Society of Spencian Philanthropists included Arthur Thistlewood, the illegitimate sone of a Lincolnshire farmer. These men had a millenarian vision of a new world. By 1814 the Spencians were divided into two groups. The mainstream followers of Evans adhered to Spence’s very radical plan for the redistribution of land but did not espouse violence. The minority, which included Thistlewood were revolutionaries.

In November 1816 a series of meetings were arranged by the Spencean Society were addressed by the radical orator Henry Hunt, a Wiltshire farmer. He appeared with the revolutionary insignia of a pike and a tricolour flag and addressed the meeting wearing the cap of liberty. The main purpose was to organize petitions to present to the Regent. But on the morning before the second meeting (2 December) a crowd of about 5,000 led by the Thistlewood and other Spenceans went off to plunder gunsmiths’ shops and attack the Tower.

On 28 January 1817, in a repeat of an episode in 1795, a projectile, supposedly a bullet, broke a window in the Regent’s coach on his way to open Parliament. On 8 February Thistlewood and his co-conspirators were arrested and committed to the Tower on the charge of high treason. They were acquitted, largely because of the discrediting of a spy’s evidence in court.

Repression
The government relied heavily on spies and agents provocateurs, who inflitrated radical movements and sometimes, perhaps, invented conspiracies, he most notorious of these being ‘Oliver the Spy’. On 4 March Habeas Corpus was suspended. According to Samuel Bamford,

‘Personal liberty not being now secure from one hour to another, many of the leading reformers were induced to quit their homes, and seek concealment where they could obtain it.’

Cobbett fled to America, where he stayed until 1819, returning with the bones of Paine.

On 14 March the Seditious Meetings Act was revived. This provided for

the compulsory licensing of rooms used for public meetings
the prohibition of federations of societies of over 50 people
the dissolution of the Spencean societies
the suspension of habeas corpus for persons arrested on charges of treason
the death penalty for inciting the armed forces to mutiny

The Whigs put up only a token opposition. Parliament was genuinely alarmed. However the effects of the legislation were less draconian than might be imagined. Only 44 people were arrested. One died in prison but the rest were eventually released. Gash argues that ‘It was not exactly a reign of terror’ - as the case of Samuel Bamford demonstrates. However, it was a time of considerable stress and hardship for the radicals.

On 27 March, in reaction to publications like the Political Register and T. J. Wooler’s Black Dwarf, Sidmouth issued a round robin to the lords lieutenant of the counties, instructing them to inform the magistrates within their jurisdiction that they had the power and the duty to prevent the circulation of ‘blasphemous and seditious pamphlets and writings’.

The march of the Blanketeers
Manchester was the place where class antagonism was sharpest. In Birmingham small masters worked alongside skilled artisans, but in Manchester, workshops were large and impersonal - there were social barriers between cotton lords and workers - the handloom weavers were being forced out of work.

On 10 March 1817 a planned mass procession of men carrying blankets to keep them warm on the journey, started out from St Peter’s Fields Manchester. The aim was to reach London to petition the Regent for parliamentary reform. Before they set out the Riot Act was read and two of the leaders were arrested at Stockport by the local yeomanry - only a small party got as far as Macclesfield. (The prisoners were judged harmless and released without trial.) The intentions of the marchers were peaceful, but they were also angry and powerless, and might have posed a serious threat if they had been allowed to march on London.

The Pentrich Rising
This was a genuine conspiracy, infiltrated by Oliver, involving ex-Luddites. On the night of 8 June 1817 about 400 stockingers, ironworkers and labourers from the Derbyshire villages of Pentrich, Ripley and Alfreton gathered for action under the belief that a general rising of working people was to take place the next day. Their ‘captain’ was Jeremiah Brandreth, a framework knitter. The plan was to attack the barracks at Nottingham seize the town before taking boats down the Trent to Newark with the eventual aim of reaching London where the forces promised by Oliver would overthrow the government. Eight miles short of Nottingham, most of the company fled at the sight of the cavalry and yeomanry. Over 80 arrests were made during the next few weeks. Thirty-five men were tried for high treason. Brandreth and two others were sentenced to death and another eleven men were transported for life. But not all the evidence was presented in court in order to protect Oliver. Nevertheless on the scaffold Brandreth blamed his death on Oliver and Sidmouth, a claim investigated by the Leeds Mercury.

Radical publications
Sidmouth’s circular, and a rather feeble propaganda campaign, did not stop the emergence of new radical publications, such as Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf (1817-24) and Richard Carlile’s The Republican (1819-25) which was very much in the Painite radical tradition. The illustrated Political House that Jack Built, published by William Hone in 1819 caricatured the entire system. The government were unable to control a press which relentlessly propounded the message that the distress of the people was caused by corruption in high places and by the misgovernment of a largely unelected elite. In December 1817 Hone was found not guilty of blasphemous libel by sympathetic London jurymen and released to the cheers of the crowd.

The Peterloo massacre

2009-10-31T21:24:00.000Z

This post owes a great deal to my friend Robert Poole's brilliant article, ‘”By the Law or the Sword”: Peterloo Revisited, History, 91 (2006): 254-276. The Wikipedia article on Peterloo is also extremely good and takes account of modern research including Poole's article.

In 1819 radical reformers made serious attempts to stage a series of mass demonstrations.

In January there was a parliamentary reform meeting of about 10,000 at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester at which Henry Hunt was the principal speaker. Banners bearing the mottoes ‘Rights of Man’, ‘Universal Suffrage’ and ‘No Corn Laws’ were displayed.

The authorities were deeply alarmed. On 2 March, following reports that radical leaders were arming themselves with pikes, Henry Hobhouse, the permanent undersecretary at the Home Office, wrote to the Oldham magistrate that the evidence confirmed Sidmouth’s opinion that

‘your Country will but be tranquillized, until Blood shall have been shed either by the Law or the sword.’ (Quoted Poole, 265).

In June there were a series of meetings in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and the west of Scotland. These peaceful meetings pounded the same theme: the sufferings of the people were due to the inadequacies and extravagance of government, and the remedy lay in annual parliaments and manhood suffrage.

In June and July, there were mass meetings at Stockport (where the cap of liberty was displayed), Oldham, Leeds, Birmingham, London and Manchester. At Birmingham on 12 July the crowd elected by a show of hands the radical baronet Sir Charles Wolseley as

‘legislative attorney and representative of Birmingham’.

Note: Birmingham did not have any MPs in this period. The crowd's action was seen by the government as a direct challenge to parliament. On 30 July a royal proclamation against seditious meetings proclaimed that this was a ‘gross violation of the law’.

A similar meeting was planned for Manchester,

‘to consider the propriety of adopting the most LEGAL and EFFECTUAL means of obtaining a REFORM in the Commons House of Parliament’.

The wording seems to show that the reformers were anxious to distance themselves from illegality. Nevertheless the local magistrates issued warnings against it. The Manchester Radical Union decided to postpone the meeting until 16 August. They would not elect a representative but would be addressed by Hunt.

Historians sympathetic to the Manchester magistrates stress that they had a genuine dilemma. The meeting itself was not illegal, but the crowd numbered at least 50,000, though the fact that it included many women and children is one indication among many that its intentions were peaceful. The demonstrators faced an inadequate peacekeeping machinery. There was no regular police force. The forces available were the special constables and the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry. In reserve and out of sight were 6 troops of the 15th Hussars; nearly whole of the 31st regiment; several companies of the 8th; a troop of Horse Artillery.

The magistrates decided to arrest Hunt on the hustings before he could speak. It was a grave mistake to decide to use the Yeomanry. They were a raw volunteer group, hastily formed after the Blanketeers’ March, and consisted almost exclusively of cheesemongers, ironmongers and newly enriched manufacturers. They had no expertise in crowd control. As Hunt was arrested and bustled away, the Yeomanry found themselves hemmed in. They panicked and started to hack about them. The Hussars were then called in. The crowd began to flee in panic, and were trampled or beaten down with the flat of swords, or sabred and slashed by the troops. 654 were wounded (a quarter of them women and children, nearly half by sabre wounds) and 2 women and 9 men were killed.

The event was promptly named the 'Peterloo Massacre' and though it was mild by continental standards, it was shocking in the British context. Cruikshank's caricature (below) shows one strand of British opinion. The text reads:

'Down with 'em! Chop em down my brave boys: give them no quarter they want to take our Beef & Pudding from us! ---- & remember the more you kill the less poor rates you'll have to pay so go at it Lads show your courage & your Loyalty.'

However, many thought the actions of the Hussars were justified and some local authorities, such as those of Salford, moved swiftly against radicalism.

Though Liverpool in private (in a letter to Canning) thought that the magistrates had been ‘injudicious’, the government felt it had no alternative but to support them. They congratulated them for

‘their prompt, decisive and efficient measures for the preservation of the public peace’.

However, the event was widely reported in the press (this was the first time journalists ‘covered’ an event at which they were present) and protest meetings were held around the country. After some hesitation the Whigs took up Peterloo as a political issue and addressed protest meetings - there were nine of these in October and November. This made it a party matter, with the Whigs using it to broaden their basis of support. The Prince Regent condemned their demand for a public enquiry.

Here is Shelley's response in his poem The Masque of Anarchy.

The Six Acts
Parliament met in November. The alarms were over except in Scotland, but because the issue had become a party matter, the government felt that it had to address the issue. Emergency legislation was passed. With the exception of the Grenvillites, the Whig opposition voted against it.

Training Prevention Act A measure which made any person attending a gathering for the purpose of training or drilling liable to arrest. People found guilty of this offence could be transportated for seven years.
Seizure of Arms Act A measure that gave power to local magistrates to search any property or person for arms.
Seditious Meetings Prevention Act A measure which prohibited the holding of public meetings of more than fifty people without the consent of a sheriff or magistrate.
The Misdemeanours Act A measure that attempted to reduce the delay in the administration of justice.
The Basphemous and Seditious Libels Act A measure which provided much stronger punishments, including banishment for publications judged to be blaspemous or sedtious.
Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act A measure which subjected certain radical publications which had previously avoided stamp duty by publishing opinion and not news, to such duty.

Hunt and Bamford were tried at York and found guilty of 'intending to incute disaffection and hatred of king and constitution' - but not of riot. Hunt was sentenced to 30 months’ harsh imprisonment in Ilchester Gaol. Bamford was treated more leniently. Sir Francis Burdett, was fined £2000 for comparing the Regent to James II and sentenced to three months imprisonment.

Echoing E.P. Thompson's earlier critique, Robert Poole sums up Peterloo thus:

'Whatever the causes of Peterloo, it was not a battle but a massacre, limited and inefficient by historical standards perhaps, but most decidedly a massacre in spirit.'

The Cato Street Conspiracy
After his acquittal after the Spa Fields, Arthur Thistlewood was imprisoned without trial in February 1818 for disturbing the peace (he had demanded satisfaction of the Home Secretary; to keep him out of the way Sidmouth paid the costs of his imprisonment out of his own pocket). He came out after a year and joined a London conspiratorial group. At meetings held in the loft at Cato Street he planned to assassinate the cabinet as it sat to dinner in February 1820 at the home of Lord Harrowby, the President of the Council (the heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh were to put on pikes and paraded through city and a provisional government was to be proclaimed). However, an agent provocateur, George Edwards, had already informed the authorities. Thistlewood and four co-conspirators were hanged at Newgate.

Though the Cato Street conspiracy was amateurish, it showed that the established order was in some danger. As Wellington informed his cabinet colleagues in 1819 a reduced and scattered army of now only 65,000 home-based men could not effectively control a concentrated rebellious outbreak. The behaviour of the crowds at the executions of the conspirators did not seem to bode well. After Peterloo, Manchester was patrolled by troops.

The most dangerous moment the government faced was not the Cato Street conspiracy but the Queen Caroline affair.

The end of the 'ancien régime'

2009-10-31T21:23:00.002Z

The years 1828 to 1832 were a period of profound changes in British politics: firstly Protestant Dissenters and then Roman Catholics were allowed to take their seats in parliament; secondly, the Reform Act of 1832 extended the right to vote and created new parliamentary constituencies.

One historian has seen in these changes the ending of Britain's ancien régime - though this presupposes that this is a useful term to describe eighteenth-century Britain. But it needs to be remembered that in many respects, Britain after 1832 remained in many respects a very conservative country. Most men still did not have the vote; the south was still over-represented at the expense of the industrial north and midlands; and parliament remained a pretty aristoccratic body.

The Catholic question

2009-10-31T21:23:00.001Z

[Above is a picture of Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), 'the Liberator'.]

The 'Catholic Question' was a the running sore of British politics in the 1820s. Was Britain an unequivocally Protestant country or should Catholics be allowed to be members of Parliament - a privilege that had been denied them since the seventeenth century? British public opinion was strongly anti-Catholic, but denying Catholics their civil rights exacerbated discontent in Ireland, with its 90% Catholic population.

On 9 May 1817 a motion to open up all government posts, except that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to Catholics was debated in the Commons. Robert Peel, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was the main speaker on the Protestant side. The motion was defeated 221/245 and after the vote ‘Orange’ Peel (as he was known in Ireland) found himself the head of the Protestant party. A a reward he was offered the seat of Oxford University, the bastion of Tory Anglicanism.

However from 1823 the balance of opinion in the cabinet shifted in favour of emancipation though Peel remained opposed.

The Catholic Association
Events in Ireland meant that the issue would remain urgent. In 1798 Ireland had erupted in revolt against British rule. The early 19th century saw the escalation of rural protest. At a different level of society middle class Catholics were becoming part of the unofficial establishment, denied the right to enter parliament but rising in the professions. From 1792 they were allowed to enter the bar both in England and Ireland. The Catholic Church too was changing. The Napoleonic wars had prevented many of them from training abroad. The Royal College of St Patrick had been set up at Maynooth in 1795 and an annual grant paid by the state (initially the Irish parliament but continued on an annual basis by the united parliament after 1800). This profoundly changed the nature of the priesthood as the urbane cosmopolitan clergy gave way to a poorer, less educated more distinctively Irish clergy. The aroused increasing and predictable paranoia among Protestants. (On the other hand when George IV visited Ireland in 1821 he was greeted by the Catholic hierarchy in full panoply and the port of Dunleary was named Kingstown in his honour.)

In May 1823 the the radical Catholic lawyer Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847) formed the Catholic Association. This was an open, accountable mass movement funded by the ‘Catholic Rent’ of a penny a month collected after Sunday Mass. It was supported by the priests and soon acquired the nature of a religious crusade. In the first year of its existence it had an income of £1,000 a week and at the end of the year had £10,000 invested. It worked for tenants, the Church and the whole Catholic community. Because of the Irish 40s freehold electorate, it soon acquired a powerful hold on the parliamentary process. The tenants en masse, led by their priests, could defy the landlords. This was a populist, clerical-led movement. Following the fiasco of the 1825 bill it began to vet new parliamentary candidates and refused to accept them if they were not prepared to vote for emancipation. By creating a mass movement O’Connell liberated tenants from their landlords.

‘There is a moral electricity in the continuous expression of public opinion concentrated on a single point.’

Because civil disobedience lay at the back of his campaign, O’Connell was widely seen in England as a dangerous rabble-rouser.

In the election of 1826 the League managed to unseat the anti-Emancipation candidate in Waterford and replace him with a supporter of Emancipation. During the campaign the Catholic Association patrolled the town to keep order. Green handkerchiefs, sashes, cockades and ribbons were worn everywhere and green flags flew in all parts of the city. An equally sensational result took place at Louth where a man whose family had controlled the county for half a century was defeated by an Emancipation candidate.

Wellington Prime Minister: In January 1828, after a period of instability, George IV chose the duke of Wellington to be Prime Minister. He was indifferent to public opinion and remote from ordinary political life. He was a staunch anti-reformer on both Catholic and constitutional questions. In spite of his prestige, his obstinacy and overbearing manner made him many political enemies. The king said he set about political questions like a battery of cannon. His most able minister was the Home Secretary, Robert Peel.

Catholic emancipation

2009-10-31T21:23:00.000Z

The Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, 1828
These Acts, debarring Protestant Dissenters from public office, were now more symbolic than real; in the past ten years there had been three dissenting Lord Mayors of London. But the fact that they were on the statute book was a grievance to a Nonconformist community that was growing in power and influence. A mass of petitions were sent up from the dissenting congregations. Only 28 petitions were registered against the repeal of the Acts.

In February the Whig politician Lord John Russell (right) carried motion for repeal. Although the Wellington government opposed the bill, it had no automatic majority to resist it. Peel, as home secretary, took charge of the bill, and in consultation with the bishops devised a substitute for the old sacramental test in the form of a compulsory declaration for those chosen for corporation offices not to injure the established church. The Anglican monopoly had been undermined, and the ease wih which the act was passed shows how society had changed.

But it was far more controversial to end the discrimination against Catholics. Emancipation was welcomed by Unitarians who argued that the principle of religious toleration was indivisible. But many Nonconformists, such as rank and file Methodists, were deeply hostile. This feeling was shared by many Anglicans - especially Evangelicals. The Colchester clergyman William Marsh saw Rome as ‘the mystic Babylon of the Book of Revelation’ and believed that it would be a national sin to ‘give power unto it’. Missionary concern for Ireland stimulated anti-Catholicism. In 1822 Archbishop Magee of Dublin had delivered a Charge in which he spoke of Catholics as

‘blindly enslaved to a supposed infallible ecclesiastical authority’.

But the tide seemed to be turning.

The County Clare election
In the summer of 1828 the government faced a major crisis. In a by-election in County Clare, the Protestant landlord, William Vesey Fitzgerald, was challenged by O’Connell who, as a Roman Catholic could legally stand for election but could not take his seat. This posed the government with a huge dilemma. If Catholic emancipation were refused, it would provoke disorder in Ireland. On the other hand, if granted it would tear the Tory party in two and provoke outrage throughout mainland Britain.

The Ultras, as the opponents of Catholic emancipation were called, were already distrustful of Wellington over the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, but Catholic emancipation was seen as the first step on the road to Catholic expropriation of Protestant land and privileges in Ireland and to the ending of the Protestant character of the British state.

In July 1828, in a carnival atmosphere, O’Connell won the election by an overwhelming majority (2,057/982), presiding over a well disciplined electorate. It was now clear that the Catholic Association was set to achieve similar victories in other Irish counties at the next general election. Britain’s ability to maintain order in Ireland was thus in grave doubt. Fitzgerald wrote to Peel:

‘The organisation exhibited is so complete and so formidable that no man can contemplate without alarm what is to follow in this wretched country’.

The election showed that the Irish landowners were losing political power to the priests.’

The Catholic Relief Act
Wellington and Peel reluctantly accepted that O’Connell had to be allowed to take his seat. During the summer and autumn the Catholic Association continued to hold meetings for the peasantry organized in semi-military fashion with banners, music, green sashes and cockades. In Ulster the response was to multiply the formation of Brunswick clubs, financed by small subscriptions in imitation of the Catholic rent and led by prominent members of the gentry and aristocracy. In November, Wellington told the king,

‘No-one can answer for the consequences of delay’.

The essential point as far as the duke was concerned, was not to resist emancipation at all costs, but to ensure that there were adequate provisions to safeguard the interests of the Irish Protestants. In January 1829 Peel crossed his personal Rubicon when he told Wellington that he would be prepared to stay in office even if Catholic emancipation became law. The whole cabinet was now unblocked.

In February Peel resigned his seat at Oxford University (the most Anglican seat in the country!) and offered himself for re-election. He was defeated (755/609) in the by-election by the Ultra Tory, Sir Robert Inglis and had to find a pocket borough instead. It was a great personal humiliation for him. It branded the former ‘Orange Peel’ as a turncoat, and he never fully regained the trust of the Tories. The damage to his reputation was permanent. His shrewder critics argued that either he had been insincere or that he had lacked sagacity and foresight.

On 4 March the king wrote to Wellington that

‘as I find the country would be left without an administration, I have decided to yield my opinion that that which is considered by the Cabinet to be for the immediate interest of the Country’.

This was an important moment in the history of the monarchy.

On 5 March Peel, now back in Parliament, introduced the bill to the Commons in a speech of four and a half hours’ length:

'Sir, I will hope for the best. … But if these expectations are to be disappointed, if unhappily civil strife and contention shall survive the restoration of political privilege; if there be something inherent in the spirit of the Roman Catholic religion which disdains equality and will be satisfied with nothing but ascendancy; still I am content to run the hazard of the change.'

142 members voted against it. It passed the Lords on 10 April and received the reluctant royal assent on 13 April. The Act admitted Catholics to all offices except those of Lord Lieutenant and Lord Chancellor. As an anti-democratic safeguard, the Irish freehold qualification was raised from 40s to £10.

To the end the Protestant party fought a passionate rearguard action. They saw themselves as fighting to prevent the overthrow of the 1688 settlement. They were quite right to regard this as a hugely significant change. It was a great shock to many Protestant Tories that the iron duke should ‘betray’ the country in this way. The dowager duchess of Richmond filled her drawing room with stuffed rats; George IV complained that

‘everything was so revolutionary ... and the peers and the aristocracy were giving way to it’.

The press turned on Wellington. Petitions were sent to Parliament and mass meetings held throughout the country. At a monster anti-Catholic meeting in Kent, 60,000 people gathered on Penenden Heath - as many as had been present at Peterloo.

The first Catholic to take his seat in Parliament was the earl of Surrey, heir of the duke of Norfolk, elected for the family pocket borough of Horsham. (The government refused to make the act retrospective, so O’Connell had to fight his seat again. This time he was elected unopposed.)

The opponents of Catholic emancipation were quite right to say that it marked a fundamental change in the constitution. Many of them never forgave Wellington and Peel for betraying the principles of the Glorious Revolution.

Paradoxically, Catholic emancipation could only have been carried by an unreformed Parliament. A Parliament more alive to public opinion would not have been able to pass it.

The First Reform Act (1)

2009-10-31T21:22:00.002Z

The posts on the Reform Act are especially indebted to Edward Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, 3rd edn. (Longman, 2001) and Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford, 2006)

The demand for reform
After Catholic emancipation the demand for parliamentary reform became irresistible. Whigs and Canningites now felt it was safe to take up the cause of reform, while some Ultras (opponents of Catholic emancipation) believed that a more representative parliament would have prevented emancipation. In February 1830 the Tory Marquis of Blandford introduced the first thoroughgoing reform bill of the crisis, calling for the transference or rotten borough seats to the counties and large towns, the disqualification of non-resident voters, payment of MPs and a general ratepayer franchise.

Political opinions were in a state of great flux. The government was praised by its opponents but discredited among its supporters. After his U-turn on Catholic Emancipation, the integrity of Peel (right) was called in doubt by everyone - Whigs, Canningites, Ultras.

Unrest
1830 was a confused year: demands for parliamentary reform, repeal of the corn laws, reform of currency, social unrest. Industry had not recovered from the 1829 depression. The handloom weavers were in long-term decline, wages were low, unemployment high and harvests bad. The economic crisis enabled the radicals to revive their argument that idle and profligate ‘tax-eaters’ were consuming the wealth of the hard-working people.

More ominously, the demand for reform was growing among many sections of the middle class. Influential provincial journals like the Manchester Guardian and Leeds Mercury were joined in their advocacy of reform by sections of the former Tory press like the Nottingham Journal. The middle classes were swinging into the reform camp. In Birmingham, a city of small-scale units of production, Thomas Attwood (1783-1856) had founded a ‘General Political Union between the Lower and Middle Classes of the People’ in December 1829. Its main platform - the ‘Brummagen remedy’ - was currency reform - the provision of readier credit and bigger domestic markets for small masters. To the alarm of the king political unions sprang up all over the country, attracting huge crowds to political rallies. The Whig peer Lord Holland feared that:

‘If the great mass of the middle classes are bent upon that method of enforcing their views, there is not in the nature of society any real force that can prevent them.’

The fall of Wellington’s government
The economic slowdown and the consequent unrest impacted on the Wellington government. His grasp of financial policy was limited and he rejected Peel’s proposal to introduce an income tax so that the duties levied on various consumer items could be reduced - a move that would have been popular with the poorer classes and would have addressed the demands from industrial and commercial interests for action to stimulate trade.

On 26 June 1830 George IV died, necessitating a general election. The new king, William IV (the duke of York had died childless in 1827), was less hostile to the Whigs.

On 24 July parliament was dissolved and the election took place against the background of revolutions in France and Belgium. In the manner of his eighteenth-century predecessors, Wellington expected to gain seats at the election by the judicious deployment of government patronage. But that patronage had been wasting away since the 1780s. Only 30% of the seats were contested and the overall results were indecisive. But in that minority of constituencies where contests were held and where public opinion could be tested, things went badly for the government partly because of a demand for reform but also because of disillusionment with Wellington over Catholic emancipation. Henry Brougham was sensationally returned for the ‘popular’ county of Yorkshire, on a platform of opposition to slavery. (Henry Hunt contested Preston which he had previously contested in 1820. He came bottom of the poll but when the member stood down in December 1830 he was elected. He made a public entry into London in February 1831.)

The election of 1830 was the first since 1708 to be followed by the fall of a government – even though it was some months before the fall came about. When the new Parliament met, Wellington found himself presiding over a disintegrating government. The Ultras continued hostile and Peel was hamstrung by his reputation as a turncoat.

November 1830 saw the Swing riots, a spontaneous revolt from Kent to Dorset, involving rick burning and the destruction of threshing machines. The riots terrified rural society and added to the sense that ministers had lost control of events.

In the new parliament, Earl Grey, now recognized as leader of the opposition, made a speech advocating reform. Wellington’s reply on 2 November has gone down as ‘one of the great parliamentary blunders of all time’. He said that the state of representation could not be improved. He argued that Britain already possessed ‘a Legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation’, and that the system of electoral representation commanded the ‘entire confidence’ of the nation’. He believed that his uncompromising stand would encourage the forces of Toryism to rally around him, but he had failed to appreciate the depth of the reform movement in the country. He had handed reform over to the Whigs.

Peel recognised that this was inevitable. He believed that the vast changes in British society had made some form of reform inevitable but after his volte-face on Catholic emancipation it was psychologically impossible for him to do it. He wrote to his brother:

‘I think it is better for the country and better for ourselves that we should not undertake the question.’

On 15 November the government was defeated 233-204 on a minor financial motion (that a select committee be set up to investigate civil list accounts) when the Huskissonites made common cause with the Whigs. Wellington resigned, the first Prime Minister to fall as a result of a Commons vote since Shelburne in 1783. On 16 November the King invited Grey to form a ministry, not because he could command a parliamentary majority but because he was the only man likely to be able to form an efficient cabinet. (Brougham, became Lord Chancellor.) The coalition with the Canningites meant that some reform of parliament was inevitable.

The Whigs and reform
Like most governments before the 1880s, the new government was thoroughly aristocratic, with Brougham one of the few commoners. The Whigs were a collection of the great families who patronized Brookes’s Club: the dukes of Bedford, Devonshire; the Leader of the Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer was Lord Althorp. Their house journal was the Edinburgh Review.
One of the first acts of the government was the suppression of the Swing Riots. 9 rioters were hanged, 457 were transported. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, refused to consider positive measures to relieve distress. Journalists friendly to the rioters were arrested, including Cobbett, who was triumphantly acquitted. This meant that there were great tensions between the Whigs and the Radicals.

The Whigs were thoroughly committed to parliamentary reform. Grey told William IV:

‘we did not cause the excitement about reform. We found it in full vigour when we came into office’.

A small committee of four - Lords Durham and Duncannon, Lord John Russell (a long-standing supporter of reform; depicted left as he was in later life), and Sir James Graham - was set up to frame a reform bill.

While the committee was sitting and later when the cabinet was discussing its proposals, political unions on the Birmingham model sprang up in dozens of towns. One Birmingham reformer wrote:

‘If the Whigs intend to realise their promises, they cannot object to strong demonstrations; if they mean to break their vows, it is wholesome to remind them of them.’

As the day approached petitions poured in from all parts of the kingdom and the House had to arrange a special sitting to receive them. When the House assembled, the seats were so covered with bundles of petitions that in many cases the members had no room to sit.

On 1 March 1831: Russell introduced his Reform Bill to Commons in a speech that was the making of his political career. Though it made no concessions to demands for the ballot of manhood suffrage, the bill was surprisingly radical.

disenfranchisement of small boroughs (Schedule A) of less than 2,000 inhabitants
semi-disenfranchisement of boroughs with populations of under 4,000 (Schedule B), allowing each borough one instead of two members

This would create 168 vacancies

42 to be filled by new borough seats (including 8 new London seats, and seats for Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham
55 to be devoted to the provision of additional members for counties
9 to be given to Scotland, Wales, Ireland
the remaining vacancies not to be filled at all so the new House of Commons was to be significantly smaller.

Conditions of voting

40 shilling freehold to be retained in counties
uniform £10 franchise in boroughs

This would extend the electorate by about half a million ‘and these all connected with the property of the country, having a valuable stake amongst us, and deeply interested in our institutions’.

In the Lords Grey said the three cardinal principles of reform were:

disenfranchisement of rotten boroughs
enfranchisement of new towns
common £10 household franchise

The boldness of the stroke alarmed the opponents of reform and left Peel shaking with anger knowing that, because it went so far beyond the moderate reform he could have supported he would have to oppose it and make common cause with his enemies, the Ultras. The Tories claimed that this was a revolutionary change: It

would give power to ‘men of limited information, of strong prejudices, of narrow and contracted views such a shopkeepers and small attorneys’
would place the House of Commons at the mercy of public opinion
would deprive the government of means of patronage
the abolition of pocket boroughs would block talent
would be a prelude to further reform
would be a form of robbery because it deprived members of their seats.

Having put forward such an unexpectedly radical bill, the Whigs had raised popular expectations to a dangerous degree and they dared not let it fail. The Spectator, which represented a growing coalition of radicals, was demanding

‘the Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill’.

The Whigs justified the bill by arguing that it was necessary to represent manufacturing interest and that to refuse reform would open the door to more extreme demands. Their case was put by Thomas Babington Macaulay who argued in his maiden speech (2 March) that the bill was the best guarantor against revolution:

‘Reform that you may preserve’.

The Radicals, represented by Henry Hunt were dissatisfied. They wanted the ballot, wider suffrage and shorter parliaments. Hunt declared that:

‘the best vote was that which came from the industrious artificer or manufacturer who earned from 30s to £3 a week’.

On the following day (3 March) Peel spoke against reform:

‘Let us never be tempted to resign the well-tempered freedom which we enjoy, in the ridiculous pursuit of the wild liberty which France has established.’

But Russell denied that the bill would bring in democracy. His argument was purely rationalist;he could not see

‘why Manchester or Birmingham should send democrats any more than Bristol or Liverpool.’

On the early morning of 23 March the bill passed the second reading in the Commons by an extremely precarious majority of one (302/301) in the fullest division lobby yet seen in Parliament. The scenes in the House were tumultuous. But the government was later defeated in committee and the king showed himself deeply hostile to a dissolution. But on 21 April he reluctantly agreed to a dissolution, knowing that this would be almost a referendum on the unreformed electorate. This had never happened before and the Tories were horrified.

During the election there was an irresistible tide for reform. The Tory diarist, Greville wrote:

‘the county members are tumbling about like ninepins’

Of the 34 English county members who had voted against Russell’s proposals only 6 retained their seats. Almost all the popular constituencies returned reformers - 4 for London. Virtually the only Tories who were returned were those for closed boroughs. Wellington became an object of hatred and abuse for sections of the public and on two occasions the windows of his London residence, Apsley House, were stoned.

In April 1831 a National Union of the Working Classes was forged in London, agitating for complete male suffrage. The size of political rallies in 1830 and 1831 suggests that working-class support for democracy was growing. But the Reform Bill had nothing in it for them.

The First Reform Act (2)

2009-10-31T21:20:00.000Z

[Above is Charles, 2nd Early Grey, the Prime Minister]

The bill re-introduced
On 24 June, Russell, now in the cabinet as Paymaster of the Forces, introduced a new (second) reform bill with only minor modifications from the first. On 6-7 July it passed the second reading with a majority of 136 (367-231) but was delayed for forty days in committee as the Tories contested the fate of each condemned borough. On 22 September it was finally carried 345/236 and sent to the Lords. This was accompanied with dire warnings in political union speeches, newspaper editorials, and pamphlets about what would happen to the upper house if it rejected the will of the people. The Whig Thomas Babington Macaulay threatened them with the fate of the French aristocracy; conservatives warned them that they would lose all political power if they tamely surrendered to the Commons.

The debate in the Lords lasted five days. Brougham, primed with port, made a three hour speech. In his winding up speech, Grey denied (probably correctly)any attempt to harm the landed interest. On 8 October after five days debate the Lords rejected the bill by 41 votes (199/158). 21 of the bishops voted against it; if they had voted for it, it would have passed by a majority of one.

The situation was near to deadlock. In the following week Althorp announced the government’s determination to introduce as soon as possible on the same principles, though the government was ready to amend some of the bill’s provisions in order to reach consensus.

In the country at large, the Lords’ rejection provoked immediate and prolonged opposition. As many as 150,000 people are estimated to have attended monster meetings of the Birmingham Political Union. Russell wrote angrily to Attwood:

‘It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of the nation’.

Riots
A series of violent incidents culminating in the sacking of the city centre of Bristol by an angry mob on 29 October, was provoked by the arrival in the city of the recorder, Sir Charles Wetherell. In three days of riots, the mob broke into prisons and burned the bishop’s palace. A cavalry charge restored order the next day. In Nottingham the Ultra Tory Duke of Newcastle’s castle was burned down. The Church of England, whose bishops had mainly voted against reform, became the special target of abuse.

At the same time a cholera epidemic reached England from the Continent and not only fanatics saw it as a judgment of God upon the nation.

In this atmosphere many MPs and more moderate reformers feared a revolution and the government swore in special constables to quell potential armed risings. The country houses of some of the peers and gentry were being fortified and mounted with cannon fir the first time since the Civil War.

On 12 December: Russell introduced his bill for the third time - with a few concessions to win over peers worried about the risk of civil war. He saved some condemned constituencies, abandoned proposals to increase the size of the Commons, and allowed resident freemen to keep their votes. This was carried on the second reading by a majority of 162.

The bill in the Lords
The bill was now back with the Lords. Grey was forced to contemplate the use of the royal prerogative to create additional peers. In January 1832 he wrote:

‘I wish to God we could avoid it.’

But under pressure from his colleagues, especially Althorp and Brougham, he asked the king to create a dozen or more peers. William reluctantly agreed (15 January). When this became known the attitude of the Lords changed. On the first reading of the bill in the upper house (26 March), some peers announced that they would support the second reading. On 13 April the (unaugmented) Lords passed the second reading of the bill by a majority of 9 (184/175).

Then (7 May) in committee the Lords passed an amendment (151/116) postponing the disenfranchising clauses. They said this was merely a matter of procedure, but the government took it up as a challenge. On 8 May Grey asked the king either to create at least 50 peers or accept the government’s resignation. The king, alarmed at ‘convulsions’ of public opinion and the undermining of the hereditary principle, refused to create more than 20 peers. (The queen was blamed for this.) On 9 May Grey and the cabinet resigned.

This set off the crisis known as the ‘Days of May’. Mass demonstrations were held in the country - Birmingham, Manchester, London. In Birmingham Attwood hinted at armed insurrection. On 12 May Francis Place suggested a run on the banks:

‘To stop the duke, go for gold’.

This slogan was posted up on London walls within twenty-four hours. Daniel O’Connell reminded his listeners that Charles I was beheaded for listening to a foreign wife.

The bill passed
The king tried to cobble together another Wellington administration, but Peel, remembering his difficulties over Catholic emancipation, refused to take office and perform a second U-turn. This, he believed, would destroy ‘all confidence in the declarations of public men’. He confided to a friend that he would be cut to pieces rather than do it. He now recognised that there would have to be some reform, but he was not the man to carry it out. It has been argued that Peel’s refusal to serve was more decisive than the ‘days of May’ in preventing the formation of a Tory administration.

With his only avenue of escape blocked, the king had to send for Grey again (15 May) and (18 May) agree to the creation of the requisite number of peers. In fact this was not needed. The Lords were frightened into agreeing to the bill. On 4 June it was passed with only 22 voting against it. On 7 June it received the royal assent. The king refused to come to the Lords in person to announce this (compare with Catholic emancipation; this was the second time the monarch was forced to accept a bill he did not agree with).

The news of the passing of the bill was greeted by banquets, illuminations and ringing of church bells. But Wordsworth, who had mutated into a die-hard Tory said that if the bill was passed he would retire to a

‘safe and conservative government like Austria’

The Tory journalist Croker wrote:

‘Our revolution is a sure, and not slow progress, and every legitimate government in Europe will feel its effects. We have been for half a century the ark which preserved in the great democratic deluge the principles of social order and monarchical government. We are now become a fire-ship, which will spread the conflagration.’

On 16 October Parliament was prorogued, and the members of the disqualified boroughs left the House for the last time; it was dissolved on 3 December.

The election of 1832
The election was fought on new constituencies. For the first time voting lists were needed. The keeping of the lists was given to the overseers of the poor (compiled the rate books). Claims and objections were settled in court through special ‘revising barristers’. The system worked badly at first, as the voters took little trouble to find whether their names were on the list. They were unwilling to pay the registration fee of a shilling. But the returns were in by the end of the year. In describing the results the Times (18 December) used the terms ‘Reformers’ and ‘Conservatives’.

188 of the 254 English seats were contested, 276 of the 401 total British seats (an unprecedented number). The election was a disaster for the Tories. The Whigs won 483 seats, the Tories 175.

The new electoral system
The apocalyptic Tory predictions were unjustified. The reformed electoral system was a blend of old and new with no radical changes. Before 1832 13 % of the adult male population had the vote, after 1832 it was 18%. The social composition of the new parliament hardly differed from the old. William Ewart Gladstone was returned as Tory member for Newark, the duke of Newcastle’s seat. William Cobbett (eccentrically) was returned for Oldham, the ‘mushroom’ town that had grown from 400 in 1760 to 12,000 in 1801. Hunt lost Preston.

1. The agricultural south continued to be over represented at the expense of the North and London. Ten southern counties had 1/4 of the population and 1/3 of the representation. The exception was Middlesex - a greater population than Lancashire but half the members. Cornwall’s representation was reduced from 44 to 13 (still over-represented).

2. 50 boroughs lost their representation entirely. 50 others lost one of their two seats. 22 new boroughs were created with privileges of returning two members; 20 with one member.
Some very big constituencies were created (Tower Hamlets, Finsbury - 7000 on roll). Reigate had 152 voters..
345,000 English county voters controlled 114 seats
275,000 borough voters controlled 327 seats
But the Act was not concerned with equal representation but the balancing of ‘interests’. Most counties still reflected the dominance of the landed interest.

3. The £10 borough franchise meant different things in different parts of the country. The national average was that a third to a quarter of households. But in Leeds no working classes lived in houses with an annual value of over £8.

4. In the counties the vote continued to be retained by 40s freeholders with the addition of £10 copyholders, £10 leaseholders, £50 long leaseholders and tenants-at-will paying rent of not less than £50. Borough freeholders could vote in the county where the borough situated if they did not occupy their freehold or if its value was between 40s or £10. These people were often not susceptible to aristocratic influence.

5. The total electorate increased by 50%.
In England and Wales 217,000 voters were added to the electorate of 435,000 (population of Great Britain 13.4m).
About 1 Englishman in 5, 1 Scotsman in 8, 1 Irishman in 20 had the vote. The change was most marked in Scotland where there was an almost 15 fold increase in the size of the electorate. In the long term this was a significant boost for anti-Tory forces.

6. New party organisation. Voters had to register and pay a registration fee. This gave an incentive to political organisations to encourage registration. In 1834 the Whig Lord Durham ('Radical Jack') set up the Reform Association. In 1835 he set up a registration office in London and established branches in the country. In May 1835 the Tories set up a small standing committee at the Carlton Club to supervise registration arrangements and to collect information on party strength within the constituencies.

7. Abuses remained. Small pocket boroughs survived where family interest was stronger than party feeling. It was calculated that 85% of the voters of Stafford had been bought at the 1832 election. There was no legal limit on the amount that could be spent by candidates at elections. They were often accompanied by violence.

The development of the full party system was held in check by traditional social forces. Not all constituencies were contested. In 1847 only 2/5 of the constituencies were contested.

Who gained and who lost?
The standard interpretation of the Reform Act is that it was designed to incorporate the middle classes into the Constitution and detach them from the workers, but this was not the government’s intention. It was only on the second night of the debate (2 March 1831) that Macaulay (a backbencher, not a government minister) spoke of ‘the struggle which the middle classes in England are maintaining against [an] Aristocracy of mere locality’. From this time there came a strong perception that the bill had been drawn up with them in mind. But the term ‘middle classes’ was vague and incorporated a variety of occupations and income groups. The £10 franchise was arbitrary. In London where rents were high, it included some working-class people but in areas of low property prices some middle-class people were excluded from the franchise.

Manufacturers obviously gained though less than previously thought. It was never the purpose of the Act to tilt the balance of power to the manufacturing interest. The enfranchisement of copyholders and the increase in county seats extended the power of the landed interest significantly. This turned out to be a ‘spectacular own goal’ on the part of the Whigs since it enabled the Tories to revive their fortunes between 1835 and 1846.

The real losers of 1832 were not the proprietors of disenfranchised pocket boroughs such as Old Sarum or West Looe but the working classes. Not only did they have no reward for their agitation for reform, but they also lost votes in previously open constituencies such as Preston and Coventry.

However the very passage of the Act showed how future pressure might bring further concession. A constitution that had been changed once could be changed again.

Wilberforce's speech: how long was it?

2009-10-28T07:28:00.001Z

I have just refreshed my memory about the length of Wilberforce's speech on 12 May 1789. Here is an extract from a preliminary draft of my book:

Wilberforce’s three and a half hour abolition speech of 12 May 1789 has to rank as a pivotal moment in the history of Parliament and of Christian humanitarianism. It was praised in the newspapers as one of the most eloquent ever heard in the House and has been listed as one of the twelve British texts that have changed the world, along with Magna Carta, the King James Bible and the Origin of Species. But the actual speech has been lost forever. It was delivered almost extempore as Wilberforce ‘had not prepared my language nor even gone over all my matter; but being well acquainted with the whole of the subject I got on’. It survives in various versions all based on notes taken by parliamentary reporters writing in longhand who did not have a designated area to from which view the debates and could not always see the speaker or hear what was being said. In his brief career as a parliamentary reporter a few years earlier, Wilberforce’s future brother-in-law, James Stephen, found that ‘No man was allowed to take a note for the purpose. To use a pen or pencil in the Gallery was deemed a high contempt’. But though the versions have to be read with these considerations in mind, there can be little doubt that, taken together, they give a fair account of Wilberforce’s arguments and the thought processes that lay behind them.

However, in view of some of your comments, I think I'm going to have to add that he must have had notes to hand for all the statistics he used!

Wilberforce's abolition speech, 12 May 1789

2009-10-27T09:31:00.010Z

From ‘Debate on Mr. Wilberforce’s Resolutions respecting the Slave Trade’ in William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England. From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803, 36 vols (London: T. Curson Hansard, 1806-1820), 28 (1789-91), cols 42-68.
[Cols 41-42]

Mr. Wilberforce now rose and said:—When I consider the magnitude of the subject which I am to bring before the House—a subject, in which the interests, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world, and of posterity, are involved: and when I think, at the same time, on the weakness of the advocate who has undertaken this great cause—when these reflections press upon my mind, it is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at my own inadequacy to such a task.

But when I reflect, however, on the encouragement which I have had, through the whole course of a long and laborious examination of this question, and how much candour I have experienced, and how conviction has increased within my own mind, in proportion as I have advanced in my labours;—when I reflect, especially, that however averse any gentleman may now be, yet we shall all be of one opinion in the end;—when I turn myself to these thoughts, I take courage—I determine to forget all my other fears, and I march forward with a firmer step in the full assurance that my cause will bear me out, and that I shall be able to justify upon the clearest principles, every resolution in my hand, the avowed end of which is, the total abolition of the slave trade. I wish exceedingly, in the outset, to guard both myself and the House from entering into the subject with any sort of passion. It is not their passions I shall appeal to—I ask only for their cool and impartial reason; and I wish not to take them by surprise, but to deliberate, point by point, upon every part of this question. I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others; and I therefore deprecate every kind of reflection against the various descriptions of people who are more immediately involved in this wretched business.

[Cols 45-48]
Having now disposed of the first part of this subject, I must speak of the transit of the slaves in the West Indies. This I confess, in my own opinion, is the most wretched part of the whole subject. So much misery condensed in so little room, is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived. I will not accuse the Liverpool merchants: I will allow them, nay, I will believe them to be men of humanity; and I will therefore believe, if it were not for the enormous magnitude and extent of the evil which distracts their attention from individual cases, and makes them think generally, and therefore less feelingly on the subject, they would never have persisted in the trade. I verily believe therefore, if the wretchedness of any one of the many hundred Negroes stowed in each ship could be brought before their view, and remain within the sight of the African Merchant, that there is no one among them whose heart would bear it. Let any one imagine to himself 6 or 700 of these wretches chained two and two, surrounded with every object that is nauseous and disgusting, diseased, and struggling under every kind of wretchedness! How can we bear to think of such a scene as this? One would think it had been determined to heap upon them all the varieties of bodily pain, for the purpose of blunting the feelings of the mind; and yet, in this very point (to show the power of human prejudice) the situation of the slaves has been described by Mr. Norris, one of the Liverpool delegates, in a manner which, I am sure will convince the House how interest can draw a film across the eyes, so thick, that total blindness could do no more; and how it is our duty therefore to trust not to the reasonings of interested men, or to their way of colouring a transaction. “Their apartments,” says Mr. Norris, “are fitted up as much for their advantage as circumstances will admit. The right ancle of one, indeed is connected with the left ancle of another by a small iron fetter, and if they are turbulent, by another on their wrists. They have several meals a day; some of their own country provisions, with the best sauces of African cookery; and by way of variety, another meal of pulse, &c. according to European taste. After breakfast they have water to wash themselves, while their apartments are perfumed with frankincense and lime-juice. Before dinner, they are amused after the manner of their country. The song and dance are promoted,” and, as if the whole was really a scene of pleasure and dissipation it is added, that games of chance are furnished. “The men play and sing, while the women and girls make fanciful ornaments with beads, which they are plentifully supplied with.” Such is the sort of strain in which the Liverpool delegates, and particularly Mr. Norris, gave evidence before the privy council. What will the House think when, by the concurring testimony of other witnesses, the true history is laid open. The slaves who are sometimes described as rejoicing at their captivity, are so wrung with misery at leaving their country, that it is the constant practice to set sail at night, lest they should be sensible of their departure. The pulse which Mr. Norris talks of are horse beans; and the scantiness, both of water and provision, was suggested by the very legislature of Jamaica in the report of their committee, to be a subject that called for the interference of parliament. Mr. Norris talks of frankincense and lime juice; when surgeons tell you the slaves are stowed so close, that there is not room to tread among them: and when you have it in evidence from sir George Yonge, that even in a ship which wanted 200 of her complement, the stench was intolerable. The song and the dance, says Mr. Norris, are promoted. It had been more fair, perhaps, if he had explained that word promoted. The truth is, that for the sake of exercise, these miserable wretches, loaded with chains, oppressed with disease and wretchedness, are forced to dance by the terror of the lash, and sometimes by the actual use of it. “I,” says one of the other evidences, “was employed to dance the men, while another person danced the women.” Such, then is the meaning of the word promoted; and it may be observed too, with respect to food, that an instrument is sometimes carried out, in order to force them to eat which is the same sort of proof how much they enjoy themselves in that instance also. As to their singing, what shall we say when we are told that their songs are songs of lamentation upon their departure which, while they sing, are always in tears, insomuch that one captain (more humane as I should conceive him, therefore, than the rest) threatened one of the women with a flogging, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful for his feelings. In order, however, not to trust too much to any sort of description, I will call the attention of the House to one species of evidence which is absolutely infallible. Death, at least, is a sure ground of evidence, and the proportion of deaths will not only confirm, but if possible will even aggravate our suspicion of their misery in the transit. It will be found, upon an average of all the ships of which evidence has been given at the privy council, that exclusive of those who perish before they sail, not less than 12½ per cent perish in the passage. Besides these, the Jamaica report tells you, that not less than 4½ per cent die on shore before the day of sale, which is only a week or two from the time of landing. One third more die in the seasoning, and this in a country exactly like their own, where they are healthy and happy as some of the evidences would pretend. The diseases, however, which they contract on shipboard, the astringent washes which are to hide their wounds, and the mischievous tricks used to make them up for sale, are, as the Jamaica report says, (a most precious and valuable report, which I shall often have to advert to) one principle cause of this mortality. Upon the whole, however, here is a mortality of about 50 per cent. and this among negroes who are not bought unless (as the phrase is with cattle) they are sound in wind and limb. How then can the House refuse its belief to the multiplied testimonies before the privy council, of the savage treatment of the negroes in the middle passage? Nay, indeed, what need is there of any evidence? The number of deaths speaks for itself, and makes all such enquiry superfluous. As soon as ever I had arrived thus far in my investigation of the slave trade, I confess to you sir, so enormous so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition. A trade founded in iniquity, and carried on as this was, must be abolished, let the policy be what it might,—let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition.

'The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class'

2009-10-26T10:28:00.001Z

I have just read this review of what looks like a fascinating book, Alison Twells' The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850: The 'Heathen' at Home and Overseas'. The review assumes a specialised knowledge you can't be expected to have, but you might like to think about the interesting argument. As the reviewer writes:

'In putting together an examination of philanthropy at home and abroad, she examines how the England’s ‘civilizing’ mission gave rise to the framework of middle class identity and culture. Further, she elides how that identity was based upon a culture of morally respectable intervention that formed the basis of a then novel claim to political power and social standing. And finally, although both men and women were mission philanthropists, she underscores how the women’s work has been constantly under-reported, and thus their historic contribution to the creation of civic culture under-valued.'

You may remember that Jane Eyre nearly became a missionary's wife. (It was only from 1860 that women were allowed to be missionaries in their own right.)

Slavery and abolition

2009-10-25T14:42:00.002Z

There is an excellent website here on the slave trade and the British campaign for its abolition. I have a post on the slave trade on another of my blogs. Go to it here.

A moral revolution?

2009-10-23T10:36:00.000+01:00

The late eighteenth century saw the start of a new moral order, which involved the overturning of the aristocratic ethos of the late 18th century (represented by Charles James Fox with his sexual laxity and huge gambling debts) with one of religion, sobriety and social concern. Obviously this is over-simple but it is remarkable how the generation that reached old age in the 1820s looked back on their youth and marvelled at the way standards had changed. The prime movers of this change are usually seen as the Evangelicals but many who did not subscribe to Evangelicalism nevertheless came to accept the new values.

The Clapham Sect
Evangelicalism was a broad movement, encompassing both Anglicans and Dissenters. It has been identified by its four defining characteristic: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. In the late eighteenth century the two most influential groups of Evangelicals were the Methodists, whose numbers were rising dramatically, and the group of Anglicans around William Wilberforce [above].

In 1784 Wilberforce was returned for Yorkshire. In 1785-6 he experienced an Evangelical conversion and at the end of 1787 he recorded in his diary,

‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.’

Earlier in that year he had been instrumental in setting up the Proclamation Society. In 1789 he made his first great speech on the abolition of the slave trade and encouraged Hannah More to set up her first Sunday school in Cheddar.

In 1792 he set up a ‘chummery’ at Battersea Rise on Clapham Common with his second cousin, the banker Henry Thornton (1760-1815). On the edge of the common Thornton built two smaller houses, one, Broomfield, rented by Edward Eliot, Pitt’s brother- in- law, and the other bought by Charles Grant (1746-1823) who had been a member of the board of trade at Calcutta. The little colony was later joined by

John Shore (Lord Teignmouth) (1751-1834), Warren Hastings’ successor as governor-general of India
the lawyer James Stephen (1758-1832)
the abolitionist, Zachary Macaulay (1768-1838) who in 1796 accepted the governorship of the experimental non-slaving colony of Sierra Leone.

This conglomeration of Evangelicals, comprising bankers, members of Parliament and colonial administrators, all devoted to the abolition of the slave trade and the dissemination of ‘vital religion’, became known as the ‘Saints’; by the middle of the nineteenth century they had acquired the retrospective title of the Clapham sect. Their group solidarity was remarkable. They went on holiday together, intermarried and stood godparents to each other’s children. In the Rev. John Venn (1758-1813) they had (almost) their own domestic chaplain; he had (of course) been presented to the living of Clapham by Henry Thornton.

The Evangelicals aimed at remoralizing both ends of society – the poor and the genteel.
In 1795 Hannah More began the publication of her Cheap Repository Tracts aimed at a popular readership.

In 1797 Wilberforce published his Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country contrasted with Real Christianity, which sold 7,500 copies within six months. It benefited from the fact that it coincided with the new moral and political conservatism in the wake of the French Revolution. Burke is said to have read it in the dying months of his life. Wilberforce's message operated on two levels:

it called the great to moral reformation
it also offered the means of strengthening the state against political reformers.

In 1802 Zachary Macaulay, back from Sierra Leone and married to Selina Mills, a former teacher at the More sisters’ school in Bristol, founded the Christian Observer, the house-journal of the Clapham sect.

The group was also influential in Cambridge: Dr Isaac Milner (1750-1820) was dean of Carlisle and president of Queens’ College; Charles Simeon (1759-1836), vicar of Holy Trinity, was a fellow of King’s.

However, the Evangelicals never acquired a commanding position in the Church of England. In 1815 they acquired their first bishop in Henry Ryder (1777-1836): bishop of Gloucester, 1815, bishop of Lichfield 1823. In 1828 John Bird Sumner (1780-1862) became bishop of Chester and in 1848 archbishop of Canterbury. But by this time the Tractarians had mounted their own challenge.

Sunday schools
Sunday schools became an extremely fashionable form of philanthropy. In the summer of 1789 Wilberforce told Hannah More ‘something must be done about Cheddar’. By ‘something’ he clearly meant a Sunday school.

This is my photograph of the 'Hannah More cottage' in Cheddar, founded in October 1789, the first of what were to be nine schools, catering at the height of their prosperity for 1,000 children in the Mendips. The first teacher was a Mrs Sarah Baber. On Hannah More's death, the school was absorbed by the Church of England National Society and in time became a state primary school (in a different building).

Hannah More and her sister also set up adult classes and women's benefit clubs (friendly societies).

In 1780 Robert Raikes started his first school for the children of chimney sweeps in Sooty Alley, Gloucester (opposite the city prison) in 1780. He used his position as proprietor and editor of the Gloucester Journal to publicize the work. After his first editorial in 1783, schools spread rapidly. In 1785 an undenominational national organization, the Sunday School Society, was set up to co-ordinate and develop the work. By 1784 there were said to be 1800 pupils in Manchester and Salford, and Leeds the same. Sunday schools were attended by adults as well as children. By the turn of the century more than 2,000 Sunday schools had been founded. 8,000 were in existence by 1821. In 1801 c. 10% of children were enrolled, more than 55% by 1851. Sunday schools taught reading and the more controversial also taught writing. They provided feasts and processions and for their parents they provided adult classes and benefit clubs. They disseminated the 'Victorian' virtues of industry and sobriety.

In 1810 the Quaker Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838) founded what became known as the British and Foreign School Society. It was based on the monitorial system in which from 200 to 1,000 pupils were gathered in one room and seated in rows, usually of ten pupils each. The adult schoolmaster taught the monitors, each of whom relayed the lesson to his own row.

In 1811 the Anglican clergyman, Andrew Bell (1753-1832) became superintendent of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. These two rival societies formed the foundations of what became the state system of elementary education.

The growth of Methodism
After the death of John Wesley an integrated organizational structure developed with each chapel linked to others in the area in a series of 'circuits' (114 by Wesley's death in 1791) which were themselves incorporated into districts. Methodism depended on an itinerant ministry; ministers remained in a particular community only for a limited period and at the direction of the Annual Conference.

Methodism concentrated on fitting the convert into a social as well as religious institution; meetings were held on weekdays. Methodists were organised into 'classes' for the majority of members and ‘bands’ for those ‘pressing on to holiness’. Inevitably such groups set up a spiritual elite that ran against formal church structures.

Methodism flourished in the North Midlands and the north of England, particularly east of the Pennines and in the south west, especially Cornwall. Its most receptive hearers were skilled workers and craftsmen. It appealed particularly to those outside the traditional Anglican hierarchy of squire, tenant farmer and labourer. In the first thirty years of the 19th century almost two-thirds of Methodists were drawn from the ranks of the skilled working classes rather than the poorest in society.

After Wesley's death a number of secessions took place. In 1807 Conference condemned revivalist meetings on the United States model which had been held at the hill known as Mow Cop on the Staffordshire moorlands. Four years later Hugh Bourne (1772-1852) a carpenter and William Clowes (1780-1852), a potter from Burslem, established a Primitive Methodist Connexion, which grew steadily to a membership in excess of 100,000 in 1851. Whereas the Methodist Connexion had banned women's preaching in 1803 the Primitives allowed women to preach. They had particular success among the rural labourers of eastern and northern England.

Elie Halévy (1870-1937) and E. P. Thompson have argued that Methodism was an essentially conservative movement, diverting energies that would otherwise have gone into revolution. Certainly the Wesleyans became increasingly conservative as the threat of radicalism increased. However, Methodism trained many working men in administration and public speaking and gave them a sense of their own worth they would not otherwise have possessed. Methodists became trade unionists, Luddites and Chartists.

In 1811 alarmed at what he saw as the Methodist threat, Viscount Sidmouth the Home Secretary proposed a bill introducing new restrictions on dissenting ministers, aimed principally at itinerants. It was beaten off by frantic lobbying, in which Dissenters united with Evangelical Anglicans such as Wilberforce.

An Age of Societies
The Evangelicals were extremely successful in mobilizing middle-class activism that involved women and even children in an unprecedented fashion. Some of the new societies were non-denominational, others purely Anglican (though always with a strong Evangelical ethos. Here is a list of some of their societies:

1792: the Baptist Missionary Society
1795: the London Missionary Society (the original title was 'the Missionary Society; the title ‘London’ was added in 1818). This was the first time in recent history that Anglicans and Dissenters had joined together in a common enterprise.
1798: the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor
1799: the Religious Tract Society
1799 the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (the Church Missionary Society). Unlike the Religious Tract Society this was purely Anglican and aroused hostility from many high churchmen, who feared that it was setting up a church within a church.
1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society. This society was inter-denominational from the start, and even included some non-Evangelicals like Bishop Burgess. Its three secretaries were an Anglican clergyman, a Welsh Baptist, and a German Lutheran; the committee consisted exclusively of laymen, fifteen Anglicans, fifteen Dissenters and six foreigners resident in London. Henry Thornton was treasurer and the Claphamite Lord Teignmouth, former Governor-General of India, its president.

The goal of the Bible Society was the interdenominational dissemination of the Bible ‘without note or comment’ - this was deeply resented by High Churchman and between 1805 and 1822 over 170 pamphlets were written against the Society. Its genius lay in its ability to mobilize the energies of its supporters throughout the country, using women and even children, and playing a vital role in the creation of the energetic evangelical culture which was to be such an important feature of Victorian society. It happened spontaneously, as auxiliary associations began to mushroom throughout the country. The auxiliaries then spawned their own outgrowths in the form of Ladies’ Associations, and by the 1830s, middle-class women had cornered the market in selling cheap bibles to the poor, much to the alarm of conservatives who thought women should concentrate purely on domestic concerns. Some feared that the women would neglect their families and undermine male authority by becoming tub-thumping fanatics or that they would be unable to add up the collections.

1809 the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. This began in 1805 as a weekly series of Saturday night lectures for potential Jewish converts in London. In 1815 the Society became purely Anglican. The stress on the Jews owes much to the millenarian preoccupations during and after the Napoleonic Wars.

Missions
Missionary work was an offshoot of imperial expansion and something which united Evangelicals of all denominations.

In 1793 William Carey (1761-1834) (left) went to Calcutta. In 1801 he began to teach at Fort William College and translated the Bible into a number of Indian languages. In the February edition of the Whig Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith (1771-1845) sneered at the Indian mission as ‘a nest of consecrated cobblers’.

In 1813 the East India Company’s charter was up for renewal, and the Evangelicals wished to insert a clause in the new charter allowing Christian missionaries to operate in the parts of India controlled by the Company. They faced fierce opposition from the Company which had always forbidden proselytizing for fear that this would exacerbate religious tensions. With tactics learned from the abolitionist movement, Wilberforce brought pressure on his fellow parliamentarians from the country at large.

The petitions were successful in Manchester, Bristol and throughout the provinces. Armed with this impressive support, Wilberforce stood up in the Commons on 22 June and delivered a diatribe on ‘the degraded character of the Hindoo superstition’ that condemned sati and female infanticide. His motion for the insertion of the new clause was carried by 89 votes to 36.

The consequences for India were momentous. The diocese of Calcutta was founded in 1814. The evangelical success in opening up India to Christianity was paralleled a generation later by the secular Utilitarian programme of westernization. In 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of Zachary the abolitionist, came to India as the new Law Member. In a resolution of the following year he declared

‘that the great objects of the British government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science ... through the medium of the English language’.

This had a profound effect on the Indian educational system.

There can be little doubt of a new ethos by 1830. Lady Louisa Stuart looked back bemusedly to her earlier admiration for Aphra Behn. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) produced his Family Shakespeare. The new generation of compulsive womanizers like Viscount Palmerston were no longer open in their conduct. There was a new ‘hypocrisy’ - the ‘tribute vice pays to virtue’?

The war with France

2009-10-21T14:18:00.000+01:00

The posts below give an account of the early years of the war against France (not necessarily in chronological order). They do not provide a comprehensive history of the whole war but they are intended to give an impression of how the country adopted to the needs of war on the military, political and financial fronts. All the general histories of Britain provide full coverage of the wars and there is also a very comprehensive account here.

Again you will need to check with the side-bar to make sure that you have read all the relevant posts.

I have not at this stage dealt with Ireland. This will come later.