Nineteenth-Century Britain

Towards 1914

2010-03-24T09:33:00.001Z

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 Delcassé, 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.'

Was it a war of choice on Britain's part. Britain was not bound by treaty to defend Russia or France from attack, though the invasion of Belgium was clearly a threat to her interests. Lloyd George believed that Grey mishandled the situation by failing to warn the German ambassador in time that Britain would take its treaty obligations to Belgium so seriously: ‘Had [Grey] warned Germany in time of the point at which Britain would declare war…the issue would have been different.’ But would it?

Ireland: again

2010-03-23T17:31:00.001Z

Above is a photograph of the Ulster Volunteers.

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, the Conservative leader in the Lords, 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.’

Did the government mishandle Home Rule?

‘It is hard to exonerate the government from the charge of letting things drift…Asquith simply failed to understand the passions which were being unleashed in Ireland.…On mainland Britain the Irish Question might have been more easily contained had it not been for the legacy left by the passing of the Parliament Act.…Irish Home Rule was being discussed in an atmosphere of intense bitterness and mutual suspicion. For the first time since the seventeenth century the country genuinely confronted civil war…because the Opposition did not wholeheartedly accept the legitimacy of the institutional arrangements which had emerged during the years of Liberal rule.’ G.R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886-1918, (Oxford, 2004), 434.

The Liberals in power: 4 The 'People's Budget' and the fight with the Lords

2010-03-17T11:55:00.004Z

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 the 'Judas Group' of 29 Unionist peers led by Lord Cromer and by 13 bishops. The Parliament Bill passed by 131 votes to 114.

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.

The Liberals in power: 3 Old Age Pensions

2010-03-16T21:37:00.002Z

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
In 1909 Churchill's Board of Trade 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: 2 Asquith becomes Prime Minister

2010-03-10T20:45:00.003Z

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 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 (1906-14): 1. The problem of the Lords

2010-03-10T17:43:00.001Z

Though the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (right) had been 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:

1.All denominational schools receiving rate aid were to be taken over by the local authorities;
2.Teachers were to be appointed by the authorities without any sectarian tests and not be allowed to give religious instruction;
3.Religious instruction was to be limited to two days a week in transferred church schools (though concessions were made in areas where 80% of the parents requested them).

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 1906 general election

2010-03-09T12:00:00.003Z

On assuming office in December 1905 the elderly Henry Campbell-Bannerman (above) 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 Conservatives: from victory to disaster

2010-03-09T12:00:00.001Z

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 (right) 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 suffragettes

2010-03-02T19:19:00.002Z

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 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 the Anglo-Irish landowning class. 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.

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-subpoenaed 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 Davison 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.

Women and employment

2010-02-23T12:27:00.000Z

How depicted?
The standard images of Victorian women are the angel in the house, the factory girl, and the domestic servant. There are plenty of visual representations of the first, far fewer of the second two. Working women in Victorian art are usually portrayed as wives and subordinate to their husbands. (The exception here is the series of photographs Arthur Munby took of the domestic servant Hannah Cullwick – whom he subsequently married – and other working-class women.) Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton portrays the life of a Victorian working girl. Significantly, she is confronted with severe family problems – an aunt drive to prostitution, a father on strike, and she is threatened with seduction by the employer’s son.

Moralists fretted about female employment. Ashley (Lord Shaftesbury) believed married women should not work outside the home. Henry Mayhew highlighted the dangers of underpaid needlewomen turning to prostitution.

The 1851 census
The 1851 census was the first to record occupations in any detail. It gave a total of 2.8m women and girls over the age of ten in employment out of a female population of 10.1m, forming 30.2% of the workforce. This is almost certainly an underestimate - perhaps by as much as a third. The census showed that women were clustered into certain occupations.

1. Domestic service took by far the greatest number - 905,000, not including 145,000 washerwomen and 55,000 charwomen. (In 1871 – the peak year – 46% of occupied women were in domestic service.) The majority of domestic servants worked in small households – we must rid ourselves of the Upstairs, Downstairs image!
2. Factory work was an important area of work for some women.
3. The next largest group was textile workers, closely followed by those in the clothing trades, most in workshops or outwork.

The overlap between home and work continued to be one of the themes of women’s lives, whether they were engaged in rural industries such as straw-plaiting or working in the ‘sweated trades’ of the great urban centres. A good example of this is the previously all-male tailoring trade. Rising demand for army and navy uniforms and for clothes of all kinds led to a new form of putting out – middlemen employed workers, mainly women, to mass-produce garments in their own homes or workshops. This eventually destroyed the control of male tailors. But the great disadvantage for women was that wages were constantly driven down.

Dundee was one of the great areas of female employment as the jute mills sought to fight off Indian competition by using low-paid female labour. It was described as a city of ‘over-dressed, loud, bold-eyed girls’. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were almost three women to every two men in the city between the ages of twenty and forty-five and a third of all heads of houses were women.

There is also the unrecorded work - seasonal agricultural work, outwork, casual domestic work such as washing, and working in family businesses. An ‘occupation’ was generally perceived as the work performed by a male head of household or a single unmarried person.

Women and change
The history of women’s work in the second phase of industrialization is very different from that of men’s work. Heavy industries expanded: iron and steel, shipbuilding, transport. These industries did not provide work for women but for skilled male craftsmen, who began to build a trade-union movement. The TUC met for the first time in 1868, representing primarily the interests of the skilled crafts, who campaigned for the ‘family wage’. In this kind of movement women had virtually no place. In 1875 Henry Broadbent, union official and later (from 1880) ‘Lib-Lab’ MP for Stoke-on-Trent, told the TUC that the goals of the labour movement included the conditions where

‘wives and daughters would be in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world’.

This was not merely an ideology. Industrialization probably reduced the female presence in the formal job market. Official returns in the second half of the 19th century show a steady decline in the proportion of women in the occupied work force from 34.1 % in 1861 to 31.15 in 1891. The majority of these working women were young and unmarried. In many sectors of the economy - such as the Huntley and Palmer biscuit factory – a formal marriage bar operated. Even in the Lancashire textile industry, working mothers were a minority (see below). This is a reflection of the growing prosperity of working-class families. The family wage, though low, was sufficient to allow the mother (called ‘mum’ from the 1880s) to remain at home – a place which could be a place of power for her.

In the following decades more women entered the labour market. By 1911 there had been a significant build up of women working in various branches of engineering: 128,000 – more than the numbers engaged in agriculture and horticulture.

But the most momentous change in the female labour market was the growth of middle-class posts – in teaching, retailing, office work, and nursing. The majority of the teachers in the Board Schools created by the 1870 Education Act were women. Though less qualified, they constituted 75% of the 230,000 teachers listed in the 1901 Census.

Another great catalyst for change was the typewriter, which took off in the 1880s. The first Remington model was sold in 1878; 304 Remington Model IIs were sold in 1880, 27,000 in 1887 and 65,000 in 1890. This drew women into the hitherto exclusively male clerical occupations. It also led to a semi-pornographic novel, Confessions of a Type-Writer (1893)! The new position of telephonist was dominated by women from the start. (Bell delivered his first telephone message in 1876.) The Post Office was a major employer, though women had to be dismissed from the Savings Bank Department because of male opposition. By 1911 the GPO employed nearly 35,000 women in the telephone and telegraph services and as counter clerks. By 1900 women were 20% of all white-collar workers, earning on average 25-30s a week.

Women were paid much less than men even when doing the same jobs, something demanded by both employers and unions. For example, shop assistants earned about 65% of men’s income. But the real problem lay in the notion of a ‘woman’s rate’ (amounting to little more than 10-12s a week, or else a fixed percentage of male earnings. For most girls the best route to advancement still lay though making a ‘good’ marriage. It has been estimated that 10 % of working-class females married into middle-class families.

Textiles
From the mid 1820s the mechanization of weaving (the application of steam power to the powerloom) for the first time brought women in large numbers into textile factories. (They had already entered such factories earlier as a minority of spinners.) Worsted followed after 1835, wool after 1850, hosiery from the 1850s, and women’s work of seaming and finishing from the 1850s. The timing of the entry by women into factory production varied greatly.
This shows that the character of the female labour force in these industries was quite diverse. Throughout, it remained influenced by the assumptions of the family economy - women’s work was less skilled and poorly paid. The only area where men and women worked together was powerloom weaving in the cotton industry.

In the Lancashire cotton factories, the majority of employed women were young single women, with a minority of poorer married women. They worked as powerloom weavers or in other preparatory work such as carding. One analysis of the census returns of 1851 for seven districts of Lancashire suggested that overall only 27% of women cotton operatives were either married or widowed. The married woman factory worker was the target of much condemnation from observers of the factory system. However the mothers of small children were probably a small proportion of the overall factory workforce. In the seven Lancashire districts only 20% of these married women in work had children under a year in age - though these numbers were gradually increasing. A family’s prosperity depended on how many members were actually contributing to its overall income. A married woman in factory work was most likely to leave employment in her thirties when her first children were old enough to enter employment. Where alternatives existed, married women were more likely to do work which could be done at home. Where there were no alternatives, she would enter factory employment.

The 'Woman Question'

2010-02-17T09:19:00.002Z

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 granddaugher 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 and made it clear 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 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 Lyttelton 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) (right) 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) (right). 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.

Orange Cameron

2010-02-11T22:23:00.000Z

I'm not commenting on the politics, but I thought you might be intrigued by the Times' history lesson in its leader of 12 February.

It was in Northern Ireland that the party led by David Cameron found its name. The oldest political party in Britain began its life as the Tory party. After the Great Reform Act it tried, never entirely successfully, to restyle itself the Conservative Party. Then, in 1886, the Unionist wing left the Liberal Party over Gladstone’s mission of Home Rule for Ireland. When the Unionist elements in the two main parties folded into one, the name Conservative and Unionist Party was adopted. To this day, this is the usual official term in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The historical provenance is the key to the negotiations that the Conservatives have been conducting with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to field candidates jointly for the Westminster Parliament, in the 18 constituencies in Northern Ireland. The proposal is simply to restore the status quo ante: until 1974 the Conservatives and the UUP fought elections together.
The Conservatives have been accused of naked electoral calculation and they will not be unaware that as many as ten winnable seats may be available, which could conceivably be decisive in a tight election. But, in truth, this is a mistake made more out of historical romanticism and present naivety than cynical calculation. The Conservative Party has, prematurely as it turns out, acted as if sectarian politics and division was a thing of the past. If the peace process continues in a straight line, the Tories have assumed, then Northern Ireland is made safe for them again. There is no reason why historic associations cannot be exhumed.
This is unacceptably naive. The mistake may have more complex causes than sheer political arithmetic but it is a serious mistake all the same. Owen Paterson, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, has promised a review of the rules for the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The fear — shared, incidentally, by many people in the UUP — is that the UUP and the Democratic Unionist Party might join forces to create a Unionist “block vote”. Reasonable suspicions have been stirred by the revelation that Mr Paterson hosted a meeting last month at Hatfield House, the country home of the Marquess of Salisbury, an ardent Unionist, to which both the UUP and the DUP were invited.
The implications of such an alliance are alarming. Its most immediate effect would be to exclude any possibility that Martin McGuinness might win the post as First Minister. The point here is not to say that Mr McGuinness would be good in the role, or acceptable to the relevant parties, as First Minister. It is that, by seeming to exclude the possibility of his elevation by a political fix, Mr Cameron is jeopardising the neutral status as honest broker which it is important that the British prime minister retains. The likely effect of the move will be to encourage the very partisan passions that the Conservative Party assumed had been decisively defeated. For the sake of a few seats, David Cameron would have diminished the moral authority which is his main negotiating attribute.
The ratio of cost to benefit makes it plain what Mr Cameron needs to do next: he needs to extricate his party from this mess. Progress in selecting candidates has been very slow and the process is not well advanced. There is no great ideological cause at issue, or any great political gain, so Mr Cameron can back out with relative ease. It will look like politics have prevailed over good government if he does not.
Tory history provides an important precedent. Robert Peel, a former Tory prime minister, once earned the nickname Orange Peel because of his opposition to Catholic emancipation. Orange Peel. Orange Cameron. It’s not as good a joke. In fact, it’s not a joke at all

The Labour Movement

2010-02-10T15:25:00.004Z

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 Cambridge graduate who, along with Eleanor Marx (right: 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 and Beatrice Webb, Hubert Bland) with little contact with trade unionism. (Bland's wife is much better known!)

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 government had refused his request 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 Connolly's socialist anthem, The Red Flag.

Politics after 1886

2010-02-07T15:22:00.001Z

The Salisbury Government 1886-92
The main characteristic of the period 1886-1902 is the hegemony of the Conservatives under Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd marquess, 1830-1903), three-time prime minister (1885-86, 1886-92, 1895-1902). However, this apparent dominance covered grave cracks in the party. The coalition with the Liberal Unionists, formalized in 1895, created many problems. How was ‘Radical Joe’ to fit into a conservative agenda? Even without Chamberlain the Conservative party would have had problems. It was led by aristocratic, landed and Anglican elements but the bulk of its supporters were middle class and many were Nonconformist (having switched from the Liberals over Ireland).

Salisbury’s answer to this problem was to steer a middle path and sponsor modest reforms. He told his Chancellor, Lord Randolph Churchill (using Gladstone's vocabulary):

We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both classes and masses.

Outside Ireland his government enacted two major pieces of social legislation.

(a) The County Councils Act of 1888 created 62 county councils in England and Wales, some of the larger shires being subdivided. Sixty‐one towns of over 50,000 inhabitants were given county borough status and London was given its own county council, the LCC. In England there was no great change of personnel, many JPs being elected, and several lords‐lieutenant becoming chairmen. However, to the annoyance of the Conservatives, the LCC soon fell under the control of metropolitan radicals. In Wales, Nonconformist Liberals swept the board at the expense of the gentry.
(b) In 1891 elementary education was effectively made free – an expensive innovation.

Neither of these reforms was as radical as disaffected backbench Conservatives believed. The principal purpose of free education was to save the church schools from collapse. And in practice the local government reforms shored up the authority of the local elites.

The Liberal Government, 1892-95
The Liberals too had fundamental problems. The events of 1886 left them committed to Home Rule as the one issue that would relate them. According to Roy Jenkins, it was the only cause Gladstone was really interested in. But circumstances were driving them towards radicalism. In October 1891 a meeting of the National Liberal Federation at Newcastle adopted an uncompromisingly radical manifesto, the ‘Newcastle Programme’. It advocated church disestablishment in Wales and Scotland, triennial parliaments, payment of MPs and employers’ liability – with heavy implied warnings to the House of Lords if they resisted these reforms. Gladstone accepted these proposals reluctantly in order to preserve party unity.

The 1892 election was fought from mid-June to early July. The result gave the Liberals 273 seats, the Conservatives 268, the Liberal Unionists 47 and the Irish Nationalists 81. In the election two ‘independent labour’ MPs were returned; Keir Hardie for West Ham, and John Burns for Battersea. Gladstone had a majority of 40 because of Irish Nationalist support. The result was a disappointment to Gladstone who had expected a decisive victory:

a small Liberal majority being the heaviest weight I can well be called to bear.

It was an inadequate majority for intimidating the Lords. On 11 August the Salisbury government was defeated on an amendment to the address and on 15 August Gladstone, now semi-blind and semi-deaf became Prime Minister for the fourth time.

The Liberal cabinet contained Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th earl of Rosebery (1847-1929) (depicted left, painted by Millais), a reluctant Foreign Secretary and Sir William Harcourt (1827-1904), Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two members of the younger generation gained high office: Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928) became Home Secretary and Edward Grey (1862-1933) Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836-1908) became War Secretary. One of the most impressive of the new intake of Liberal MPs was David Lloyd George (1863-1945) who in 1890 had been returned for the previously Conservative Caernarfon Boroughs in a by-election.

For the government's defeat on the second Home Rule Bill see the earlier post.

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.

Gladstone had failed to groom a successor and his resignation led to a crisis in the party. Most Liberal MPs preferred Harcourt, but on 3 March the Queen sent for Rosebery; he had the backing of the London press, the Scottish wing of the party and most members of the cabinet. He was replaced at the Foreign Office by Lord Kimberley.

Rosebery, a horse-racing aristocrat, inherited a weak and divided government which lasted only 15 months. He was in a weak position leading a Liberal government from the Lords, which, he said was like addressing a crowd through a megaphone with a pudding in its orifice. The most important measure of his premiership was Harcourt’s famous (1894) budget, one of the most important in British history. It raised the basic rate of income tax to 1s. 8d, in the £, and introduced graduated death duties on the novel principle ‘that the state could tax capital and spend it as income’. Rosebery hated it, and in April 1894 he wrote his Chancellor a memorandum protesting that the Budget would forfeit the support of the propertied classes; Harcourt taunted him with wishing to protect his own pocket. Gladstone thought it

too violent ... by far the most Radical measure of my life time.

The ‘poor man’s budget’ was a sign of the ‘New Liberalism’, more committed to redistribution than to economic orthodoxy. However most of the new taxation came from increased duties of 6d on beer and spirits. The significance of death duties lay in the future.

Harcourt would have liked to have been bolder. He wanted to cut some taxes and to introduce old age pensions – a policy which was rapidly gaining support on the Liberal back benches. But his plans were put on hold by increased army and navy expenditure.

The government’s slowness to act on the issue of Welsh disestablishment led to a Commons defeat. The Queen asked Salisbury to form a government. The general election was fought in July 1895. It was a bad time for a governing party to fight an election. Unemployment was high and there were a myriad of grievances among traditional Liberal supporters – especially the brewers. The appearance of 28 socialist candidates may have helped to split the vote and was a warning that the Liberals had no monopoly on radicalism.

The Conservatives went into the election in a confident mood. The election of 1892 and three years of Liberal government had increasingly convinced Conservatives and Liberal Unionists that they would need to form an official coalition. This meant papering over the differences in temperament and political philosophy between the profoundly anti-democratic Salisbury and the populist Chamberlain. But in spite of their differences Chamberlain’s growing enthusiasm for empire brought them together. He was impressed by the economic arguments for imperial development as an antidote to economic depression and attracted by the notion of an imperial federation uniting the Anglo-Saxon race.

The Unionist victory was stunning; 340 Conservatives; 71 Liberal Unionists; 177 Liberals, 82 Irish Nationalists. [Keir Hardie lost his seat.]

The Third Salisbury Government, 1895-1902
Salisbury’s third administration was dominated by foreign policy. He was his own Foreign Secretary and Chamberlain was Colonial Secretary. One of Salisbury’s main concerns was to bring Britain out of the isolation into which Gladstone’s policies had led her. His nightmare was that there would be a European war in which Britain’s imperial possessions would become the spoils. Yet he did not want a full continental alliance. He maintained contacts with the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, Italy) but in spite of difficulties with France in the Mediterranean and Egypt, he wanted to keep friends with France.

In 1898 a serious crisis occurred in Anglo-French relations. Sir Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916) had long wanted to recapture the Sudan, in spite of cabinet hostility. His strategy was to advance by short stages up the Nile. On 2 September an Anglo-Egyptian force of 26,000 defeated an army of 40,000 mahdists at Omdurman and went on to occupy Khartoum. The results of the battle were the destruction of mahdism in the Sudan, and British dominance of the area.

But this did not go unchallenged as France too had expansionist ambitions. In July Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand and his French troops had occupied Fashoda on the White Nile, having advanced from Senegal. On 18 September Kitchener’s force reached Fashoda, where he handed Marchand a written protest and hoisted the British and Egyptian flags. For some months Britain and France stood on the brink of war. In November Marchand quit Fashoda, though he left behind him a string of posts. Early in 1899 the French gave way. An Anglo-French convention in March fixed an Anglo-French dividing line (roughly the watershed between the Nile and the Congo). This was seen as something of a diplomatic triumph for Salisbury.

With the occupation of Egypt, Britain had less need of Turkey. As early as 1892 Salisbury was saying that it was no longer possible to protect British influence in the Ottoman Empire. Turkish massacres of the Armenians in 1894/5/6 inflamed British opinion in a way their earlier massacres of the Bulgarians had not done. It was clear to Salisbury that the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating and even in Tory circles there was now very little sympathy for Turkey. However there was no immediate move towards Russia. Instead, in 1902 Britain formally ended her policy of ‘splendid isolation’ when she signed an alliance with Japan, as a counter to Russian ambitions in China.

ParNELL or PARnell?

2010-02-05T10:53:00.001Z

I've been having an email correspondence with an Irish friend about how to pronounce the great man's name. She dug up for me the first footnote in the Wikipedia entry that I think settles it - not because it's Wikipedia, but because it confirms what most historians say.

Most contemporaries pronounced his name /pɑrˈnɛl/, with the stress on the second syllable. Parnell himself disapproved of this pronunciation, pronouncing it /ˈpɑrnəl/, with the stress on the first syllable.

Thanks, Brenda!

The Second Home Rule Bill

2010-02-03T17:48:00.002Z

In February 1893 Gladstone, now back in power (of which more later) 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 Irish members at Westminster, but they were only to be 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.

Home Rule seemed to have come a step nearer: at least it had gone through all stages in the elected house and would have become law but for the Lords' veto. It was clear that the Conservative-dominated House of Lords would block any Home Rule Bill. And, of course, there was Ulster.

The defeat was predictable but it left the government in a quandary. . Yet there was no immediate at the conduct of the Lords, which suggests that for most people in the United Kingdom, Home Rule was not a popular cause.

The fall of Parnell

2010-02-02T15:21:00.001Z

This post owes a great deal to Paul Bew's entry on Parnell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. You may be able to access it through your library website.

After 1886 Home Rule was the polarizing issue in British politics.

From March 1887 the Chief Secretary for Ireland was Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, who was determined to assert the rule of law in that country. This was also the policy of his uncle, who believed that the Irish must take ‘a good licking’. Balfour stiffened the provisions of the Crimes Bill and subjected disaffected areas to a kind of martial law, under which Nationalist politicians, Roman Catholic priests and the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt were imprisoned. In September 1887 an illegal demonstration took place at Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. The police panicked and fired into an unarmed crowd, killing three civilians and wounding others.

Balfour’s draconian policies earned him the nickname ‘Bloody Balfour’. Ireland once more became an issue of fierce party politics as ‘Remember Mitchelstown’ became a favourite Liberal war cry. On 13 November 1887 (‘Bloody Sunday’) a rally was held in Trafalgar Square, despite a banning order by the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Serious rioting erupted, leading to loss of two lives and some prominent arrests. So tense was the atmosphere that the government created the ‘Special Branch’ to protect the queen during her Golden Jubilee celebrations.

The Unionist strategy of coercion was risky but so was the Liberal one of investing so heavily in Irish nationalism and in Parnell. In 1887, The Times published a series of articles, “Parnellism and Crime”, in which the Home Rule leaders were accused of being involved in murder and outrage during the land war. It produced a number of facsimile letters, allegedly bearing Parnell’s signature; in one of the letters Parnell had excused and condoned the murder of T.H. Burke in the Phoenix Park which he had publicly condemned. Parnell immediately declared the letter a forgery and the government set up a Special Commission to investigate the charges made against Parnell and his party. The commission sat for nearly two years. Their findings concluded that the letters were forgeries. They had been bought in good faith by The Times from a disreputable Irish journalist, Richard Pigott, who had forged one of them with his own hand.

In February 1889, Pigott entered the witness box and admitted to having forged the letters; he then fled to Madrid, where he shot himself. Parnell’s name was fully cleared by the commission, and the Times paid a large sum of money by way of compensation. The closing months of 1889 marked the high point of Parnell’s popularity. He received a standing ovation in the House of Commons, was presented with the freedom of the city of Edinburgh. In December he stayed as Gladstone’s guest at Hawarden, planning for what seemed the inevitable Liberal return to office.

A much more serious threat to Parnell’s career was to follow. At the end of 1889, Captain O’Shea, filed for divorce from his wife, Katharine, and Parnell was named in the proceedings. (For Garrett Fitzgerald's review in the Guardian (21 June, 2008) of the latest biography of Katharine O'Shea, see here.) He did not defend himself and to most people it appeared to be another trumped-up charge. This time, however, he was not innocent. He and Katharine O’Shea had fallen in love when they first met in 1880. By that time her marriage to Captain O’Shea was breaking up. From 1886, Parnell and Katharine O’Shea lived together. There is no doubt that Captain O’Shea had been aware of Parnell’s relationship with his wife. To keep him happy Parnell had O’Shea elected as an unpledged Home Ruler to the Galway City seat in February 1886, despite opposition from his party. (Was O’Shea blackmailing Parnell?) It is not clear why O’Shea delayed until December 1889 before seeking a divorce. One possible reason was the hope of obtaining a large sum of money from his wife, when her aunt, Mrs. Woods (‘Aunt Ben’), died. Mrs. Woods left her entire fortune to Katherine, but in such a way that her husband could not get his hands on it. Captain O’Shea is said to have resorted to blackmail, asking for £20,000 from his wife but she refused to pay. It was after this that he went ahead with the divorce case.

The case caused a sensation in England and Ireland. In England The Times gave currency to the phrase ‘the Nonconformist conscience’ in an attempt to label Nonconformists as hypocrites. On the day after the verdict the Baptist minister, John Clifford, wrote:

Men legally convicted of immorality will not be permitted to lead in the legislation of the Kingdom.

It was not merely Nonconformists who were outraged. Parnell’s adultery galvanized the social purity movement into action, and Cardinal Manning issued a letter to English Catholics imploring them to put morality above politics. Gladstone told Parnell’s second-in-command, Justin Macarthy, that if Parnell continued leader, the Liberals would lose the next election.

But Parnell, a proud man, showed no intention of retiring. His refusal to step down produced a bitter spilt in the party. His old partner, Michael Davitt, along with another Irish MP, Tim Healy, urged the Irish party to dismiss Parnell. A meeting of the Irish Parliamentary Party was held on 1 December 1890.

The meeting lasted for several days. Desperately the party tried to achieve a compromise. It sought guarantees from Gladstone of a satisfactory home-rule measure if Parnell was to retire, but Gladstone refused to be pressurized in this way. Finally, when one of Parnell's supporters, John Redmond, referred to ‘the master of the party’, Tim Healy could not resist the malevolent quip:

Who is to be the mistress of the party?

Parnell bitterly retorted by describing Healy as that

cowardly little scoundrel … who dares in an assembly of Irishmen to insult a woman.

Healy later called Parnell ‘Mr Landlord Parnell’, introducing a note of aggressive Catholic nationalism into the debate.

After a long discussion as to whether the man (Parnell) was more important than the cause (Home Rule), the party split in two. Forty four members sided with Justin McCarthy, the vice-chairman, and remained in favour of the alliance with the Liberals, and twenty seven sided with Parnell. Parnell had now lost the leadership of the parliamentary party. He refused to accept the verdict given against him. Almost immediately afterwards, at a by-election in Kilkenny, Parnell's candidate was beaten (22 December 1890) 2 to 1. In 1891 two more by-elections were held and in both the Parnellite candidates were beaten. On the campaign Parnell had mud thrown at him. He was subsequently and falsely accused of a whole range of exorbitant acts including embezzling party funds to pay for his affair.

In June 1891, he married Katherine O’Shea at Steyning registry office, profoundly shocking the Irish clergy, but he still refused to retire from public life. Eventually the strain of addressing meetings up and down the country proved too much for him. On 27 September while suffering from rheumatism he addressed an outdoor meeting in the rain. Returning to England gravely ill, he went home to his wife at Brighton and died on 6 October 1891. He was only forty-five years of age. 150,000 people attended his funeral at Glasnevin cemetery, his casket led by a group of radical Fenians.

Parnell was the architect of his own downfall. He refused to co-operate with the party during the critical time of the divorce dispute. His attitude was that of a ‘loner’ and so he was prepared to ignore the advice of his best friends. Despite this his achievements were real and lasting. He brought Home Rule from being a faint hope to the forefront of national politics. Both the English political parties and successive governments had to recognise the importance of the Irish question and declare their standpoint on it. By his creation of a disciplined party, he proved that Irishmen were capable of ruling themselves.

Perhaps he will be most remembered for the quotation that can be found on his statue at the junction of O'Connell Street and Parnell Street in Dublin City Centre:

'No man shall have the right to fix the boundary to the march of a Nation'.

But possibly his greatest legacy was the powerfully emotional image of Ireland’s ‘uncrowned king’ torn down by base followers; a prophet outcast with the Promised Land in sight.’
He is still remembered today on Ivy Day, 6th October, when supporters wear a sprig of ivy on their clothing.

Meanwhile agrarian agitation in Ireland was abating. With Ireland relatively tranquil, the policy (wrongly) called ‘Killing Home Rule with Kindness’ was pursued. Public money was invested in rural projects and new piers and harbours along the western seaboard. Ireland became relatively quiet until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ireland

2010-01-08T15:34:00.004Z

The two posts below are about the events of 1885-6 when the Liberals faced their great crisis over Irish Home Rule.

Ripley students will be studying these events a little later than those at Poverest. Poverest students should scroll down or use blog archive on the side-bar to see the material that is relevant to them.

Gladstone and Ireland

2010-01-08T15:32:00.004Z

The Problem
When Gladstone became Prime Minister in 1868 he had 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. The alleged murderers were executed at the end of the year.

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

2010-01-08T15:30:00.000Z

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 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), Hartington 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.

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.

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?

The Grand Old Man is 200

2009-12-26T15:05:00.001Z

Praise for Gladstone on the bicentenary of his birth from Simon Heffer, the normally grumpy Daily Telegraph columnist.

The Mail is also onto the bicentenary.

Gladstone's second administration

2009-12-09T22:37:00.000Z

Gladstone’s second administration was elected in April 1880. He was then 70 and until 1882 he was also Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as Prime Minister. The cult of the ‘Grand Old Man’ was now in full force. Biographies were written and statuettes, plates, jugs and engravings made (as well as chamber pots for Tory households!) and visitors travelled to Hawarden to see him fell trees [see above!].

The Conservatives were temporarily demoralized. After Disraeli’s death in April 1881 they divided the leadership between Sir Stafford Northcote in the Commons, and the Tory intellectual, Lord Salisbury, in the Lords. Salisbury was much the more impressive personality, though his impetuosity led Gladstone to call him ‘Prince Rupert’. As early as 1882 he had coined the phrase ‘Villa Toryism’ to describe the new Conservative supporters, and in the years of opposition he played an important role in the long process of transforming the Conservatives from the party of the landed interest to the party of property in general. The quasi-medieval Primrose League, founded in 1883, became the largest political body in the country.

The early months of Gladstone’s second premiership were wasted on the affair of Charles Bradlaugh, a Liberal MP for Northamptonshire, who between 1880 and 1886 was not allowed to take his seat because he refused to take the parliamentary oath.

The whole affair allowed a group of younger Tory MPs to practise their debating skills and their opportunism. They soon became known as the ‘Fourth Party’ and their leader was Lord Randolph Churchill. In 1884 he and Salisbury came to an agreement by which Salisbury became, in effect, the sole leader of the Conservatives.

Franchise reform
The increasing ‘democratization’ of political life in the 1870s had led to a growing recognition that the Second Reform Act contained indefensible anomalies. The great towns and cities still lacked their rightful number of MPs and the small boroughs were heavily over-represented. The anomalies relating to the franchise were even more absurd. Since the vote in 1867 had been granted only to urban householders, industrial workers living outside the borough boundaries (such as miners) did not have the vote while farm labourers living in boroughs possessed it.

The contribution of the National Liberal Federation to Gladstone’s victory meant that not only was its founder, Joseph Chamberlain, MP for Birmingham since 1876, rewarded with a seat in the cabinet, but that the government was committed at least in principle to some measure of parliamentary reform. By 1883 Chamberlain’s patience could no longer be contained. The government passed three major reforming measures:

1. The Corrupt Practices Act (1883) restricted treating at elections.
2. The Third Reform Bill was introduced in February 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 bill was initially blocked in the Lords but Salisbury eventually agreed to let it go through provided it was accompanied by a redistribution measure.
3. The Redistribution Act (1885) engineered the most extensive reform of the constituencies since 1832. 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. Salisbury’s predictions about ‘villa Toryism’ proved correct.

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.

.

Egypt and the Sudan

2009-12-09T13:59:00.002Z

Gladstone had been elected on a largely anti-imperialist platform and it is one of history's ironies that under his premiership the Empire expanded significantly. One of his government's most controversial actions was the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882.

At the beginning of the 1880s Egypt was a largely Turkish province whose strategic importance had been greatly increased by the completion of the French-inspired and French-financed Suez Canal in 1869. French predominance was somewhat redressed by Disraeli’s raid on the Suez Canal company, but this coup had been strongly opposed by Gladstone who had condemned it as a showy and dangerous example of ‘Beaconsfieldism’. In 1879 Khedive Ismail was deposed at the instigation of various European powers and replaced by his docile son, Tawfiq. At the same time the Egyptian finances were put under the so-called Dual Control of Britain of officials from Britain and France.

For all Gladstone’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, it was difficult to avoid entanglement in Egypt. Not only did it occupy a strategic position, but it had an enormous national debt which consumed two thirds of its revenue and was financed by bonds among the propertied classes of Vienna, Paris, and London. Gladstone had intensive holdings in Egypt, though neither he nor anyone else saw a conflict of interest. How times change!

But Egypt was vulnerable to charismatic opponents of European interference. In 1881 and 1882 coups were staged by a Nasser-like figure, Colonel Urabi Pasha (the name is variously transliterated) whose core message was ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’. In May 1882 British and French naval forces arrived off Alexandria to protect their respective ‘interests’. On 11 June an anti-Western riot in the town left 50 Europeans dead and another 60 injured, including the British consul. Urabi then began to fortify the harbour at Alexandria, event though a British fleet was lying off-shore.

Gladstone believed that Urabi had to be stopped. His preference was for a ‘Concert of Europe’ intervention, but this was blocked by Bismarck. The French were reluctant to get involved and their fleet simply steamed away from Alexandria. Most of Gladstone’s cabinet were firm for action.

On 11 July under the command of Admiral Seymour British naval guns pounded the Alexandria waterfront for ten and a half hours after which 40,000 men were landed under Sir Garnet Wolseley. There were not vast casualties, though substantial death and destruction took place in rioting when Urabi left the city. On the same day Gladstone made a statement in the Commons and was torn apart for his inconsistency by the opposition politician, Arthur Balfour. The action caused John Bright to resign from the cabinet. He said in private that it was

simply damnable - worse than anything ever perpetrated by Dizzy.

By the end of July the government was geared to a land expedition to back up the bombardment. 15,000 men were sent from England and another thousand from India under the command of Wolseley (the costs met by raising income tax from 5d to 8d for half the current financial year).

The expedition was a quick action. Urabi declared a jihad but on 13 September his army was defeated at Tel-el-Kebir, 59 miles north-east of Cairo. British casualties were under 450. Urabi was captured, tried, made to plead guilty and then exiled to Ceylon. It was a spectacular exhibition of British supremacy. On hearing of his capture Gladstone ordered church bells to be rung and the guns to be fired in the London parks to mark the triumph. He welcomed the troops home with obvious enthusiasm. As Roy Jenkins says in his biography of Gladstone,

Within two months, only half by intention, Britain had put a lid on Egyptian nationalism, which was to be kept down for more or less seventy years, extruded French political and military ... influence, and assumed responsibility for the most prosperous and sophisticated country in Africa.

But the Khedive remained the nominal ruler, and Britain refused to accept permanent responsibility for Egypt. In September Major Evelyn Baring was knighted and sent out to Egypt as British agent and consul-general. As Lord Cromer, he remained in Egypt for 23 years – though the occupation was meant to be temporary.

Britain’s actions had huge significance. France felt itself out-manoeuvred and the way was prepared for the Franco-Russian alliance of the early 1890s.

Gordon and the Sudan

Occupation of Egypt (temporary or otherwise) opened up the question of what was to be done about the Sudan, whose order was the responsibility for the Khedive, acting for the Sultan. In the Sudan Egypt’s authority had been challenged by a religious uprising led by a militant leader, Muhhammed Ahmed, the Mahdi, a former slave trader and an Egyptian official. He had been declared a ‘False Prophet’ by orthodox Islamists, and the Khedive was determined to put him down. He sent an army of 10,000 Egyptian troops under a British commander, William Hicks (‘Hicks Pasha’), to achieve it. In retrospect the British government should have vetoed this.

In November 1883 just as the Cabinet was preparing the further reduction of its Egyptian garrison, the army was ambushed and Hicks killed. Most of the Sudan was now in the Mahdi’s hands. In January the government decided that the Sudan had to be evacuated, but a great difficulty arose over the scattered Egyptian garrisons, especially the ones centred round Khartoum.

British public opinion was outraged and edgy. A head of steam built up, led by W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, to send out Major-General Charles Gordon, then in semi-retirement in order to carry out the policy of supervising the British evacuation - in spite of the fact that in both the Pall Mall Gazette and The Times Gordon had publicly opposed the policy. He was also a messianic, unstable character.

In January 1884 Gordon was appointed. He set off from Charing Cross (the foreign secretary had to buy his ticket) and arrived at Khartoum in February and formulated a plan to commission Zobeir Pasha, a former slave-trader, as governor-general of the Sudan to hold Khartoum and the Nile valley against the Mahdi.

In May the Mahdists advanced and Gordon was cut off at Khartoum. For a while the government did nothing - Gladstone was immersed in the details of the Third Reform Bill - and it was only in August that a relief force under Wolseley was despatched to the Sudan. They did not reach Khartoum until 28 January 1885. Gordon had been killed two days earlier after a siege of 320 days. His body was never found. News of his death reached England on 5 February.

[Even though El Mahdi died shortly after the fall of Khartoum, his Mahdist Islamic regime survived until 1889 when the Anglo-Egyptian forces under Kitchner captured Khartoum, regained control and proclaimed a British-Egyptian condominium dominated mainly by British policies. The British presence would last until 1956 when Sudan got its independence.]

Gladstone had viewed Gordon as an insubordinate general and a religious fanatic, and he was unable to grasp his hold on the popular imagination. When he heard the news he was in north Lancashire. Gladstone was furiously denounced by Opposition MPs. At Carnforth Junction, on his way down to London, he received a telegram en clair from the Queen, which was promptly leaked to the press. When Gladstone was seen at the theatre, he was promptly dubbed by the Tories as heartless. The popularity of the government declined steeply and Gladstone acquired the nickname ‘Murderer of Gordon’. A vote of censure in the Commons was defeated by only 14 votes.

By this time Gladstone's government was in deep trouble, not merely because of Gordon but also because of problems in Ireland (of which more later) and internal divisions between aristocratic Whigs like Hartington and Radicals like Joseph Chamberlain.

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. (There will be a subsequent post on Ireland.) The Gordon affair administered the final blow.

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 and Dilke resigned.

On 8 June the ‘Ministry of all the Troubles’ was defeated by 12 votes over the budget - largely as a result of heavy (76) 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.

Old Birmingham brought back to life

2009-12-04T06:11:00.005Z

Caryl has sent me some more photographs of Birmingham, showing how it is now trying to safeguard its remarkable heritage. A carefully restored, atmospheric 19th-century courtyard of working people's houses shows Birmingham's last surviving court of back-to back-housing.

The story is told through the experiences of the people who lived and worked here. It covers four different periods, from 1840 to 1977. The design of each interior reflects the varied cultures, religions and professions of the families who made their homes here.

Other photographs show the restored canal system. Brummies will tell you with pride that their city has more canals than Venice!

The Victorian countryside

2009-12-01T08:29:00.001Z

Above: Myles Birket Foster, 'An Afternoon in the Garden'.

Demography
The census of 1871 showed that out of a population of 31 million nearly two thirds of the inhabitants of Great Britain still lived in rural areas or in towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants - and many of the small towns were still more loosely tied to an agricultural rather than a manufacturing economy. Apart from London only five cities housed more than a quarter of a million people. Heavy urbanization was physically confined to certain localities: London and Middlesex, Lancashire and Durham, Staffordshire and Warwickshire, west-central Scotland and parts of south Wales. Suburbia was still limited and unknown as a word. Most people still lived near their place of work. Farm labouring was the largest male occupation. Even in industrial areas many urban-dwellers lived in walking distance of green fields.

But this Census was the last decennial survey for which this was true. The picture was irrevocably shattered by three factors

1. the agricultural depression
2. the gravitational pull of urban employment
3. the development of a cheap, suburban transport system.

Between 1871 and 1881 the urban population increased by over 25%. Buckinghamshire, Huntindonshire and Oxfordshire lost a quarter of their population. Much of Middlesex and Surrey was transformed by the extension of the underground railway. The prolonged building boom of the 1870s and 1880s encircled the towns with what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘a base and brickish skirt’. By 1911 out of a population of 45 million, 40% lived in towns of over 100,000 (in England and Wales more than 50%). Greater London had 7 million inhabitants and 14 provincial cities had over a quarter of a million. By 1914 only 8 % of the British population were employed in agriculture, compared with 27% in Germany and 38% in France. Daily commuting, not just from the suburbs but from the shires and the south coast had become common and rural England was beginning to aquire its role as a place for living and leisure rather than work. Of children born between 1901 and 1911, 80% were born in towns and cities, and probably grew up with an almost wholly urban outlook.

The Agricultural Depression
A whole combination of adverse circumstances combined to make the period 1877-1895 a dark time for British farmers, especially grain producers.

1. A series of wet summers, culminating in the wettest season in living memory in 1879 meant an alarmingly low yield in successive harvests.
2. Farmers could not raise prices because they could not compete against the produce of the American prairies where the McCormick reaper was cutting labour costs. By the 1870s American technology had advanced to the use of self-binders, while the new railroads and steamships were cutting transport costs.
3. The government refused to reintroduce agricultural protection - this was one of the reasons why Disraeli lost the election of 1880.
4. There was an outbreak of animal diseases: 1879 liver rot, 1880 foot and mouth.

The Assault on ‘Landlordism’

The political consequence was to strain relations between landowners and tenants, which led to widespread criticism of the whole landed order’ This was especially intense in Ireland and Scotland. In 1879 the Irish Land League was founded, its President Michael Davitt, its Secretary Charles Stewart Parnell (of whom much more later).

The winter of 1881-2 was particularly severe, and many Highland crofters were so destitute that they could no longer pay their rents. When the factors of the great estates tried to evict them, they retaliated by taking back grazing rights of which they had been deprived and by rent strikes. This escalated into violence at the ‘Battle of the Braes’ on Skye in 1882 when Glasgow policemen clashed with crofters. For the rest of the decade their were disturbances throughout the Highlands and gunboats and marines were sent in to quell them. The Crofters' War was the most severe crisis in the Highlands since the heyday of Jacobitism’. The crofters were supported by the Irish Land League and by a great deal of public opinion in Scotland.
There were similar disturbances in Wales.

In retrospect it can be seen that some of the attacks on landlordism were unfair. In the Celtic fringes, the problem was poor soil and an adverse climate, which left the landowners often powerless to effect improvements. Aristocrats such as the Dukes of Bedford and Argyll went into print to defend themselves. But perhaps the unfairness is beside the real point, which was a shift in political power. The widening of the franchise and the agricultural depression struck fatal blows at the aristocracy.

In England there was little rural violence, but the Liberal politician, Joseph Chamberlain delivered celebrated attacks on the aristocracy. On 30 March 1883:

Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class - of the class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin; whose fortunes - as in his case - have originated by grants made in times gone by for services which courtiers rendered kings, have since grown and increased, while they have slept, by levying an increased share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country.

The Agricultural Worker
Agricultural workers were obvious sufferers from the depression and this lay behind much migration to the towns. However, as a group they were becoming more assertive.
In the 1870s they became unionized. At a meeting of Warwickshire labourers, a Primitive Methodist preacher, Joseph Arch, a labourer at Barford, made a revivalist speech calling for a farm workers’ strike, which raised him to the leadership of a movement. The strikers were given considerable publicity in the press, especially the Liberal Daily News, and on 29 March 1872 they founded at Leamington the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers’ Union. It spread rapidly and soon became a national union with a membership of nearly 100,000 at the end of 1872. But after a defeat over a Suffolk and Norfolk strike in 1874 membership fell rapidly, and with the decline in agriculture the union lost power.

In 1883 Chamberlain and his Liberal colleague John Morley led a fierce popular agitation in the country, coining the phrases ‘the Peers against the People’ and ‘Mend them or end them’. In 1884, partly as a result of this agitation, the Third Reform Act broadly aligned county and borough franchises, adding three million new voters. Combined with the secret ballot, already in existence, this freed small tenants from the political dominance of their landlords. This gave the Liberals a short-term advantage allowing them to gain a majority of English county seats in the general election of 1885; only in 1906 were they ever to do so again. But the Liberals could be certain of the rural vote only in East Anglia.

In 1888 the County Councils Act replaced the automatic dominance of the aristocrats and gentry with elected councils.

The Village
The village was changing rapidly, and in spite of the agricultural depression and depopulation, showed many signs of life.

The country parish of 1860 was very traditional: ‘the squire in his pew, his friend the parson in his stall, respectable farmers in pews, and on benches the labourers in smock frocks ... their wives often in scarlet flannel shawls’. But already in 1860 a maker of smock-patterns complained about the decline in trade, and in the 1870s only a few older men wore smocks. Instead the labourer’s Sunday best was the cheap town suit. This brought about a psychological change. ‘The labourer in his smock expected to go to church. The labourer in his black suit did not.’ Contemporaries had little doubt that the village church was in decline. Partly it was because the village itself was in decline, partly it was because the labourer himself was changing.

Every institution in the village declined as the young moved into the towns. The church was a particular sufferer. Rural clergy complained of empty pulpits. By the 1890s the value of tithes had declined by 25%. Between 1885 and 1905 the Easter offering used as a gift to the parson, spread rapidly through the country churches; after the turn of the century the Inland Revenue began to tax them!

The village was changing. The village school flourished as never before, staffed by better educated teachers, though one consequence was the Sunday schools declined in importance.
A new institution in the village was the Mothers’ Union, whose membership was a quarter of a million by 1912, the majority working class.

Another sign of strength was the building of village halls as meeting places for various social events. Partly this came from pressure from women who were not content with the public house. 48% of the total were built between 1880 and 1890. A high proportion of village halls were built on the initiative of the squire or parson, though Nonconformists gave generously and also spent freely at bazaars. The hall was usually regarded as a church hall, used, for example for Sunday schools and confirmation classes, but it was also used for secular functions. On the right is the village hall of Barnaby-in-the Willows, Nottinghamshire.

An Act 1894 provided for an elected council in villages of over 300 people. The churchwardens ceased to be overseers, the parson was no longer chairman and not even a member unless elected. The removal of secular business left the old vestry without a life, even though its legal existence was unaffected.

Rural nostalgia
As the country became more urbanized, a generation grew up that provided a market for idealized pictures of country life. The paintings of Myles Birket Foster show how an artist could make a career catering to this market. See, for example, his 'At the Cottage Door'.

The Times online

2009-11-28T22:26:00.000Z

Excellent news for those of you who have tickets for Bromley libraries. Click here for access to The Times archive from 1785 to 1985.

Thanks, Jeremy.

Victorian civic pride

2009-11-25T15:05:00.001Z

[The Birmingham Council House, completed in 1879.] For more details, see below

The building of cities was a characteristic Victorian achievement, impressive in scale but limited in vision, creating new opportunities but also providing massive new problems. Perhaps their outstanding feature was hidden from public view - their hidden network of pipes, drains, and sewers, one of the biggest technical and social achievements of the age ... Yet their surface world was fragmented, intricate, cluttered, eclectic and noisy, the unplanned product of a private enterprise economy developing within an older, traditional society. …Economic individualism and common civic purpose were difficult to reconcile.… Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities.

Individualist preference for avoiding public enterprise whenever possible died hard. J.K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914.

Urban Growth
The Victorians continually commented on the speed of urban development. A north London rector wrote,

‘I have tried to keep Hornsey a village, but circumstances have beaten me’.

The visitor to Birmingham could expect to find a street of houses in the autumn where he saw his horse at grass in the spring. In Victorian South London the houses could spring up in what seemed a single night.

Much of the effort went into church building, but particularly in the last quarter of the century there was a huge development of public offices, hospitals, schools, sewage farms, and water works.

Transport
Trains: The railway linked the new cities together and made their growth possible. The first railways encouraged the concentration of the urban population (contrast with the car which scattered cities further away from their centres). The first local passenger service to be authorized in London was started between Tooley Street and Deptford in 1863. The first workman’s fare was introduced in London by the Metropolitan Railway Company in 1864 and on a section of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1852. The Cheap Trains Act of 1883, which compelled the railway companies to offer workman’s fares was deliberately designed for further encouraging the migration of the working classes into the suburbs in order to relieve housing congestion in the central areas.

A new leisure industry sprang up in the wake of the railways. In 1841 a Baptist missionary named Thomas Cook conceived the notion of organizing excursions at a cheap rate and entered into negotiations with the Midland Railway Company to lay on special trains for private outings for temperance clubs and for Sunday schools. Thousands were taken by train to the Crystal Palace in 1851. Once Saturday half-holidays had become the normal practice in the 1860s trips were organized to places like Scarborough, Whitby, Blackpool, and Southport.

Trams: The first tram was introduced in Birkenhead in 1860 by the American engineer, George Francis Train. The Tramways Act of 1870 gave local authorities the option to buy out private tramways by compulsory purchase after twenty years of operation. By 1900 61 local authorities owned tramways and 89 undertakings were managed by private enterprise. The trams made it possible for working men to get to the football grounds and to the holiday firework displays and galas in the public parks.

London transport: In London, the advent of trams was fiercely resisted. But in the 1850s Charles Pearson, solicitor to the City of London, devised a plan to build an ‘Arcade Railway’ beneath the Farringdon Road to connect the Great Northern railway at King’s Cross with Farringdon in the City of London. The Great Northern agreed to subscribe £170,000, but one of its officials misappropriated the money and was transported for life.

The scheme was revived in the 1860s in the form of the Metropolitan Railway which would connect Paddington, Euston and Kings Cross to the Faringdon terminus. The Times condemned it as Utopian. Most of the capital was contributed by engineering firms, who hoped to gain contracts to build the proposed railway. The Metropolitan Railway was opened on 9 January 1863. The railway earned its shareholders reasonable dividends, though these were mainly due to the policy of building railways overground into the suburbs - Gladstone lost £25,000 worth of stock in 1884.

The Inner Circle was complete by 1884. The City and Southwark followed in 1890. An Act of 1893 authorized the Bakerloo Line to link Baker Street and Waterloo, though the building was held up by problems of funding.

The Northern Metropolitan Railway coined the term ‘Metroland’. In 1868 an independent railway company had opened a line from Baker Street to Swiss Cottage, and in 1880 the Northern Metropolitan extended it to Harrow. The slogan: ‘Live in Metroland’ showed that it was not so much satisfying existing needs as creating new residential districts.

The railway made chain stores and large department stores possible. W. H. Smith and Sons were directly dependent on the railway. They began to build their networks in the 1850s. Department stores began to flourish in London and the provinces in the 1880s and 90s.

Long distance commuting also became possible. In 1891 a commentator wrote of how ‘rich merchants and stockbrokers’ went up to town in the morning from Brighton, and returned in time for dinner.

Health
In 1869 Manchester appointed its first medical officer of health - Liverpool had been even earlier - 1847. But in general, it was not until after the 1870s that health conditions in the poorer parts of the cities began to improve. The Sanitary Commission of 1869-1870 collected ample evidence concerning the petty jealousies and unwillingness to spend money of the mid-Victorian Boards of Health. This was the prelude to the setting up of the Local Government Board in 1871, the Public Health Act of 1875, which divided the country into urban and rural sanitary districts with clearly defined duties, and the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwelling Acts of the same year.

Civic Pride?
In spite of the problems, the political vitality Victorian city was a cause of civic pride. Liberal politicians in particular praised it for its progressive spirit and lack of deference. In contrast to the Dorset labourers, Manchester working men were not expected to touch their caps to their masters.

However the problems of the cities were increasingly recognized. During the 1880s and 90s the detailed study of the poorer parts of the city became highly systematic and organized, and social surveys founded on statistical investigation familiarized the reading public with the awkward facts of deprivation.

There was also the phenomenon recognized by European observers that wealthy manufacturers did not wish to live in the town but in the country. Ruskin, Morris, William Booth and other commentators expressed horror at urban life. The paradox is that the most urban society in the world was deeply ambivalent about urbanization. One religious novelist wrote:

Adam and Eve were created and placed in a garden. Cities are the result of the fall.

The settlement movement, seen in Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884, was an attempt to deal with the effects of urban deprivation.

In 1877 Manchester Town Hall (left) was completed, and was at that date unequalled for size and convenience among the municipal buildings of Europe. Bradford’s Italianate town hall also dates from the ‘70s. In the great provincial cities, the ‘municipalization’ of the ‘natural monopolies’ became increasingly the vogue - though more from empiricism than from a collectivist ideology.

Birmingham and the Civic Gospel

During the 1870s and 1880s Birmingham (population 344,000) acquired the reputation of being the best governed city in the world. It had a very diverse labour force, skilled and therefore relatively prosperous. Housing was better than in most English cities, and there was a high degree of social mobility. In the early Victorian period it was the home of radical politics. From 1857 John Bright was one of the MPs. He had been defeated in Manchester because of his opposition to the Crimean War, but welcomed in Birmingham.

The radical tradition continued with the formation of the Birmingham Liberal Association in 1865. It campaigned with the Reform League for the extension of the franchise. The Association became a powerful body within the Liberal party, and in the general election of 1868 it secured the return of three Liberal MPs. This type of ‘caucus’ organization was unprecedented.

One of the key figures in what can be seen as the Birmingham Renaissance was the preacher, George Dawson, one of the great public speakers of the age, who became minister of the Mount Zion Chapel in 1844 at the age of twenty-three. He was a literary man much influenced by German Romanticism and the writings of Thomas Carlyle and his theological liberalism put him at odds with his congregation. Many of his flock followed him to his new Church of the Saviour, where he preached his distinctive civil gospel. One of his hearers, and the main beneficiary of the civic gospel, was
Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914).

Chamberlain had arrived in Birmingham in 1854 at the age of 18 and quickly established a reputation as a businessman and forceful personality. A Unitarian, he was drawn into politics by his opposition to Anglican privilege. He became a councillor in 1869 and in 1870 of the first School Board. Four years later he was chosen as Mayor as well as Chairman of the School Board. He was re-elected mayor in 1874 and 1875.

His three years of office from 1873 to 1876 saw the implementation of his civic gospel.

There is no nobler sphere for those who have not the opportunity of engaging in imperial politics than to take part in municipal work, to the wise conduct of which they owe the welfare, the health, the comfort and the lives of 400,000 people.

His radical programme in Birmingham and the caucus system of securing it were wildly controversial, yet both forced the problems of big cities into national prominence. ‘City government was never quite the same again.’

Chamberlain’s achievements in Birmingham were:

the purchase by the corporation of the gas-works, water-works and sewage farm
the destruction of the slums in the heart of the city
the provision of artisans’ dwellings
the extension of free libraries and galleries

Gas figured prominently in the working out of the civic gospel - it was the classic symbol of ‘improvement’. Chamberlain gave three reasons for ‘municipalizing’ the gas and water companies.

1. Financial: its profits could be used to improve the health of Birmingham.
2. All monopolies in any way sustained by the state should be in the hands of the elected representatives of the people, to whom their profits should of right go.
3. Municipalization would increase the power and influence of the local council, which should be encouraged to become a real local parliament, supreme in its own sphere of jurisdiction.

Agreement with the gas companies (the Birmingham Gas and Light Co and the Staffordshire Gas Light Co) was finally reached in March 1874. The first year’s profits greatly exceeded expectations. Plant was extended and modernized, the price of gas was lowered and the working conditions of the employees improved.

In the same year the Council began negotiations to acquire public control of the Birmingham Waterworks Company. This put up more of a resistance than the gas companies, and in the Lords the bill was bitterly opposed as ‘compulsory purchase’ and unjust to shareholders. The bill passed the House in August 1875 and the Works were transferred in January 1876.

Chamberlain’s third venture was his town improvement scheme. The 1875 Artisans’ Dwelling Act allowed corporations to purchase slum property for the purchase of clearance. Chamberlain saw in this not only an opportunity to clear away the slums in the centre but a chance to carry out a radical new town improvement. His intention was to create a new ‘Parisian Boulevard’ (Corporation Street) lined with blocks of modern dwellings - though when it was built the new street was composed of shops and office buildings. Work began in 1878. Corporation Street was opened as far as Bull Street in 1881.

As early as 1853 the Council bought the site of the future Council House but because of bickering and misunderstandings it remained undeveloped until 1870. In that year a proposal of the Estates Committee was at last accepted for the construction of ‘town buildings’ and Alfred Waterhouse was hired as a consultant. Chamberlain laid the foundation for the new buildings in 1874. They were completed in 1897. On the central pediment of the town hall was a sculptured group representing ‘Britannia rewarding the Birmingham Manufacturers’. The interior of the building included a mayor’s parlour, reception rooms and a semi-circular Council Chamber. The windows of the upper tier were filled with stained glass and both the walls and ceilings were ornamented with frescoes representing Birmingham industry.

Behind it stood the museum and art gallery.

In 1874 Chamberlain stood unsuccessfully for Sheffield. At a by-election in 1876 he was elected for Birmingham. In 1877 he reorganized the Liberal party in the constituencies by forming large local associations on a representative basis in federating them in a central organization, the National Liberal Federation. He was thus able to claim substantial credit for the Liberal victory in 1880. The election was regarded as a test of ‘the efficiency of the new democratic machinery of which Birmingham is the capital’.

Writers from all parts of the world went to Birmingham to report on what they saw there. In 1890 an American writer called it ‘the best governed city in the world’. The doctrine of ‘municipal socialism’ rapidly enveloped the 19th century city. In 1909 of the 74 county boroughs in England and Wales, 53 owned their water undertakings, 33 the gas supply, 65 electricity and 50 the tramways. Sidney Webb described the route of a town councillor as he walked along

the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal water.

But for all its impressive achievements, Birmingham suffered the usual fate of Victorian cities - alternating between periods of civic spending and going slow. Battles about rates were endemic. Unfortunately, we can't be too idealistic about Victorian achievements. However, there is now some imaginative thought now going into making Birmingham a more attractive place. See below. Thanks, Caryl.

Hommage à John Stuart Mill (update)

2009-11-24T11:37:00.001Z

These photographs were taken by Penny over half term. She visited Avignon and found the graves of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill. The second photograph refers to this admirable organisation. If you read French you might like to explore the site.

The Midlothian campaign (1880)

2009-11-18T17:57:00.002Z

The troubles in South Asia and South Africa contributed to the government’s run of misfortunes. Domestically, unemployment was rising and the municipal elections had gone badly. A Farmers’ Alliance, formed in July 1879 began to put up candidates at by-elections demanding government assistance and a return to protection.

Disraeli also faced a resurgent Gladstone, even though Hartington, the heir of the duke of Devonshire, was the nominal leader of the Liberals. Hartington had disagreed with Gladstone’s policy on the Ottoman Empire, believing that, though Disraeli was wrong to offer unconditional support to Turkey, it was a mistake to encourage Balkan nationalism.

Gladstone, who was also unhappy with his Greenwich constituency, became convinced that it was right to accept an invitation from the marginal (and small) Conservative seat of Midlothian. After a survey revealed that the Liberals would almost certainly win the seat, he had announced his candidature in January 1879 and his determination to smash ‘Beaconsfieldism’ which he saw as an amoral programme of profligate expenditure and an unjust foreign policy..

In November 1879 he arrived in Scotland and began a fortnight’s ceaseless campaigning in Midlothian and the surrounding districts (24 November to 8 December). He progressed by train from Liverpool to Edinburgh with intermediate station speeches at Carlisle, Hawick, and Galashiels. The first week was devoted to strict Midlothian campaigning - nine speeches of which five were major orations - the second week to campaigning in other Scottish towns and cities.

What was novel about Gladstone’s actions was the delivery of a large number of connected speeches over a short period. The news agencies, freed from high charges by the Telegraph Act (1868) meant that his speeches were widely and speedily reported in four or five columns. Yet above all it was Gladstone’s physical presence that gave his speeches their electrifying effect. Enthusiasts came from all over Scotland to hear them. In Waverly Market, people who fainted were handed out over the heads. His message was simple: ‘Beaconsfieldism’ was rotten in every respect. His attacks focused above all on foreign affairs and finance. The most morally powerful speech was about Afghanistan:

Remember that ... the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.

In March 1880 Disraeli, buoyed up by some by-election successes, announced the dissolution of Parliament. A week later, Gladstone journed to Edinburgh from London and was greeted by thousands at all the major stations of the east coast route. He then delivered a second round of speeches. His victory was declared on 7 April

The return of Gladstone
The final result was a Liberal increase from 243 to 351 seats, and a Conservative loss from 352 to 239. Especially noteworthy was the Liberal gain of 38 county seats in England and Scotland. Disraeli blamed the result on ‘six bad harvest in succession’.

Hartington, who had just been returned for North-East Lancashire, was in a difficult position because Gladstone stated that the unexpectedly decisive Liberal majority called for ‘skilled and strong hands’. The Queen wanted anyone but Gladstone to be Prime Minister. She wrote to her Secretary, Ponsonby:

She will sooner abdicate than send for that half-mad fire-brand who wd ruin everything & be a Dictator. Others but herself may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen.

But Hartington knew he would be in an impossible position as Prime Minister, with Gladstone on the back benches. When Hartington was summoned to Windsor he recommended that Gladstone be sent for. Victoria reluctantly agreed and Gladstone became Prime Minister for the second time on 23 April. Gladstone to John Bright:

You and I probably both think we see the hand of God manifest in what has been going on.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80)

2009-11-18T17:57:00.000Z

[This is a picture of the 92nd Highlanders at Kandahar.]

The problem of Afghanistan was a by-product of the whole Eastern crisis, the threat of Russia’s advance into central Asia. As early as the 1830s Russian agents had established themselves in Kabul and the First Afghan war (1839-42) was successfully fought to oust them (though in 1842 an entire British army was annihilated during a mid-winter retreat from Kabul). From the period of the Mutiny or even earlier there had been two opposed schools of thought about the north-west frontier:

1. the advocates of the ‘Forward Policy’ such as Lords Dalhousie and Canning believed that India would not be secure unless Afghan foreign policy was conducted on advice from British India.
2. the proponents of ‘masterly inactivity’ such as the former Viceroy Lord Lawrence regarded the Indus rather than the Hindu Kush as the natural frontier of India and considered that the barbarous tribes beyond should be left alone unless they showed some signs of attempting to cross it.

Disraeli believed that the Russian advance into central Asia invalidated the ‘masterly inactivity policy’. The new Viceroy, Lord Lytton, was told that his first task would be to persuade the Amir, Sher Ali, to receive a permanent British mission. The Amir prevaricated. In July 1878 he received a Russian delegation at Kabul. Lytton was determined to compel the Amir to receive a British mission and to dismiss the Russians. The first demand was reasonable, but the second was provocative, only justifiable on the grounds that a major confrontation with Russia was necessary. But at the same time government ministers in London were negotiating with St Petersburg over the matter and did not want Lytton to send his mission until the negotiations were finalized.

On 13 September Lytton received a telegraph ordering him not to enter Afghanistan until the British had received a reply from the Russians. However, on 21 September he ordered British troops into the Khyber Pass - a route that the Amir had forbidden - he wanted the British to use the route through Kandahar.

General Chamberlain was turned back at the frontier, a rebuff which made war inevitable. Disraeli was furious with Lytton but sure that he must be supported. In November the cabinet sent an ultimatum to the Amir. Meanwhile at his annual oration at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Disraeli referred to India’s north-west frontier as ‘a haphazard and not a scientific frontier’ and hinted that steps would soon be taken ‘to terminate all this inconvenience’.

The Amir made no reply to the ultimatum and hostilities became inevitable. The British campaign went well, thanks largely to the brilliant operations of the column commanded by General Sir Frederick Roberts. Sher Ali fled to Turkestan, leaving the country in charge of his son. In May 1879 he signed a treaty with the British, and a mission was installed under a new Resident, the gallant but gullible Sir Louis Cavagnari (a naturalized Italian). There was no reaction from Russia and Lytton’s policy seemed to have been vindicated.

On 3 September Cavagnari and his entire staff were slaughtered by mutinous Afghan soldiers in Kabul. For the second time Roberts conducted a mountain campaign. On 13 October he entered Kabul in triumph, having routed a large Afghan army with well-directed volleys of Martini-Henry rifle fire. He was rewarded with a peerage, granted him from Kandahar. However, as Disraeli admitted in private, the government had suffered a serious blow to its prestige.

The fundamental question facing the British government was what to do about Afghanistan: break it up into petty states, possibly keeping Kandahar as a strategic ‘outwork’ or find a new ruler for the country and withdraw. In April 1880 the Liberals won the general election. In July a field force of 2,000 British and Indians under Brigadier George Burrows set out from Kandahar to support a force of 6000 British-equipped and allegedly friendly tribesmen in putting down a rebellion by Ayub Khan, the new governor of Herat. In the event most of the ‘friendly tribesmen’ mutined and went to join Ayub, leaving Burrow to face the rebel army alone. The British and Indian troops were surprised by an Afghan army at Maiwand and suffered 1,300 casualties (around 3,000 Afghans were killed). The survivors retreated to Kandahar, where the Afghans besieged them.

A strong column was at once assembled at Kabul on 8 August, arriving at Kandahar on 28 August, having travelled over 300 miles in 20 days. This column relieved the demoralized Kandahar garrison. On 1 September Roberts launched an attack on the Afghan army. Under heavy fire the Highlanders and Ghurkas stormed the Afghan positions and drove them out of their entrenchments, capturing all their guns.

With the arrival of a new Viceroy, Lord Ripon, Afghanistan’s independence was acknowledged, with the exception of foreign affairs, which were conducted from Delhi. In the autumn the British withdrew from Kabul. Afghanistan slipped into the background and did not play a major role in international politics for the next hundred years. From 1919 it was officially independent and neutral.

Disraeli: the greasy pole

2009-11-10T13:59:00.002Z

Below are a some posts about Disraeli's second administration. Information about his defeat in the 1880 election and the return of Gladstone will be posted later.

Disraeli and conservatism

2009-11-10T13:59:00.001Z

Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister in February 1874. This was his second period as Prime Minister, as from February to October1868 he had headed a minority, caretaker administration, following Derby’s resignation because of ill health (gout). The Queen though this:

A proud thing for a Man “risen from the people” to have obtained.

Disraeli famously said:

I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.

During the years of opposition the Conservatives built up grassroots support. The Conservative Central Office was set up in 1870 and new associations were set up in many constituencies. In the election of February 1874, the Conservatives had a majority of 110 seats in England though only 50 in the nation as a whole. This pushed the Liberals more into the ‘Celtic fringe’, though in Ireland they lost seats to ‘Home Rulers’. Disraeli’s political cleverness lay in the fact that he enabled his party to take advantage of the slowly growing popularity of the Conservatives in the leafy suburbs. His election victory was such that die-hard former opponents such as the 3rd marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903) agreed to serve in his cabinet (India Office).

In August 1876 he moved to the Lords as Lord Beaconsfield - his wife, the former Mary Anne Lewis, had been given the title Viscountess Beaconsfield following the defeat of 1868. He sought to solace his craving for female company in a romantic attachment to two elderly sisters, the countess of Bradford and her sister the dowager countess of Chesterfield.

In spite of his commanding victory Disraeli believed,

Power has come to me too late.

He was 70 and in ill health, suffering increasingly from gout. He had led the Conservatives in the Commons for twenty-five years, though with only three brief periods on office. Now he had a substantial parliamentary majority but what was he to do with it?

His beliefs are hard to determine. He believed in a vague Christianity and was remarkably ignorant of Judaism. He was uninterested in the moral and intellectual problems of the day. In 1863 speaking in the Sheldonian in Oxford, he dismissed the Darwinian debate:

I am on the side of the angels.

This type of flippancy infuriated the intellectuals.

He also had a fantastic devotion to Queen Victoria, whom he figured as the second Gloriana, and styled to his inmates ‘the Fairy’. His relationship with her was similar to Victoria's with John Brown. The story that he said ‘we authors, ma’am’ ‘has never been authenticated, but it deserves to be true. There were occasions when his language, if taken too literally, attributed anachronistic powers to the Queen. The monarchy was steadily losing power, largely as a result of the democratization of parliament and this made Disraeli’s romanticizing very unrealistic.

The Second Disraeli government
In contrast to Gladstone, he did not come into office with a programme of reforming legislation. A great deal of the government’s energy was devoted to the regulation of Anglo-Catholic clergy. In 1875 a disgruntled Conservative MP referred to ‘suet-pudding legislation’.

Disraeli had begun life as a radical, diagnosing England as ‘two nations’, rich and poor. As Prime Minister he presided over social legislation, though most historians do not believe that this was part of a considered programme. It was electorally necessary to make concessions to working-class demands, but his legislation did not mark a substantial shift from laissez-faire to state intervention. His Public Health Act was passed in 1875. His Home Secretary, R. A. Cross, with Disraeli’s full backing, reformed trade union law, by removing strike action from the law of conspiracy. The other major reform of 1875 was the Artisans’ Dwelling Act (1875), which empowered municipal councils to draw up improvement schemes for districts certified as unhealthy by a medical officer - though the scheme had many weaknesses and was never fully implicated. The Merchant Shipping Act was a cross-party measure.

Disraeli's campaign against Gladstone in the 1874 election had been fought on traditional Tory grounds - attacking him for menacing ‘every institution, every interest, every class and every calling in the country’. But these were defensive slogans. He needed others, and found them in two causes, the monarchy and the empire.

Disraeli and imperialism
The traditional version is that Disraeli set out his vision of empire in his Crystal Palace speech of 24 June1872. In it he had claimed that the working classes

are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness - that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, their empire.

But the reference to empire was quite casual, with India barely mentioned.
The two causes came together when he masterminded the visit of the Prince of Wales (described by Disraeli as ‘our young Hal’) to India in the winter of 1875-6. His initiative on imperialism enabled him to position the Conservatives as the imperialist party.

The Suez Canal
In 1869 the Suez Canal had been opened, enabling the journey from Britain to India to be cut by several weeks and some thousands of miles. In 1875 four fifths of its traffic was British, though most British ships continued to use the Cape route. Its strategic importance was even greater than its commercial. In the event of another Indian Mutiny or an invasion by Russia, it could carry reinforcements far more quickly than by the old Cape route.

In November 1785 Disraeli purchased the shares of the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt in the Suez Canal Company for £4m. This was a tricky operation because Parliament was not sitting and it could only be done by loan. The money was loaned by Baron Rothschild rather than the Bank of England. Disraeli to the Queen: ‘You have it, Madam’. To Lady Bradford: ‘The Fairy is in ecstasies’. In fact, Disraeli was confusing the ownership of the Canal Company with the ownership of the Canal itself, and he was wrong to believe that Britain now had a controlling interest in the Canal. But the loan prevented the strengthening of French interests and deepened the British involvement in Egypt. Gladstone was furious and attacked the episode in the Commons - though to no great effect. Disraeli managed to cloak the affair in a mysterious Asiatic melodrama and to claim that somehow the Canal had fallen into British hands.

India
The conferment of the title Empress of India in 1876 was another example of the importance he attached to the British position in Asia. Essentially it arose out of the trauma of the Mutiny and was a counter to the advance of the Tsar into Central Asia. However, the timing was not of his choosing but was chosen by the Queen, who badgered him into giving her the title.

The Empress-Queen demands her Imperial Crown.

It was also part of his policy to consolidate British rule by the reinforcement of hierarchies. By not consulting the opposition over the matter, he caused a row. The Queen never forgave Gladstone for the ferocity of his attack.

The Zulu War
In 1879 Disraeli’s relaxed approach to running a government eventually forced imperial affairs upon parliamentary and public attention in a manner highly damaging to the Conservatives. With the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa in the 1860s those who wanted to expand British territory there became more assertive.

In the spring of 1877 the Governor and High Commissioner Sir Bartle Frere annexed the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. In an attempt to mollify the outraged Afrikaaners, he then moved against the traditional enemies the Zulus. This was not British government policy: the Colonial Secretary Sir Michael Hicks Beach, told Frere that ‘we entirely deprecate the idea of entering on a Zulu war to settle the Zulu question'. But in an age before the telegraph, it was the men on the spot who held sway. On 11 December 1878 Frere sent an ultimatum to Cetshwayo, the Zulu chief that he knew would be disbanded. He naturally refused, and on 22 January 1879 a Zulu army destroyed General Lord Chelmsford’s temporary base at Isandhlwana. In one of the worst defeats the British Empire ever suffered, 800 white and 500 African soldiers were killed. On the same day 150-155 British troops of the 2nd Battalion, 24th Foot: later the South Wales Borderers and now the Royal Regiment of Wales, men of the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, Army Service Corps, Commissariat and Medical Corps, successfully held off 4,000 Zulu warriors at the Rorke's Drift outpost (a Swedish mission). The following day up to 500 wounded Zulus were slaughtered in cold blood. Eleven Victoria Crosses were (deservedly) won, but this was a smokescreen to disguise the disaster.

The news reached London in mid-February. In a period when racial prejudice was intensifying, a defeat at the hands of black men was a great humiliation and, to make matters worse, the government reacted indecisively. Lord Chelmsford escaped blame by blaming two conveniently dead officers though Disraeli told the queen that he held him responsible for a ‘dreadful disaster’. Victoria was not convinced.

In July that Cetshwayo was defeated and captured at the battle of Ulundi (at which Napoleon III's son, the Prince Imperial, was speared to death), his army destroyed and his kingdom broken up. Zululand was annexed and incorporated into Natal. With the Zulu threat removed, the Boers quickly recovered. In retrospect it had been a grave mistake to go to war with the Zulus, who would have been very useful allies against the Boers.

Cetshwayo was reinstated in 1883 but he died, probably of a heart attack, in 1884.

The Bulgarian Crisis

2009-11-10T13:59:00.000Z

[Above is Konstantin Makovsky's painting The Bulgarian martyresses: a propaganda painting that is half compassion for suffering and half pornography.]

When Disraeli took office in 1874 it is doubtful if he had any clear ideas on foreign policy other than doing something to reassert Britain’s power in Europe. His foreign secretary, Derby, was an extreme isolationist.

In July 1875 an insurrection broke out in Herzegovina on Turkey’s ‘’North-West Frontier’, and spread to Bosnia. Within the following twelve months the Sultan Abdul Aziz defaulted on his debts, about 30% of which was in British hands. This led to consternation in the City. Disraeli wrote to Lady Bradford.

I really believe that the ‘Eastern Question’ that has haunted Europe for half a century, and which I thought the Crimean War had adjourned for another half will fall to my lot to encounter - dare I say to settle.

What was the ‘Eastern Question’? In 1875 Turkey was in possession of a vast, polyglot Empire covering most of the Middle East and stretching into Europe and including modern Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. The Sultanate was a cruel and corrupt regime, and it only survived because of the dissensions of the great powers. Militarily, Turkey no longer counted. The powers principally concerned were Russia, Britain, and Austria-Hungary. The main conflict lay between Russia and Britain. Austria was on the sidelines - she wanted the preservation of Turkey, but if Turkey collapsed, she wanted to seize a share of the spoils. Most of Turkey’s European subjects were Orthodox Christians, who looked to Russia for support. The Tsars were dubious about pan-Slav sentiment, but, however autocratic they were, they could not entirely ignore public opinion in Russia.

It was an article of faith of British diplomacy that Turkey had to be protected. There was deep mistrust of Russian intentions towards India. The fear was either that the Russians could march overland to India or obtain the same result indirectly by cutting off the British route to India.

Both these dangers were exaggerated. It is true that during the 1860s Russia conquered a number of oriental kingdoms in central Asia, but the distance to India remained vast, and the Russian government never contemplated the conquest of India. The building of the Suez Canal lessened the Russian threat; and Constantinople was a thousand miles from Suez. (Lord Salisbury, the Colonial Secretary, who was sceptical about the Russian threat, believed that the British were using maps on too small a scale.) Britain’s obsession with the Eastern Question sprang from reflex and habit rather than clear thought. It was also becoming embarrassing because of the abuses of Turkish rule.

Disraeli instinctively lacked sympathy with the struggle for the Balkan nations to be free. He saw the Bosnian demand for independence as similar to Ireland’s. As he wrote to Lady Bradford,

Fancy autonomy for Bosnia, with a mixed population. Autonomy for Ireland would be less absurd.

He feared that if Britain were seen to support Bosnian independence, it would be difficult to deny it to Ireland. He had visited parts of the Turkish empire in 1830-1 and like many travellers in the region, he preferred the Turks to their Christian subjects.

In May 1876 Turkey once more came into the headlines with the murder of the French and German consuls at Salonika by pro-Muslim rioters. The Northern Courts (the conservative Dreikaiserbund, Berlin, St Petersburg and Vienna) protested to the Sultan in a document called the Berlin Memorandum. They asked Disraeli to sign, but he refused, though the Queen had misgivings about his refusal. She rightly believed that it might give the Sultan a false sense of security and allow him to continue with his misrule.

On 30 May Abdul Aziz was deposed and later found dead in suspicious circumstances. He was succeeded by his nephew, Murad V. For a while there was hope that he would introduce reforms and Disraeli felt justified in abstaining from the Berlin Memorandum. But at the end of June, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey, and this gave new impetus to the Bosnian revolt.

On 23 June, the liberal Daily News alleged that 25,000 men, women, and children had been slaughtered by Turkish irregular troops (in fact, there were nearer 12,000 - and when this figure was confirmed many thought this quite bad enough). Disraeli, who disliked the politics of the Daily News, was instinctively sceptical about the atrocity stories; he had taken the same line at the time of the Indian Mutiny. His own information came from the pro-Turkish ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Henry Elliott.

The country was in an uproar over the massacres. But when the question was raised in the House, Disraeli played down the massacre stories and even appeared to make a heartless joke about them. He was relieved when Parliament shut down in August, and hoped that the whole business would blow over. He continued to refer to ‘atrocities’ in inverted commas, even though news reaching the Foreign Office confirmed that they had taken place. In August a second revolution in Constantinople deposed Murad V and installed his half-brother, Abdul Hamid, whose accession was greeted with misplaced enthusiasm by Turcophiles.

But his hopes that the crisis would go away were dashed by the publication in September of Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. It was written in three days while in bed with lumbago. He completed it in the British Museum, which had been alerted of his arrival. The pamphlet caused a sensation. 40,000 copies were sold within a week, 200,000 by the end of September.

Let the Turks ... one and all, bag and baggage ... clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.

The situation was tailor-made for Gladstone. Hartington’s mistress, the duchess of Manchester unfairly told Disraeli,

That gentleman is only waiting to come to the fore with all his hypocritical retirement.

But in fact, he had been under pressure to speak out. It was not political opportunism in the usual sense of the word. Gladstone responded slowly to the Bulgarian atrocities. He had believed that his retirement from the Liberal leadership would be permanent. The election defeat showed him he had lost the support of the ‘virtuous masses’. But now suddenly he saw that this agitation might regain it for him.

Three days after the publication of the pamphlet, Gladstone delivered the first of his speeches on the Eastern Question at Blackheath. It was a memorable occasion and from this time his public oratory became a major feature of British politics.

Gladstone’s intervention brought out all Disraeli’s obstinacy. He described the pamphlet as

vindictive and ill-written ... of all the Bulgarian horrors perhaps the greatest.

In a speech to his constituents at Aylesbury (before he went to the Lords), he spoke of ‘designing politicians’ who exploited the noble sentiments of the British people for sinister ends. When the Conservatives later held the seat, it was regarded as a vindication of his policies.

The nation divides
Gladstone’s decision to lead the atrocity campaign injected a bitterness into British politics unequalled since the Corn Law debates. The country was divided into ‘Turks’ and ‘Russians’. Disraeli denounced his opponents as ‘priests and professors’.

The priests: The strength of the ‘atrocitarians’ was relatively weak in Scotland, and hardly existed in Ireland. It lay in the north of England (where there were great demonstrations to greet Gladstone), the south-west, and Wales. It coincided with the geographical distribution of nonconformity. Protestant nonconformists like the charismatic preachers C. H. Spurgeon and R. W. Dale were atrocitarian. On the other hand, Irish silence can be explained by the cool attitude of the Vatican to the Orthodox Church.
The Church of England with the exception of the High Church (Canon Liddon of St Paul’s) was in general anti-atrocitarian. Evangelicals, who comprised the majority of the inferior clergy, were strongly pro-Disraeli.

The professors: The intelligentsia were divided. Most historians (Stubbs, Green, Freemen) were atrocitarian. The agitation was supported by Ruskin, Browning, Trollope, Darwin, Spencer as well as by Liberals like Henry Fawcett.

But many of the younger generation were more imperialist and did not support the agitation: Alfred Milner, Herbert Asquith. The controversy marks a watershed in intellectual attitudes - the change from mid-Victorian to late-Victorian Liberalism.

Thomas Carlyle’s support of the agitation is surprising, but he respected Russia as a strong power. On the other hand, Matthew Arnold saw the agitation as smacking too much of the ‘hebraic philistinism’ of Nonconformity.

Many working-class radicals sided with Gladstone: George Holyoake, Henry Broadhurst. But there was another strand of working-class opinion - robust, patriotic popular Toryism. There was always a suspicion that the atrocitarians were middle class.
The press, with the exception of the Daily News, was behind the government. The Telegraph, owned by the Jewish family of Levy-Lawson, was pro-Turk.

The Queen was emphatically anti-atrocitarian, and her known views influenced London society. She had not previously been pro-Turk, but Gladstone’s conduct had outraged her. Her pathological animus against Gladstone dates from this time. She described his behaviour (to her daughter) as ‘reprehensible and mischievous’ and called him ‘that mischief-maker and firebrand’. Disraeli wrote to Derby about

that unprincipled maniac Gladstone - extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and superstition.

Few political issues have raised such venomous feelings. The Church Times described Disraeli as the ‘Jew Premier’. The feelings were intensified when on 21 October Alexander II delivered an ultimatum to Turkey in which Russia threatened to act if Turkey did not introduce reforms. On 9 November at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Disraeli made a speech on the Eastern Question, declaring his support for ‘the territorial integrity of Turkey’. Though he went out of his way to be polite to Russia, he ended describing Britain’s resources for a righteous war as ‘inexhaustible’. This led the historian Edward Freeman to refer in print to ‘the Jew in his drunken insolence’. Gladstone said: ‘The provocation offered by Disraeli is almost incredible’.

The Russo-Turkish War
In May 1877 Russia and Turkey went to war and for the first three months Russia won easy victories. Salisbury advised moderation. Derby, the Foreign Secretary, told the Russian ambassador, Shuvalov, a strong opponent of pan-Slavism, of cabinet disagreements. But the Queen’s language was so extreme that it was embarrassing and Disraeli had to remind her that the Cabinet was committed to neutrality. On 9 December Plevna fell after a long siege. In January 1878 Russian troops reached Adrianople. Public opinion shifted from criticism of Turkey to ‘an excited Russophobia’. The Queen wrote,

Oh, if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating.

Gladstone was hooted in the street and a musical hall song coined the word ‘jingoism’.

The Treaty of San Stefano
In the early months of 1878 and Anglo-Russian war seemed likely to break out at any moment. In February preparations were made for an expeditionary force which might have prevented Russia from seizing the Dardanelles. But when in March Russia imposed the strongly Pan-Slavist Treaty of San Stefano (a village outside Istanbul) on the Turks, extending Russia’s Asian territory and creating ‘big Bulgaria’ it was a step too far for both Britain and Austria.

The Congress of Berlin
In early March a decision was made in principle to hold a congress in Berlin (13 June - 13 July), with Bismarck, the German Chancellor, acting as honest broker. This was the most imposing gathering of diplomats Europe had seen since the Congress of Vienna. At the age of 73, Disraeli made the journey, together with his new Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury.

Disraeli got his way over Bulgaria in all essentials, and Britain also acquired the right to occupy and administer the previously Turkish island of Cyprus in order to protect her route to India. He returned from Berlin claiming that he had brought

peace with honour.

The Congress gave Austria-Hungary the right to administer Bosnia-Herzegovina in a form which denied Serb aspirations. Other provisions included the protection of the Armenians and other religious minorities.

The occupation of Cyprus was condemned by Gladstone. This led Disraeli to say that

a sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

'Ineffable complacency' and 'stupefying lack of imagination'

2009-11-04T06:21:00.001Z

I haven't yet had the change to see Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain, but I've just read Charles Moore's demolition in the Telegraph. Enjoy the polemic - and make up your own minds.

Update: and here is Andrew Marr's reply.

Gladstone: the first administration

2009-11-01T18:51:00.001Z

The period 1868-80 is remarkable for the starkness with which political differences were epitomized by dramatic confrontations between its two leading men: Gladstone (1809-98) and Disraeli (1804-81) and two political parties (see Iolanthe, 1882).

The 1867 Reform Act had brought in household suffrage in the boroughs. Of all males aged 21 and above, a third now enjoyed the vote in England and Wales, just under a third in Scotland and just under a sixth in Ireland. Over all, about a million were added to the electorate. In the decades after this reform, British political parties slowly took on the characteristics of a modern party.

The general election of 1868 was held under the new franchise, but in many respects it was a typical general election. There was much violence. About 80 seats remained under the control of the landed patrons, while in the industrial North factory owners were emerging as a new political elite. Religion was still a major issue. Most MPs came from the usual backgrounds: aristocracy, landed gentry and commerce. John Stuart Mill was defeated at Westminster. The result was hardly an earthquake. The Conservatives lost 20 seats and the Liberals gained 20, giving the Liberals a majority of 110.

Gladstone himself lost South-west Lancashire, but a week before he had been elected for Greenwich. As Roy Jenkins puts it in his biography of Gladstone,

The public were used to politicians shuffling constituencies about as quickly as a Mississippi steamboat gambler did a pack of cards.

He was MP for the borough for eleven years, but rarely visited it. He received the news that the Queen had asked him to form a government at Hawarden.

Gladstone and the Liberals
In December 1868 Gladstone headed the first of his four Liberal administrations. The Liberal party was an uncertain animal, divided between old-fashioned Whigs and radicals. It was never an easy party to lead and as leader, Gladstone, who on some questions was an extreme Radical and on others an old-fashioned Conservative, stood outside his party.

Gladstone’s career and character
He had begun, in Thomas Babington Macaulay's phrase, as ‘the rising hope of the stern, unbending Tories’, and had followed Peel into the wilderness. At the end of 1852 he became Chancellor in Aberdeen’s Liberal/Peeling coalition. In 1859 he became Chancellor in Palmerston’s Liberal government.

He moved with bewildering rapidity from disturbingly frequent bouts of prostration to displays of almost manic energy. He found time to translate Homer, write works of theology and to read voraciously. His physical energy found release in chopping down trees. Lord Randolph Churchill said:

The forest laments so that Mr Gladstone may perspire.

In spite of his happy marriage in 1839 to Catherine Gwynne (which brought him the ownership of Hawarden) there were sexual tensions which found release in good works among prostitutes. This had begun systematically in 1849 as part of an Anglo-Catholic charitable enterprise. But for Gladstone it involved temptation and after many of his meetings his diary records a sign for scourging. His association with prostitutes was an open secret in political circles. In 1896 he told his clergyman son, Stephen that he had never ‘been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed’. But what did he mean by infidelity?

Even more potentially embarrassing was his deeply emotional friendship with the ex-courtesan turned theosophist preacher, Laura Thistlethwayte. In November 1869 while he was piloting the Irish Land Act through Parliament, he was especially obsessed with her. His relationship was carried on in the full knowledge of the political elite.

Religion was the motivating force in his life. He had moved from Evangelicalism to High Anglicanism. He was friends with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and (until his conversion) with Henry Manning. He was also friends with the liberal Catholic Döllinger, but he detested Ultramontanism and ‘Vaticanism’: see his publication of The Vatican Decrees (November 1874). In spite of his Anglicanism, his electoral base came largely from the Nonconformists.

He brought his moral beliefs into politics, and there were many who found his overbearing moralism irritating - the Queen among them. Two causes in particular aroused the crusader in him: Ireland and the pursuit of an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. He favoured a concert of Europe rather than isolationism or imperialism. At the height of the Franco-Prussian war he set out his views in an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review:

a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind ... which recognises, as a tribunal of paramount authority, the general judgment of civilised mankind.

For him this was a religious rather than a secular ideology - taken from St Augustine.

Ireland
Gladstone was at Hawarden when he received the news that he had won the general election. He said,

My mission is to pacify Ireland.

In 1845 Gladstone had written in a letter to his wife: I

reland, Ireland, that cloud in the west, that coming storm of he vehicle of God’s retribution.

But however strong his feelings, he had never visited the country.

Since 1829 it had been possible for Catholics to be returned to Parliament. The 1850 Franchise Act finally overhauled the registration system and simplified the franchise to an occupational qualification based on a Poor Law valuation of £12 in the counties and £8 in the boroughs.
But this left a range of other grievances, which had intensified after the famine. In the light of the Fenian attacks it was courageous of Gladstone to campaign in the election on Irish grievances and it explains the reason for his defeat in South-West Lancashire.

In July 1869 Gladstone’s government disestablished the Irish Church - a major concession to Irish grievances, and a cause that united his disparate party. His Land Act of 1870 was more timid; it gave legal sanction to the so-called ‘Ulster custom’ by which departing tenants in good standing received generous ‘compensation’ from incoming tenants. The eviction of tenants without a lease (the majority) was to be made more difficult. As an immediate solution, the Act was a failure, but retrospectively it can be seen to have heralded the beginnings of the demise of the landed class in Ireland. Those conservatives who attacked it as an assault on property were ultimately right.

The Education Act
In 1870 there were 4.3 million children of school age in England and Wales. From the early 19th century primary education for the great mass of English children was in the hands of the churches: the National Society (Anglican, founded 1811) and the British and Foreign Schools Society (Nonconformist). In the 1830s ragged schools came into existence. These were intended for children who were too wretchedly dressed, and whose attendance was too sporadic, for the National Schools. They were co-educational and lured children with free buns and tea, with plenty of singing and short, enjoyable lessons. The facilities were inadequate, as classes were typically held in rented rooms of buildings not designed for the instruction of large numbers of children. In the 1860s, when the Ragged School Union was at its most active, it assisted 200 schools claiming an average total attendance of 20,000 pupils.

The state had given a small grant in 1833, but had taken no direct responsibility for schools. However, from the 1840s training colleges were set up for teachers (St Mark’s, Chelsea) and from the 1850s, school inspectorates were established. . In 1862 the Revised Code had laid down a syllabus (mainly the three ‘R’s) assessed by a school inspectorate, and the teachers were paid by results. Matthew Arnold: ‘the heaviest blow dealt at civilization and improvement in my time’.

By the time Gladstone formed his government in 1868, it was clear that the education system needed reform. England (not Scotland) lagged far behind (eg) Prussia. There was also the fact that the Second Reform Act had enfranchised considerable numbers of the urban working class. Robert Lowe: ‘We must see to it that our new masters learn their letters.’ However, denominational conflicts were a major problem. There were two main voluntary education bodies:
1. The National Educational Union (Anglican)
2. The Education League (Nonconformist)

The Union wanted to maintain the privileged position of the Church of England, the League campaigned for free, compulsory, non-sectarian schools.

In February 1870 an Elementary Education Bill was introduced by William Edward Forster (Matthew Arnold’s brother-in-law), Vice-President of the Council, aimed at providing for the first time a national system of primary education. He proposed to set up new directly elected local authorities called School Boards, which would have the power to direct their own schools, which would be paid for by the local rates. But the bill was designed to supplement voluntary and denominational effort in education not supersede it. The Board Schools would ‘fill in the gaps’ and provide education where there were no church schools. The boards had the power to pass bye-laws for compulsory attendance (so-called ‘permissive compulsion’), assist existing schools, and pay fees for poor parents.

Initially, he proposed to give the boards the power to decide religious instruction. But this ran into heavy opposition from Nonconformists, who opposed any use of the rates to support denominational schools. In the end, after much wrangling, the ‘Cowper-Temple’ clause excluded denominational catechisms and formularies from rate-aided schools. This provision severed the local authority schools from the denominational schools (the latter were to be funded by central grants).

The ‘Board Schools’ were a conspicuous feature of late-Victorian and Edwardian education. The majority of schools were still voluntary schools, but it was a steadily declining majority. There was as yet no compulsion, but once the school boards were established, particularly in the big towns, they took compulsory powers, so that by 1873 40% and by 1876 50% of the population was under compulsory powers, 84% in boroughs. Even Tory squires and parsons in the rural areas now felt that more general powers to compel attendance were necessary to keep voluntary schools in rural areas in business. In 1876 the employment of children under ten was forbidden. In 1880 compulsion became general, though not yet quite universal.

For some years after 1870 a controversy raged round clause 25 in the act which enabled local authorities to pay the fees of needy children at denominational schools. The clause was thought by Nonconformists to give an unfair advantage to church schools in places where board schools did not exist - especially in the rural districts. In 1891 the remaining fees were effectively abolished for pupils at voluntary and board schools alike.

"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea." "The board-schools." "Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future." Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1892)

The abolition of privilege
The removal of barriers to advancement by merit and the establishment of full civic equality were part of the philosophy of Gladstonian Liberalism. He was a strange mixture of the elitist anti-democrat and the populist.

In June 1870 an Order-in-Council opened the civil service to competitive examination.
The fight against privilege was especially intense over the abolition of purchase of commission in the infantry and cavalry undertaken by Edward Cardwell, the Secretary for War. The matter became especially urgent after the Franco-Prussian War. But in the debates in 1871 the Tory opposition put down a long series of obstructionist motions. In a speech to his constituents at Greenwich, Gladstone accused his opponents of class selfishness. In the end the abolition of purchase did nothing to alter the social composition of the armed forces. Because pay was not increased, exactly the same kinds of men continued to be officers as before. The problems the army was to face in the Boer War show the limitations of the reforms in creating a truly efficient army.

A major move towards the abolition of privilege was the Ballot Act of 1872 - though it caused no general enthusiasm and the electorate did not thank him for it. Gladstone himself was lukewarm about secret voting.

The election of 1874
In retrospect the first Gladstone administration seems one of remarkable achievement. Unlike his predecessors, he considered legislation to be the main function of government, and acted upon this belief. But Disraeli touched a raw nerve in a brilliant speech delivered in Manchester in April 1872, which contained one of the great similes of political invective:

Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.

In 1874 Gladstone sought a dissolution at a time when trade unionists were disappointed by his failure to enact social legislation. In addition his Licensing Act , which would have made it possible for magistrates to introduce fairly strict limitations on opening hours and the granting of licences, had led to minor riots and the collapse of the bill. This enabled the Tories to pose as champions of the beer-drinking working man. The election of 1874 was the worst Whig-Liberal result since 1841.

‘We have been swept away, literally, by a torrent of beer and gin.’

After this, he privately resigned the leadership of the Liberals though he kept his unloved Greenwich seat. In January 1875 the resignation was made public and Lord Hartington succeeded him. Forster, the obvious candidate, was still not forgiven. Disraeli: ‘

The Whigs were dished; now they are Cavendished.’

It might have looked as if Gladstone’s career was over.

The Reform Acts

2009-10-28T09:10:00.002Z

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.

'If all the world were of one opinion…'

2009-10-26T06:21:00.001Z

I think I know what John Stuart Mill would have thought about this story.

Lord Derby: the forgotten prime minister

2009-10-23T11:09:00.001+01:00

The historian Andrew Roberts gives a glowing review here of Angus Hawkins' The Forgotten Prime Minister: the Fourteenth Earl of Derby. Volume Two, Achievement, 1851-1869. Roberts:

'It was Derby, not Disraeli, who educated the mid-Victorian Conservative party, saved it from becoming a rural, obscurantist rump and set it on the road to majority government, whih it finally achieved in 1874 after 28 years as a minority party.'

The Second Reform Act

2009-10-21T07:06:00.002+01:00

[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 Fenians

2009-10-14T17:17:00.001+01:00

In January 1867 a Captain T. J. Kelly sailed from New York to Europe with a group of companions. Kelly and his companion William Halpin took lodgings in London off the Tottenham Court Road. Two others, took lodgings in Tavistock Square, all of them operating under assumed names. The plan was to wage a guerilla campaign in Britain - to destroy rail and telegraph communications and attack police barracks. Meanwhile bodies of fighting men were to assemble in Ireland until they received support from America.

The name Fenian was derived from Irish legend. It was the name given to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a separatist secret society that emerged in the 1850s in the aftermath of the Famine. Founder James Stephens. There were any strands: Irish American exiles, agrarian secret society tradition, continental examples. Aimed at total separation from Britain.

A daring plan was staged for February 11: the capture of the large British arms and ammunitions stored at Chester Castle. Simultaneously, trains between Chester and Holyhead were to be seized and the arms rushed to Holyhead, to be shipped to Ireland on a captured mail boat

By early afternoon, there were well over 1000 Fenians in Chester, but they soon found that the authorities had been alerted. The operation was quickly called off and arms and ammunitions hastily dumped. Over the next few days police arrested Fenian suspects in Ireland.

On September 11 the Manchester police arrested Kelly and another Fenian, Captain Deasy. On September 18 Kelly and Deasy were conveyed in an unescorted prison van to Belle Vue gaol. As the van passed under a railway arch it was stopped and surrounded by thirty Fenians, some of them armed. In the confusion, a policeman, Sergeant Brett, was killed. Kelly and Deasy rescued and never recaptured.

Large numbers of Irishmen in Manchester were rounded up and five men eventually put on trial for the murder of Brett. All five - Allen, Larkin, O'Brien, Maguire and Condon - were found guilty (Maguire a case of mistaken identity). Defiant appeal of the four guilty men in the dock made a great impression in Ireland. All condemned to death but Maguire given a free pardon and Condon, an American citizen, reprieved.

November 24, Allen, Larkin and O'Brien (‘the Manchester martyrs') were executed in public.

On 13 December 1867 the Fenians attempted to rescue two of their number - Richard O'Sullivan-Burke, their armaments organiser, and Joseph Casey - from Clerkenwell gaol. Shortly before 4 pm they placed a barrel stuffed with gunpowder against the prison walls, intending to detonate the explosives while the two men exercised in the yard. The bombers were amateurs and had no idea of the damage they were going to cause. the explosion tore a 60 foot breach in the wall, which would probably have crushed the prisoners if they had been exercising there. The blast could be heard for miles around. The house immediately opposite collapsed and some 40 men, women and children were reported injured. Four people died, one on the spot, two overnight, and a fourth shortly afterwards. In response, special constables were sworn in. The solution of the Irish problem was to be an urgent priority of the incoming Liberal government.

This introduced a new element into British life. The government authorized the foundation of a Secret Service Department (SSD) that was intended to expand into England the anti-Fenian network already existing at Dublin Castle. Although it only lasted until April 1868 and achieved little it marked the beginning of codified domestic intelligence on the British mainland.

The Governor Eyre Case

2009-10-14T14:48:00.003+01:00

This post is indebted to Bernard Semmel, Jamaican Blood and the Victorian Conscience: the Governor Eyre Case (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1962) and Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-67 (London: Polity, 2002) and to this post.

The Morant Bay Rebellion
On 11 October 1865 a riot occurred outside the court house in the town of Morant Bay, the result of months of tensions between black people and white over land, labour, and law. Led by Paul Bogle, a native Baptist deacon, the crowd attacked the police station before confronting the militia and the parish authorities. In the subsequent confrontation the crowd killed eighteen people. Over the next few days local people killed two planters and attacked many plantations in the parish.

    The 13,000 Europeans on the island had long feared a rising from the 350,000 black people. The rising was suppressed by troops under the direction of the colonial governor, Edward Eyre. In the course of the pacification of the island, Eyre instituted a month-long reign of terror; a thousand homes were burned, 493 blacks were executed and more than that number were flogged and tortured. The most prominent of Eyres opponents, the mixed-race member of the Jamaica Assembly was hanged after a controversially conducted court-martial.
    News reached Britain in November, accompanied by exaggerated reports of the atrocities committed by the rebels. But the reports which reached the Colonial Office painted a different picture – of atrocities committed by the British troops – which were soon printed in the newspapers.

Reacting to the Rebellion
The first newspaper to report on the story was the sensationalist New York Herald, which headlined ‘EIGHT MILES OF DEAD BODIES’. By the end of November dissenting groups in London had appropriated this headline and placarded London with the legend. The London press took sides. The Radical Morning Star stressed the atrocities committed against the blacks by British troops, while the weekly News of the World reported ‘savageries’ against the whites. During the first two weeks in December the Colonial Office was besieged by delegations demanding Eyre’s immediate removal from office. The most imposing of these, consisting of over 250 gentlemen from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society came on Saturday 9 December to present a memorial to Cardwell, the Colonial Secretary. Included in the delegation were Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton the president of the Society, the Quaker banker Samuel Gurney and Thomas Hughes, the radical barrister and author. Cardwell responded by stating his respect for Eyre and stressing the difficulties of the situation.
    A few days later Cardwell, this time accompanied by Russell, the Prime Minister, received a delegation from the London Missionary Society. Russell urged the delegation not to underestimate the gravity of the Morant Bay rebellion.
    These delegations too place against a background of mass meetings. Those arguing against Eyre included the cream of the British intelligentsia: John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell. Herbert Spencer, John Bright, and Frederick Harrison. They believed that martial law had been misused: British subjects were being denied their rights under the rule of law. The behaviour of the governor was an attack on Englishness. In late November there was a meeting at Manchester addressed by Jacob Bright, brother of the Radical MP. A similar meeting at Brighton was addressed by the blind Liberal MP, Henry Fawcett who described what had taken place in Jamaica as

‘a barbarity which never occurred in the time of the blackest pages of history’.

But Eyre had his defenders. His sister, Mary, wrote a letter to the Radical Morning Star:

‘It is not fair, Sir, it is not English, to publish only letters abusing a man and stigmatizing him as “a wholesale murderer and a Robespierre”’.

The Pall Mall Gazette also sprang to Eyre’s defence. The Times demanded an impartial investigation, reminding its readers that Eyre had been the protector of the Australian aborigines. Spearheading the defence of Eyre was Thomas Carlyle, backed by Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Between the summers of 1866 and 1867 public opinion swung away from the Jamaica Committee to the supporters of Eyre. By 1868 when the third, last and still unsuccessful attempt was made to prosecute Eyre, it was clear that the defence of black Jamaican rights was no longer a popular cause. As Catherine Hall states,

'Only a small core of middle-class radicals was left, led by a disillusioned and disheartened Mill, and relying for support on working-class radicals. A considerable body of opinion had concluded that black people were essentially different from whites, and thus could not expect the same rights. British subjects across the empire were not all the same.'

In February 1866 Commander Bedford Pym, a prominent defender of Eyre's presented a paper to the newly formed Anthropological Society of London:

'We do not admit equality even among our own race, as is provided by the state of the franchise at this hour in England. The principles on which alien and dissimilar races ought to be governed is not yet understood by our rulers. Jamaica is not the only proof of this: the state of St Vincent, Antigua, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, to say nothing of India, attests that “how to govern alien races” has yet to be learned. Let us take the negro as we find him, as God designed him, not a white man, nor the equal of a white man.'

Attitudes to race had hardened since the early nineteenth century.

Lost in translation (or: Self-Help goes on its travels)

2009-10-08T17:21:00.001+01:00

Our discussion about whether the title Self-Help translates easily into other languages has unearthed some fascinating information. Here is the French site. It can also translate as les effets personnels or auto-assistance. In Hungarian it translates as önségly. In German it is Selßsthilfe and in Italian iniziativo individuale. Now all we need is the Japanese!

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) and Self-Help

2009-10-08T04:34:00.000+01:00

[This post is especially indebted to the various writings of Asa Briggs on Smiles.]

1859 was a great year for important books. It saw the publication of Adam Bede, J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help. Mill set out the attractions of individuality - the need to create a tolerant society (though raising the possibility of the tyranny of the majority); Darwin explained evolution in terms of struggle. These were both controversial books. The third - Self-Help- was not.

The Gospel of Work
Smiles did not believe he was expounding something controversial but something old and profoundly true - a gospel not a thesis.

Many people have claimed that the Victorians invented the gospel of work - but it can be found in Hogarth’s 'Idle and Industrious Apprentice' and the whole 18th century ethos of inculcating ‘habits of industry’. But the work ethic was set out as a gospel by a lapsed Presbyterian, Smiles’s fellow Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle (right), who had praised the nobility and dignity of work - and he was one of Smiles’s heroes.

The Life of Smiles
Smiles was born in Haddington near Edinburgh in 1812. He described his youth as ‘frolicsome’ and ‘prodigal’. He admitted in Self-Help that it was more ‘natural’ to be prodigal than thrifty, more easy to be dependent than independent.

He gained a medical degree from Edinburgh University but soon turned from medicine to journalism. In 1838 he moved to Leeds where he became involved in radical politics. The contents of Smiles’ book were first delivered in a series of lectures in 1845 at the height of the Anti-Corn Law agitation, to a group of about a hundred young Leeds working men, who, on their own initiative had set up an evening school ‘for mutual improvement’.
    After the 1848 revolutions Smiles retreated from radicalism. He became less concerned with public causes and more with writing and business. In 1845 he became secretary of the Leeds and Thirsk Railway, and in 1857 he produced his first popular book, The Life of George Stephenson. From this time onwards, his future as a writer was secure. After Self-Help, he published Lives of the Engineers (1862), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), Duty (1887). All have the same confident style, full of improving anecdotes.
    In 1871 Smiles had a stroke which paralyzed his right hand and robbed him of his memory for proper names. In a striking demonstration of his own principles, he taught himself to write and to remember again.
    When he died in 1904 the world had moved on and economic writers and socialists attacked the whole basis of his philosophy.

Self-Help
Smiles adopted the phrase ‘Self-help’ (which proved to be difficult to translate into other languages) from a lecture by the American essayist and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, delivered in 1841. His own lectures became so popular that Smiles sought a wider audience. His manuscript was turned down in book form by Routledge because of publishing difficulties during the Crimean War, but then published by John Murray.
    The book was a remarkable success. 20,000 copies were sold in the first year, 55,000 by the end of 1864, 150,000 by 1889, 250,000 by 1904. The sales far exceeded those of the great novelists. The book was translated into many languages, including Japanese.
    The speed of transmission was determined by the circumstances of the time as well as by the readability of the book. Self-help was the creed of a more mobile society than had ever existed before. Smiles was part of a ‘success literature’ that reached its peak in the USA. There were many similar books, but unlike many of these Smiles did not offer ‘easy’ ways of acquiring knowledge. The book was enormously influential. William Lever (born 1851) was given a copy on his 16th birthday and gave copies to the young men he employed at Port Sunlight. Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was another. Smiles received many letters from people telling them how much his book had helped them

The message
Self-Help was very readable - full of anecdotes and aphorisms, such as ‘energy accomplishes more than genius’. It contained the tales of Carlyle and Stephenson but also of more humble men.

Individual liberty
In spite of its provenance in the troubled ‘40s, the message was essentially mid-Victorian. When the mid-Victorian consensus broke down in the 1880s, Smiles was accused by socialists (unfairly?) of only being interested in the individual. The book aroused controversy in the 1980s - the 1986 edition had an introduction by Keith Joseph. In 1996 the free-market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs issued an edition with a foreword by Lord Harris of Greenwich.
    Smiles was consistently hostile to socialism and state intervention, which he saw as an attack on personal liberty.

Some key quotes:

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

Men cannot be raised in masses as the mountains were in he early geological states of the world. They must be dealt with as units; for it is only by the elevation of individuals that the elevation of the masses can be effectively secured.

Perseverance
Smiles followed Carlyle in the praise of perseverance. Carlyle: ‘Perseverance is the hinge of all the virtues’.

Nothing of real worth can be obtained without courageous working. Man owes his growth chiefly to the active striving of the will, that encounter with difficulty which he calls effort; and it is astonishing to find how often results apparently impracticable are then made possible.

Social intervention
But few Victorians were totally uncritical supporters of laissez-faire, and Smiles was not as individualist as many of his socialist critics believed. He believed in economic laissez-faire and expressed sympathy for the businessman who protested against too much interference in his affairs. But he went on to advocate certain forms of state intervention. He did not believe that social matters or education could be left to market forces. Illnesses were caused by ‘a terrible Nobody’.
He also wanted a national system of education and approved of the 1870 Act. He believed that education had to be run by the state and rejected the analogy between education and free trade in commodities. Education was not a consumer product.

We often hear that ‘Knowledge is Power’, but we never hear that Ignorance is Power.

He attached even more importance to adult than to school education:

The highest culture is not obtained from the teacher when at school or college, so much as by our ever diligent self-education when we become men.

Unlike later social commentators, he never troubled about the possible connection between economic and social laissez-faire - he felt no doubts about their respective spheres of influence.

Thrift
His analysis of thrift contains the essentials of his theory of society. Individual savings provided the foundation of the national accumulation of capital and this was essential to economic growth. He agreed with John Stuart Mill when he wrote:

‘The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object’.

Smiles thought the thrifty man was also the good man - the ideal working man was the one with a bank account. By a combination of prudence and industry, he could become a little capitalist. He approved of corporate institutions such as co-operative societies and savings banks; savings, not state help was to be the security for old age. He distrusted periods of full employment and believed that prosperity was often caused by over-speculation.
    He refused to see a possible connection between thrift and avarice - claimed to hate the miser. He believed that if applied universally among the working classes it would raise their whole social position and widen rather than narrow their horizons. He disapproved of pay-nights - ‘a Saturnalia of riot and disorder’.
    He was a great believer in the potential of the working class - which he refused to identify with the industrial proletariat. He was not opposed to ‘good’ trade unionism for the working classes who were not able to rise.
    His belief in competition applied to all classes: ‘all life is a struggle’. Men of all classes had to live within their incomes. He hated the fact that the son of a self-made man became a gentleman-idler. He hated all forms of snobbery. He did not believe that the acquisition of wealth was a proof of moral worth.

Competition
In 1847 he met the Corn Law rhymer, Ebenezer Elliot and agreed with him that competition was ‘the great social law of God’ .

All life is a struggle. ... Under competition the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind, If he do not work, neither shall he eat.

The gentleman
The final chapter of Self-Help is a discussion of the ‘gentleman’. Smiles, who hated snobbery, took the term out of its upper-class context and associated it purely with character. The true gentleman was not the creature of inherited privilege but a person with certain moral qualities. This was also the message of Mrs Craik's best-seller, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856).

Walter Bagehot (1826-770 and the constitution

2009-10-07T10:22:00.000+01:00

The English Constitution was published from 1865 in the Fortnightly Review over eighteen months. Its publication as a book coincided with the passing of the 1867 Reform Act. Bagehot never revised the book though he published a preface to the second edition in 1872. This preface was far more pessimistic than the original book. The age of the mass electorate had arrived and Bagehot was dismayed.

1. The Monarchy
Bagehot believed that monarchy was a better form of government than a republic because it had more appeal.

Monarchy is ‘an intelligible government’.
Monarchy presents the nation with a family.
‘Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions.’

The keynote of Bagehot’s book is the ‘efficient secret’. He divided the constitution into the 'dignified' and 'efficient parts'. Parliament is the efficient part, monarchy the dignified. The role of the monarch is

‘the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn’.
    The ‘secret lies in the fact that the British people are not aware of what is happening. They see the grandeur and panoply of monarchy and are deluded into believing that the queen has real power. The people are incapable of governing themselves and therefore it is right to deny them a share in the government. Because they are enormously deferential, they welcome the monarch and its apparent powers.
    It is important for the monarchy to be visible. Bagehot was well aware that at the time of writing, its future lay with ‘a retired widow and an unemployed youth’.

Bagehot did not present the Crown as an example of virtue. Queen Victoria was virtuous but her predecessors had not been. He believed that the Prince of Wales in particular was subject to more temptations than other men.

Bagehot has been frequently misunderstood. He was not describing how the monarchy functioned in his day, but prescribing how it should function. Queen Victoria played a far more active role than Bagehot’s theories allowed.

How relevant was Bagehot’s thesis after Victoria’s death? On several occasions the monarch followed the guidance of the Prime Minister. 1910 George V agreed to use the royal prerogative to create enough peers to allow the passage of the Parliament Bill; in 1924 he granted Ramsay MacDonald a dissolution; 1963 Elizabeth II accepted Harold Macmillan’s advice on the choice of his successor.
    On other occasions the monarch accepted a Prime Minister not of his choosing: George V and Ramsay MacDonald; George VI and Churchill (1940) and Attlee (1945).
    On at least two occasions, the monarch took personal initiatives: George V in 1931 insisted on the formation of a National Government; 1938 George VI and Queen Elizabeth invited Neville Chamberlain onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Munich agreement.

2. Removable inequalities
Bagehot differentiated Britain (a) from India (a caste society) and (b) the US (an egalitarian society). He extolled the merits of the system of ‘removable inequalities’, a system in which each might hope in theory to rise on a level with the highest. This theory was also stated by Palmerston.

We have shown the example of a nation, in which every class of society accepts which cheerfulness the lot which Providence has assigned to it; while at the same time every individual of each class is constantly striving to raise himself in the social scale - not by injustice and wrong, not by violence and illegality, but by preserving good conduct, and by the steady and energetic execution of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his creator has endowed him.

According to this analysis it was possible to reconcile economic change and individual mobility with traditional social balance and stability.

3. Deference
Bagehot argued that the stability of the British constitution rested on a social as well as a political balance. This balance was not only provided by the monarchy, but also by ‘old deference’. Deference meant the unthinking and habitual respect for social superiors. Even during the storms of the Crimean War Gladstone had claimed

if this country is more aristocratic ... than it ought to be, it is not owing to any legal privileges possessed by the aristocracy, nor is it owing to any exclusive legislation; but it is owing partly perhaps to the strong prejudices in favour of the aristocracy which pervade all ranks and classes of the community.

Bagehot argued

'A deferential community, even though its lowest classes are not intelligent, is far more suited to cabinet government than any other kind of democratic country, because it is more suited to political excellence. The highest classes can rule in it; and the highest classes must, as such, have more political ability than the lower classes. ... A country of respectful poor, though far less happy than where there are no poor to be respectful, is nevertheless far more fitted to the best government. You can use the best classes of the respectful country; you can only use the worst where every man thinks he is as good as every other.'

The best government was based on discussion; it was most effectively managed not by the many but by ‘a select few’, men who had enjoyed ‘a life of leisure, a long culture, a varied experience, an existence by which the judgment is incessantly exercised and by which it may be incessantly improved’. The ‘select few’ were members of Parliament.

Bagehot believed that England was the archetype of deference. Was he right ? During the 1840s it seemed that deference might be on the way out. But the 1850s it seemed back in force. Once the Corn Laws were repealed the middle classes failed to keep up the political momentum. Cobden believed they had sold out to the aristocracy.

‘The citadel of privilege in this country is so terribly strong owing to the concentrated mass of property in the hands of the comparatively few’. The upper classes ‘never stood so high in relative social and political rank as ... at present’.

John Stuart Mill told the Italian patriot, Mazzini: The people

'of all ranks and classes, are at bottom, in all their feelings, aristocrats. They have some conception of liberty, and set some value on it, but the idea of equality is strange and offensive to them. They do not dislike to have many people above them as long as they have some below them. And therefore they have never sympathized, and in their present state of mind will never sympathize with any really democratic or republican party in other countries'.

Cobden was disgusted at what he saw as working-class deference.

'I wonder the working people are so quiet under the taunts and insults offered them. Have they no Spartacus among them to head a revolt of the slave class against their political tormentors?

Engels dubbed England ‘the most bourgeois of all nations’ and accused the English proletariat of becoming more middle class. Was he right?

How to become a domestic goddess (or god) even if you can't cook

2009-09-29T17:25:00.001+01:00

Here you can access the complete text of Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management. You now have no excuses. Get cooking!

On the other hand, Mrs Beeton herself couldn't cook. Her first recipe for a Victoria sponge left out the eggs. This fascinating nugget of information (together with more of the same) comes out in Kathryn Hughes' biography.

'The authority of history'

2009-09-25T16:31:00.000+01:00

In view of our discussions of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, I thought you might be interested in Simon Schama's article in the Financial Times. In the process of a pungent attack on our current holocaust-denier-in-chief and on the cowardice of the western response, he has some very well made comments on the nature of history as a discipline:

It is the great glory of the project inaugurated by Thucydides that it endeavoured to disentangle fact from fable and to make history the instrument of honest self-criticism rather than idle self-congratulation. Thus sternly conceived, it was to be the torment of despotisms. This was something fresh and breathtaking in the world, the conviction that the authority of history based on an unflinching scrutiny of evidence would always prevail over fantasies derived from claims of revelation.
But then perhaps we have already abandoned history as the rough upbraider of moronic turpitude. Perhaps it is easier to digest history as costume pabulum, a stroll with Dame Vera Lynn down memory lane; endlessly rerunning the Good War and wallowing in harmless period romance courtesy of Jane Austen, while tough history gets thinned and thinned until it is finally put out of its misery and the age of national amnesia is enthroned.

John Stuart Mill

2009-09-23T20:16:00.000+01:00

There is lots of material on John Stuart Mill here. Follow the links.

There's a good summary of the arguments of the Subjection of Women here.

John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand.

2009-09-23T09:25:00.000+01:00

Here is the Guardian's review of Richard Reeves' very good biography, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand ((Atlantic Books, 2007).

1859 and all that: Darwin's bombshell.

2009-03-25T14:51:00.004Z

Here is the most fabulous site, with all Darwin's works available online.

Science is not value-free, and the language and concepts of Darwinism are those of the economic and social doctrines of the time. Darwin's Origin of Species was published at a particularly sensitive time, when scientists were making a bid for cultural supremacy.

The keystone of traditional naturalism was Archdeacon William Paley’s Natural Theology, which Darwin studied at Cambridge. The argument was simple and apparently convincing:

Life was good because through the kindness of God, all human beings were adapted to their surroundings;
Animals, including humans, are complex beings from the divine workshop, exquisitely fitted to their place in the world.
This proves there must be a designer.

Paley was writing during the wars with France, at a time of great social and political upheaval, his science legitimized the existing social order, and his conservative politics were unacceptable to radicals and to rationalist Unitarians such as Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather. But Paley’s followers included not merely naturalists at the university, but also scores of vicar-naturalists working in their parishes.

The voyage of the Beagle
On 27 December 1831 a tiny ship named the Beagle left Plymouth. The volatile, bad-tempered, depressive captain, Robert FitzRoy, was starting on a two year survey, commissioned by the Admiralty, of Tierra del Fuego and the southern coasts of South America. On board the ship were three inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, who had been ‘collected’ by Fitzroy on an earlier expedition, and were being shipped back to their country of origin to fulfil the captain’s vision of establishing Christianity there. Also on board as Fitzroy’s companion was Charles Darwin a young naturalist intended for the church, whose father, a Shrewsbury doctor, had only reluctantly sanctioned his going. Darwin’s aim was to collect as many specimens as he could and donate them to a prominent institution, and thus establish himself as a scientific celebrity. In this period there was no clear distinction between collecting, hunting and plundering.

Darwin was away from home for five years, financed by his wealthy father. Of this five years only eighteen months was spent in actual sailing. While at sea, he was often sick, and lay listening to the shrieks of men being flogged and reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Landing on the volcanic island of St Jago in January, in territory no geologist had visited before, he decided that the signs of volcanic activity indicated relatively recent action – in contrast to the much older volcanic structure of Edinburgh where he had studied medicine.

In December 1832 the Beagle arrived in Tierra del Fuego. Darwin never forgot his first sight of ‘wild men’: ‘They are as savage as the most curious person would desire’; ‘like the troubled spirits of another world.’ But both Darwin and Fitzroy were convinced that the Fuegians were the same species as Europeans. It was this fact that made the whole experience so painfully interesting to him as it seemed to reinforce the essential fragility of civilization. But it also confirmed his Whig belief in the possibility of progress and his recognition of the underlying unity of the human race became one of the building blocks of his theory of evolution.

In June 1834 the Beagle sailed into the Pacific. In April 1835 the crew witnessed a devastating earthquake in Chile. In September the ship began to head west and reached the Galapagos Islands on the 15th. At first he did not recognize the significance of what he saw – the fact that different species of tortoises, iguanas, and finches were found on the different islands. He shot birds, but when he examined their corpses he assumed that the differences were insignificant anomalies.

In January 1836 they arrived at Sydney. Here Darwin mused on the uniqueness of the Australasian flora and fauna:

‘Surely two distinct creators must have been at work.’

He also explored coral reefs, which he described as one of the most remarkable alterations in the natural world.

By the time the Beagle was heading homewards, Darwin had abandoned the prospect of becoming a clergyman; he wanted to become a proper naturalist like Lyell.

Between the Beagle and Origin
On 2 October 1836 the Beagle arrived at Falmouth. Darwin was now well known because his letters to one of his scientific friends had been published. He arrived home with a huge number of specimens (but not tortoises – he had eaten them!) which he donated to the Zoological Society in London. He was eagerly received by geologists, became friendly with Lyell and Richard Owen, and was elected a fellow of the Geological Society. He became a celebrity in London scientific circles.

Darwin’s intellectual breakthrough arose out of a meeting at the Zoological Society in March 1837 where his findings were discussed. The problems focussed on the rheas (flightless birds) he had brought back from Patagonia and the Galapagos finches (initially thought to be mockingbirds) and iguanas. Equally significant were the pampas fossils. In January Richard Owen at the College of Surgeons had identified them as giant sloths, anteaters and armadillos – South American types which suggested a lone of succession from long-dead to currently living forms on the same spot. Why the divergence into different species? Why the divergence into different species? What was the relationship between modern and extinct species?

The solution clearly involved transmutation of species, a theory already put forward by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, but heretical among British naturalists in the 1830s.

‘From then on transmutation became the central, undisclosed hub of Darwin’s life … he possessed the pivotal idea of change in living beings – of real ancestral links between animals and mankind.’

He hit on the concept of the mechanism for this transmutation in September and October 1838 when he read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population: those who died (human or animal) were the weakest, those who lived the strongest, or best adapted; over a long period of time variations might become fixed and a whole species might adapt to its current situation. The theory also fitted well with Darwin’s own background in competitive, entrepreneurial England. By 1842 he was using the phrase natural selection – a theory which ruled out the need for God.

Steve Jones has pointed out that too much should not be made of Darwin’s five week stay on the Galapagos islands. For next forty years following the Beagle’s return he wrote 19 books and hundreds of scientific papers, totalling 6 million words. Their subjects ranged from barnacles, orchids, insect-eating plants and earthworms to the expression of emotion in dogs, apes and people. Together they contributed to his revolutionary idea.

In December 1838 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood. Already he recognized that he could not share her religious beliefs and as he developed his theory of natural selection he knew that he would alienate many of his naturalistic friends. It was this thought that kept him from publishing. He wrote an essay in 1842 but did not publish it. In January 1844 (now living at Down House) he wrote to his new friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker:

‘I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable… think I have found out (here’s presumption) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.'

In this letter he set out succinctly the thesis of Origins: the mutability of species and the mechanism of natural selection. To Darwin’s relief, Hooker’s response was matter-of-fact, but he still felt no rush to publish. But he still felt no rush to publish.

Then in October 1844 the Scottish journalist Robert Chambers published anonymously his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which promptly became both fashionable and notorious. Darwin was stunned to find that, in spite of his amateurish zoology and geology, Chambers’ thesis was the same as his: he suggested that everything currently in existence had developed from earlier forms. The book ran into many editions and stimulated great debate. It clearly influenced Tennyson's In Memoriam. Ideas of extinction and evolution were very much in the air years before the publication of Origins.

The writing of Origin
In 1854 Darwin finally got down to writing a book, with the title Natural Selection. In April in the same year Alfred Russel Wallace arrived in Singapore to explore wild life in the East Indies. While collecting birds on the small volcanic islands of Bali and Lombok, he noticed a change in the fauna:

‘The islands … though of nearly the same size, of the same soil, aspect, elevation and climate, and within sight of each other, yet differ considerably in their productions, and in fact belong to two quite distinct zoological provinces.’

For example he found placental mammals only on Bali’s side, in the western ‘Indo-Malayan’ zone, marsupials only in the Austro-Malayan zone stretching from Lombok eastwards. In August 1856 he drew his famous boundary known as ‘Wallace’s Line’.

In September 1855 Wallace published a paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, based partly on his earlier research in the Amazon basin. He later described his paper:

‘Relying mainly on the well-known facts of geographical distribution and geological succession, I deduced from them the law, or generalisation, that “Every species has come into existence coincident in both Space and Time with a Pre-existing closely allied Species’; and I showed how may peculiarities in the affinities, the succession and the distribution of the forms of life, were explained by this hypothesis, and that no important facts contradicted it.’

Darwin told Wallace:

‘I can see plainly that we have thought much alike, and to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions.’

But though Wallace had established the fact of evolution, he had not explained the 'how'. This was natural selection.

In June 1858 Darwin received a letter from Wallace, from Ternate in the Dutch East Indies enclosing an essay written in February

‘which, line by line, spelled out virtually the same theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin believed was his alone. … He was well and truly forestalled.’ Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, The Power of Place (Pimlico, 2002), 14-16.

As Wallace had requested, he despatched the essay to Lyell, who discussed the matter with Hooker. On 30 June the two men forwarded to the Linnean Society three papers that were read at a meeting of the Society, to little reaction:

extracts from Darwin’s sketch of 1844,
Darwin’s letter written in September 1857 to his friend the American biologist Asa Gray,
Wallace’s essay.

This was a genuine attempt to be fair to Wallace, but also to show that Darwin had developed his theory before he received the communication from Wallace. In August Darwin began writing, and he finished in May 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published by John Murray in November under Darwin’s name – he did not take refuge in anonymity.

In his conclusion, Darwin summed up his argument

'that species have changed and are slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favourable variations'. (The Origin of Species and the Voyage of the Beagle, New York and London: Everyman, 2003, p. 906)

He predicted correctly that

'we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history'. (Ibid, p. 909)

And he hinted - though no more - at the full implications of this theory when he wrote

'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.'(Ibid, p. 912)

[He was to set out his theory of human evolution more explicitly in his Descent of Man (1871).

The overall message was arguably grim, but the final paragraph was lyrical.

'Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.' (Ibid, p. 913)

The reception of Origin
The book sold well, though not on the scale of Vestiges of Creation or even of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. It was very useful that Mudie’s Circulating Library agreed to distribute it. Darwin received a letter of approbation from Charles Kingsley, who was the first churchman publicly to endorse evolution. Marx and Engels called it a ‘bitter satire’ on man and nature': Marx noted that

‘Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society.’

Others were appalled at the laissez-faire message and believed that the book would gratify the free-market fanatics. On the other hand, optimists seized on sentences such as this:

'And as natural selection works solely for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. (Origin, p. 913)

However there was great distress among Darwin’s old friends, such as his former professor Adam Sedgwick at Cambridge, and among many, though not all, of the Anglican hierarchy, and this probably cost Darwin a knighthood. Richard Owen wrote a long, venomous anonymous review in the April 1860 edition of the Edinburgh Review.

The culture war
Darwin’s friend and 'bulldog', T. H. Huxley, was determined to use the book in his war with the Church. In February 1860 he gave a deliberately confrontational lecture at the Royal Institution on Darwin’s theory of ‘species, races, and their origin’, in which he pulled a handful of pigeons out of a wicker basket. In the following edition of the Westminster Review he wrote:

‘Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.’

The climax of the confrontation between the establishment of clergymen-naturalists and the iconoclastic secularists came at the meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at Oxford on Saturday 30 June 1860. This was in the diocese of Samuel Wilberforce (below left), who had already given a hostile review of Origin in the Anglican Quarterly Review. It was not surprising that he had been asked to give the review as he was a vice-president of the British Association and had served on the Council of the Geological Society. He was acquainted with the geologists Buckland and Lyell. He was a friend and admirer of Richard Owen, and his review (which Darwin found ‘uncommonly clever’) relied heavily on Owen. Darwin was not present at the meeting – though FitzRoy was.

The meeting began badly with a long and boring speech from Professor William Draper of New York. When the bishop came to speak he tried to lighten the proceedings with a joke, and asked Huxley whether it was on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side that he was descended from an ape. This was a risky gambit as it played on Victorian sensibilities about the female sex. According to Huxley, he delivered a decisive riposte:

'If I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm by preference for the ape.'

Amid the clamour of the crowd, FitzRoy stood up and waved a bible aloft.

Though not all observers thought Huxley had won the argument, a powerful mythology built up round the debate – part of the scientists’ war on the Church. Darwin wrote to Huxley

‘By Jove you seem to have done it well.’

But see here for an argument that this is not the whole story. Wilberforce was making three points.

Over the course of human history there was no evidence of any new species developing;
Selective pressures, while admittedly having an effect, did not cause a change of species;
The phenomenon of the sterility of hybrids told strongly in favour of the fixity of species.

As regards the first point we now know that Wilberforce was wrong; but on the other two points he had a good argument. Dogs, horses and pigeons have been selectively bred for thousands of generations, yet different breeds do not only remain mutually fertile, but are liable to revert to type. Obvious changes in the phenotype are less significant than Darwin claimed, and species are genetically much more stable than he had supposed. Even if the family resemblances between different species were fully recognized, it still would not follow that they had evolved from one another. Unless and until Darwinians could produce an explanation of how organisms of one species could eventually evolve into those of another, which also accounted for hybrid infertility and reversion to type, it was a fair criticism to say that Darwin had not offered a causal theory but only, at best, a hypothesis.

Darwin’s funeral
Darwin died 19 April 1882. The next day the papers announced that he would be buried in the family vault in St Mary’s churchyard at Downe. But the arrangements were taken over by Huxley and Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the high-priests of the new scientific clerisy, who wanted him to be given the funeral appropriate to his stature. Lyell had been buried in Westminster Abbey in 1875 – they wanted the same honour for Darwin. This would not be easy. Two years before Huxley had opposed George Eliot’s interment there – but then Darwin had not lived openly in sin as she had!

Huxley had a clerical acquaintance, Canon Frederick Farrar, Canon of Westminster, a former head of Marlborough school and a fellow member of the Athenaeum. He suggested that they approach George Granville Bradley, dean of Westminster, and a man with a strong interest in science (and another member of the Athenaeum), with a request that Darwin be buried in the Abbey.

Meanwhile, Darwin’s neighbour (who was also President of the Linnean Society) Sir John Lubbock, City Banker and Liberal MP, collected signatures from among his fellow MPs.
The family were then showered with letters urging them to consent, and the newspapers joined the crusade, urging it as a patriotic necessity. Foreign tributes poured in and made the same point. The papers went out of their way to assert that there was no necessary conflict between Christianity and evolution. The church newspapers made the same point, whatever their private misgivings.

The Dean, at the time in France, telegraphed his acquiescence. After this the funeral had to be re-organized. The funeral directors were the same firm who had organized Wellington’s funeral.
However Emma stayed in Down, as did the villagers.

Darwin was buried on Wednesday 26 April. The queen stayed away – but the monarch did not attend the funerals of commoners. Gladstone did not attend, though the Tory leader, Lord Salisbury did. But Parliament emptied and the embassies sent representatives. Darwin was buried beneath the Newton monument.

The following Sunday the bishop of Carlisle pointed out to his congregation that

‘Had this death occurred in France, no priest would have taken part in the funeral, or if he had, no scientific man would have been present’.

By 1885 £4,500 was raised for a statue of Darwin to stand in the Natural History Museum. When it was unveiled the Prince of Wales was there, and all the Darwin family except Emma.
Desmond and Moore describe Darwin’s interment as ‘the apotheosis’ of the scientists,

‘the last rite of a rising secularity’.

But it also shows the Church’s ability to adapt to the times.

The development of science

2009-03-25T14:48:00.000Z

Above is a picture of the great geologist, Sir Charles Lyell. Darwin took his Principles of Geology with him on his voyage on the Beagle.

Before Darwin
In the early 19th century science was widely considered to be a branch of philosophy. William Paley’s Natural History argued that a divine providence had created the universe and presided over human affairs. There was no conflict between science and the Bible. But during the century some scientists mounted a cultural war against religion.

As early as the 1830s the view that science and religion were compatible was challenged by the Frenchman, Auguste Comte’s creed of positivism. He argued that human development followed three states: (1) a ‘theological’ state where human beings interpret natural forces through animist beliefs, gods or a single divinity, (2) a ‘metaphysical’ state in which people explain the world through abstractions like nature or progress, (3) a ‘scientific’ or ‘positive’ state in which humans simply try to discover the immediate causes of phenomena and the scientific laws which govern them through the application of reason and observation. In positivist thought, science would become the ultimate bases for the reorganization of society and provide human ethics with its moral basis. These ideas were to be enormously influential at the end of the nineteenth century.

Paley’s views also came under attack from the findings of geology, notably in Britain and France. Following James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795) and the foundation of the Geological Society in 1807, geology became ‘the science of the day’ between 1820 and 1840. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1831 with the twofold purpose of increasing public interest in useful knowledge and inspiring scientific discovery.

The pioneer of the new approach to interpreting fossils was the Frenchman, Georges, Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), who had served in the Revolutionary army. It was he who identified the mammoth and the mastodon. His studies suggested that entire species had been wiped off the face of the earth by catastrophes. This opened the problem of why and how extinction had occurred.

In 1811 and 1812 two Dorset children, Joseph and Mary Anning discovered on the beach at Lyme Regis the skeleton of a huge unknown creature, later named Ichthyosaurus by the Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum. Mary Anning was to become one of the most celebrated dinosaur collectors.

Another child, Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), while exploring the South Downs uncovered ammonites ‘like the fabled form of Jupiter Ammon’. He later trained as a doctor and in his spare time carried on with his geological studies. The most remarkable feature of his studies was the sheer size of the beasts that apparently once roamed the earth. In 1824 Mantell was admitted to the Royal Society. He had identified a new herbivorous lizard and the new species was named Iguanodon.

Geology was beginning to reveal vistas of time directly at odds with Archbishop Ussher’s calculations. However some of the most eminent of the early English geologists were not only Christians but clergymen: the Rev. Adam Sedgwick held the chair of Geology at Cambridge, where he taught Darwin, and in 1818 the very eccentric Rev. William Buckland was made Reader in Geology at Oxford and Director of the Ashmolean Museum. In the same year he met Cuvier, who was greeted as a hero on his visit to England. Initially, Buckland refused to speculate about the gigantic bones of an unknown creature that had been in the Ashmolean since the 17th century. Though it was carefully labelled it had become almost invisible because no-one knew how to classify it.

Buckland knew that one of the reasons for his appointment had been to produce proof of the biblical Flood. In 1819 in his inaugural lecture, he declared that geology should be the handmaid of religion. He believed that pebble deposits in the Midlands proved the flood. In seeking his proof he and his colleagues identified and named various geological strata: Devonian, Carboniferous Limestone, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous.

In France there was less pressure to prove the flood but still puzzlement about why the mammoth and the mastadon had disappeared from the earth. At the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Cuvier’s colleague, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), had developed in his Philosophie Zoologique a radically different theory: species were not necessarily extinct at all; they had developed by transmutation into other forms of life. Organs could change permanently by frequent use or habits allowing for the progression of animal forms into ever more complex types without any special creation from God. Lamarckism opened up the disturbing possibility that human attributes were not God given, that nature was autonomous and could automatically develop higher forms of life.

Cuvier’s alternative explanation was the ‘Doctrine of Catastrophes’ was welcomed when it was translated into English because it was assumed (wrongly) that it supported the biblical Flood.

In 1821 Gideon Mantell met Charles Lyell (1797-1875), a young Scotsman with a keen interest in geology. In 1828 he explored the volcanic region of the Auvergne, and then went to Mount Etna to gather supporting evidence for a theory of development he was developing and which he expounded in his popular and controversial Principles of Geology (1830-33). Uniformitarian theory stated that such as volcanic activity or the weathering effects of the sea, wind, or rain never change in intensity. This view excluded the idea that there might have been some intensely active epochs long ago when mountain ranges were built or continents rose up out of the sea; everything had happened gradually, and there was no room for an inexplicable catastrophe such as the Flood. The importance of Lyell’s work is that it effectually brought the whole realm of nature under the conception of developmental law. This development had no need for a theological underpinning. The earth was forever on the move but these moves were not necessarily going anywhere. Darwin was to say that Lyell’s book taught him to think about nature.

However Lyell believed in man’s uniqueness and the immutability of species (and attacked Lamarck ferociously for arguing for evolution) but he had come to the conclusion that the Mosaic chronology was ‘an incubus on our science’. In his presidential address to the Geological Society in 1831 Sedgwick put forward a compromise position – the flood was not a literal truth.

These scientific debates reached an even more popular audience when the journalist Robert Chambers published anonymously Vestiges of Creation (1844). He argued that organic forms had not been created in fixed groups at the beginning of the world but had chronologically progressed:

‘man, considered zoologically, and without regard to the distinct character assigned to him by theology, simply takes his place as the type of all types in the animal kingdom’.

This conclusion was fiercely attacked by the clergyman- scientists. Sedgwick: Chambers had ‘annulled all distinction between physical and moral’.

But the great lizards, named dinosaurs by the anatomist, Richard Owen (1804-92) in 1842 (from the Homeric word deinos, terrible, and sauros), had entered the popular imagination and Owen (undeservedly) became a hero. In 1850 he was presented to Prince Albert and served on the Great Exhibition Committee. When the Great Exhibition was relocated at Sydenham models of dinosaurs were displayed. At this stage many people believed that the dinosaurs must have been exterminated in the Flood - there was great reluctance to consider that they were much more ancient.

Palmerston as Prime Minister

2009-03-18T15:14:00.001Z

The Age of Palmerston
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.

The Second Anglo-Chinese War
The early years of Palmerston’s premiership were marked by parliamentary instability. His grip on power proved surprisingly tenuous.

Early in 1856 Britain declared war on Persia and sent an expedition from India to drive the Persians (seen as a Russian surrogate) out of Herat in western Afghanistan.

War with China began in 1856. By the Treaty of Nanking (1842), which concluded the ‘Opium War’ the Chinese government had conceded every British demand except the legalization of opium. But after the war there was strong pressure in China, both from missionaries and from the revolutionary peasant Taiping movement, to suppress opium smoking and the opium trade. However Palmerston sided with the merchants, who argued that opium was not harmful if taken in moderation – a view which coincided with his own free trade ideology. This policy led to an increase in ill-feeling between the British and the Chinese.

In October 1856 the Chinese authorities at Canton had arrested twelve crew members of a small sailing vessel (a lorcha), the Arrow, which was engaged in piracy, even though the ship had been registered at Hong Kong and was (improperly) flying the British flag. The Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, demanded restitution and an apology, and when these were deemed unsatisfactory, he ordered the bombardment of Canton (September). The governor’s palace was destroyed, a large part of the city was set on fire and there was considerable loss of life. The Cantonese responded by attacking British residents and property, and the British navy then sank Cantonese boats.

When the news reached London in February 1857 Bowring’s action was defended by Palmerston (who felt he had no choice) in spite of contrary advice from the Attorney-General. But an anti-Palmerston coalition of Conservatives, Radicals and Peelites (Gladstone and Disraeli joined forces) quickly formed. In a debate in the Commons Disraeli urged the Prime Minister to go to the country on the slogan

‘No Reform! New Taxes! Canton blazing! Persia invaded!’

A motion by Cobden produced a dramatic government defeat (263/247).

The result was the general election of April 1857. Palmerston defined the election issue as

‘An insolent barbarian wielding authority at Canton had violated the British flag’.

Lady Palmerston took to referring to her husband’s political opponents as ‘the Chinese’. The result was that Palmerston was returned with a modestly increased majority (85). Cobden lost at Huddersfield to a Palmerston Liberal, while Bright was defeated in Manchester (but later returned for Birmingham). Russell had a hard fight to retain his City of London constituency.

Social legislation
Although Palmerston’s government has become noted for inactivity, in fact 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

The Second Derby administration
The government remained vulnerable after the 1857 election. The majority was insecure and a severe commercial crisis in the autumn led to a decline in business confidence.

On 14 January 1858 an Italian, Felice Orsini, aided by a Spaniard and three other Italians, threw three bombs at Napoleon III in Paris as he and his wife were driving to the Opéra; they were cut by flying glass, and several bystanders were killed. It soon emerged that the plot had been hatched in England among Italian refugee groups and revolvers and explosives (made in Birmingham) obtained there. This caused an outbreak of anti-British feeling in France and the French Foreign Minister Alexandre Walewski wrote a moderate note of protest and asked the French ambassador in London to deliver it to the British government. Palmerston’s ministry thought this reasonable (the British authorities were keeping an eye on Victor Hugo and his associates in the Channel Islands) and, the government introduced in February a Conspiracy to Murder Bill, which made it a felony (punishable by long-term imprisonment) rather than a misdemeanour to plot in England to murder someone abroad.

This was immediately attacked by the Radicals who accused him of interfering with the rights of refugees at the behest of a foreign despot. The Conservatives then switched votes to back opposition to the motion and Palmerston was put in the ironical position of being depicted as ‘crouching to any foreign Power with which we have had any differences’. (But then a good deal of the bluster of his foreign policy was window-dressing and at moments of crisis he could be more conciliatory than his reputation suggested.) The government was defeated by nineteen votes. Palmerston had misjudged the feeling of the House. Next day he was hooted by the people as he rode in the Park; two days later he resigned, and Derby agreed to form a minority administration.

This short-lived administration (it lasted six months longer than its first) committed itself to reform and progress in an attempt to show that Conservatives were not mere reactionaries. Reforming measures included:

the patching up of relations with France
piloting the final passage of the Government of India Act
the abolition of the property qualification for MPs (the first Chartist demand to reach the statute book)
the admission of Jews to Parliament

However, when the government presented a modest bill for parliamentary reform (lowering the county franchise, ‘fancy franchises’), it was defeated.

In the general election which followed (remarkable for the number of uncontested seats), the Conservatives made modest gains but still remained a minority. However they were able to hold onto power for a while because their opponents were temporarily in disarray.

The formation of the Liberal party
The main effect of the Conservative government was to bring the anti-Tory elements together in a search for stability. 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. The two big egos, 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.

On 11 June Derby’s government was defeated in a large House in clear party lines (323/310). The Queen reluctantly asked Palmerston (now 74) to form a government; Russell (now 67) was made Foreign Secretary, Gladstone (only 49) Chancellor of the Exchequer. The new government differed from Aberdeen’s Peelite coalition in that it was a Liberal government, not a coalition at all.

The second Palmerston administration (June 1859-October 1865)
The Palmerston government of 1859-60 was reasonably harmonious. Palmerston and Russell sank their differences in old age, and the few radicals in the government were held firmly in check. Palmerston asserted a firm executive control over Parliament and was careful to cultivate public opinion. He made provincial tours of the great northern cities, was greeted by cheering crowds and addressed large audiences. His relations with the queen improved and when in 1863 he was cited in a divorce case, it only added to his popularity.

Diplomatically, however, the 1860s was a barren decade in which Britain lost a good deal of influence as the world changed. It opened on a wave of francophobia, with volunteers signing up against a French invasion. As a result defence spending was higher than at any other time of peace during the nineteenth century – much to Gladstone’s despair. It meant he had to abandon his cherished plan of ending income tax. But Napoleon III’s main preoccupation was war with Austria in order to achieve the partial liberation of Italy. On 27 October 1860 Russell issued his famous despatch in which, without consulting his colleagues, he virtually committed Britain to a united Italy:

‘the gratifying prospect of a people building up the edifice of their liberties, and consolidating the work of their independence’.

This drew a frosty Prussian riposte: it was

‘a declaration on the part of England, that, wheresoever there exists any dissatisfaction among a people, they have the privilege to expel their sovereign with the assured certainty of England’s sympathy’.

Many noted that Russell was not prepared to apply his principles to Ireland or India.

Perhaps the single most important misjudgement of Palmerston’s career was his failure to anticipate Prussia’s drive to dominate the North German states. When Bismarck annexed Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 Britain talked of intervention but did nothing.

With difficulty Britain preserved neutrality during the American Civil War. In December 1861 Southern sympathizers in Britain were outraged when a US ship intercepted and boarded the British ship, the Trent, which was carrying Confederate delegates to Europe. It has been suggested that if the transatlantic cable had been in operation, Britain would have gone to war with the North, but as it took weeks for letters to cross the Atlantic there was time for tempers to cool and a diplomatic solution to be reached. There was further trouble over the fact that the Birkenhead built ship, the Alabama, did extensive damage to Northern shipping before being sunk in the summer of 1864. (In 1872 that Britain agreed to pay compensation to the US.)

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.