A History of England: Recent Episodes
David Beeson
A full explanation of how, over five centuries, England got Britain into the state it's in today, and all in brief podcasts of under ten minutes each. Or at most a minute or two over. Never more than fifteen.
We saw last week that Britain wasn’t in any fit state to go fighting more wars in 1919. Having got out of the bloodiest war in history (up to then), a deep war-weariness had set in amongst the combatants, and no one felt up to more fighting. The British economy too was in no state to stand another war, what with Britain heavily in debt, to the point where its status as the banker to the world was now swiftly going down the pan. Indeed, the country taking over that role, the United States, was the very country to which a quarter of Britain’s war debt was due.
Everything was made much worse by the fact that war seemed to be brewing in every direction. The very collapse of the Empires defeated in the Great War – the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman – had produced a different and highly unstable constellation of potentially conflicting nations.
For Britain, one of the areas where war most threatened, was on its very doorstep – in Ireland.
A subject we’ll pick up next week.
Illustration: Woodrow Wilson, US President who dreamed up the League of Nations but couldn't get his own nation to join. Public domain.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
At the end of the First World War, a devastating worldwide flu pandemic killed perhaps as many as 50-100 million around the globe, and even 228,000 in Britain. That was a cruel addition to the 880,000 lost to the war itself.
Despite that blow, Lloyd George’s government did what it could to realise its objective of making Britain a ‘land fit for heroes’. That meant moving on with the programme of social reforms he’d already launched before the war. He made considerable progress in health, education, pensions and housing. However, Lloyd George was a Liberal Prime Minister in a Tory-dominated government. That imposed serious limitations on how far he could take a radical programme.
This was made worse by the economic downturn that hit the world economy in 1920. The Conservatives, never very keen on all this social radicalism, became increasingly concerned about Lloyd George when economic conditions it more difficult than ever to finance the kind of public spending that his reforms required. The Prime Minister, coming under growing pressure from his Conservative partners, tried to placate them by dumping a Minister most associated with this high spending, even though he was an important ally to him. Christopher Addison, perhaps the most distinguished medic ever to become a Member of the British Parliament, was driven from his position and soon afterwards resigned.
Something similar happened with Edwin Montagu who, as Secretary of State for India, had begun to introduce a programme of political reform there. Confused and far too limited, it was still a well-intentioned initiative, hated by the arch-imperialists, such as the Conservative MPs who had backed General Dyer, the man responsible for the Amritsar massacre. Eventually, Montagu too had to go.
The trouble was that throwing raw allies to the Tory so-called diehards in this way didn’t blunt their growing opposition to him. It did, however, deprive him of much-needed support.
Illustration: Christopher Addison in 18917, by Walter Stoneman, National Portrait Gallery x67932 (left), and Edwin Montagu, public domain.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden, is a song of praise to the selflessness of the white man who goes out to the lands of benighted savages and gives them the benefits of his wisdom and kind, if stern, governance to protect them from their own savagery.
Sadly, when we take a closer look at imperialism, we find a rather different picture. That’s anyone’s imperialism and not just the British version. This episode looks at the impact of the Spanish and Portuguese in what would become Latin America, as well as the US in the Philippines (powerfully denounced by Mark Twain). But it concludes in India, and the incident that became the turning point for Indian political leaders, previously loyal to the Empire, but convinced by that innocent that British rule had to be ended.
One of the key aspects of that incident, an obscene massacre followed by further severe oppression, was that the perpetrator faced little sanction in Britain, while the victims in India received little help. It’s no surprise that the stark contrast caused faith in British fair play to crumble. The growing resistance to British power wasn’t the reaction the perpetrators had hoped for, but it’s the reaction they should have expected.
Illustration: Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Ghandi. Public domain.
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The 1918 election was a disaster for the Liberal Party. Although Lloyd George’s faction, inside the coalition government with the Conservatives, took 127 seats, the Liberals independent of the coalition only won 36. Asquith himself, their leader, even lost his seat.
The Conservatives saw a huge surge in their number of MPs and could have formed a government themselves. For the time being, though, they stuck with Lloyd George, seen by many as ‘the man who won the war’.
The biggest defeat was for the traditional nationalist MPs from Ireland, thrashed by Sinn Fein, backers of an independent Irish Republic. The Nationalists were reduced to 7 seats while Sinn Fein won 73. One of these was taken by the first woman to win a seat in the British parliament, the Easter Uprising veteran Constance Markievicz. However, neither she or any of the 72 other Sinn Fein MPs took their seats, instead calling a meeting of the first ever Dáil Eireann in Dublin, the first Irish parliament.
Over the next year and a half or so, there would be some violent incidents in a growing Irish War of Independence. The most threatening development for the British Empire, though, was how Sinn Fein began to build an independent government, increasingly winning allegiance from the population in the south and west. The British sent increased forces, many of them ex-soldiers, but fighting only really took off from the summer of 1920.
A matter we’ll return to in a later episode.
Illustration: Countess Markiewicz, Easter Uprising veteran, first woman elected to the British Parliament, one of the first women to become a cabinet minister in Europe.
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The return of peace after the First World War might have heralded the arrival of a time of tranquillity. Sadly, it didn’t. Too much had changed. Four empires, three venerable and one an unpstart, had collapsed: Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the longstanding ones, and the German Empire, most powerful of all four, was the upstart that had shared the same fate.
In Britain, Lloyd George, basking in his reputation as ‘the man who won the war’, was nonetheless in a precarious position as the Liberal leader of a Conservative-dominated government. He decided to bring in a major electoral reform, the Representation of the People Act of 1918, and then go to the country at the head of his coalition – that is, the two parties in the coalition campaigning together, rather than as separate organisations which might well form a coalition afterwards, if the election results made that necessary.
The electorate he faced had been greatly increased by his reform, including over five million more men but also, and this was the major innovation, for the first time, over eight million women. At last, the suffrage movement had broken through, but no thanks to the Suffragettes – Emmeline Pankhurst’s WSPU had stopped campaigning for the vote when war broke out. The much bigger organisation, of Suffragists, the NUWSS led by Millicent Fawcett, played a much more significant role. It too, though, had been convulsed by the war, breaking with the peace movement to retain the support of more nationalist individuals, in particular in the Conservative party. At the same time, I had severed its electoral links to the Labour Party.
It had paid off. Enough Conservatives voted for emancipation for the vote to be granted to women aged 30 or over and meeting a property qualification – not universal adult suffrage as granted to men but a big step all the same. So at the December 1918 general election, women could vote, and indeed stand, for the first time ever.
Illustration: The WSPU in action: Millicent Austen addressing a rally in Hyde Park on 26 July 1913. Image from the library of the London School of Economics, which knows of no copyright restrictions on it.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
The First World Was over. Or was it?
First of all, does it deserve the name First World War at all?
Secondly, was it really over in 1918? That depends a lot on when we think the Second World War started. There are lots of possible dates in the thirties. One of the most striking suggestions, however, backed by some eminent historians, is that it was really only a continuation of the First. In which case, both wars share the same start date, in August 1914.
That’s because of what happened to end the fighting in 1918. It was an armistice but not a defeat followed by surrender. The way that happened, the subject of this episode, would play a fundamental role in how things panned out in Germany and in how they led to the Second World War.
Which, as we’ll see later, concluded the First.
Meanwhile, to help us wrap up on the end of the fighting in 1918, and in the spirit of a single death being a tragedy but millions of them simply being a statistic, the episode takes us through the last few deaths of Allied soldiers. And then to Wilfred Owen and how his death contributed to the idea he made his, the pity of war.
Illustration: Conrad Veidt and Claude Rains in a still from Casablanca.
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The last year of the First World War was one of startling about turns in fortune.
In the spring, making highly effective use of a different approach to artillery in combination with new tactics for infantry, the Germans broke through the British lines in France. It looked for a moment as though victory might be in their grasp. But clever tactics weren’t enough once they were through the lines, since to turn the British around and drive them back to the sea needed something more: massive numbers of men. And they didn’t have them.
Not that the Germans learned the lesson. They kept trying, in offensive after offensive, against both the British and the French, at one point getting right back to the Marne and threatening Paris once again. But they were blocked each time.
What was worst for them is that as they started to run out of men – and they lost 1.1 million in all those offensives – the Allies were getting huge reinforcements. The American Expeditionary Force was seriously increasing its numbers in France and, indeed, beginning to win some battles.
Slowly the tables turned. By the autumn, far from seeming to be on the brink of victory, the Germans began to look defeated. And the other Central Powers were cracking too. Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria-Hungary signed armistices with the Allies from late October into early November.
Finally, the Germans too asked for it all to end. And on 11 November at 11:00 – eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – they signed their own armistice. The guns, at last, fell silent.
Illustration: Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in France at the end of World War I, in 1920. National Portrait Gallery x120172
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In 1917, all the belligerents in the First World War were reaching the limits of their resources, certainly in finances, but also in manpower. It looked as though the Central Powers weren’t doing too badly, as revolutions in Russia pushed that nation out of the ranks of the Allied powers. Those allies clearly needed help from outside, and the obvious place, if any, had to be the United States.
Ironically, it would be the leading Central power Germany itself that, by relaunching unrestricted submarine warfare and above all, by sending a telegram to Mexico proposing joint action against the US, ensured that this ultimately fatal intervention would take place.
A fine further proof of the universality of human imbecility. And its associated capacity for shooting itself in the foot.
Illustration: Arthur Zimmermann, German Foreign Secretary, whose telegram suggesting concerted action by Mexico against the United States more or less ensured US intervention in World War I – against Germany. Public domain
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Lloyd George was a Liberal, but he led a coalition government even more dependent on Conservative votes than the one he replaced under Asquith. And, not only was he dependent on the Conservatives, he also faced an Opposition – a loyal and generally supportive Opposition, committed to not blocking any measure designed to win the war – made up of Liberals, under the leadership fo the very Asquith he’d replaced.
Meanwhile, the war itself had hit something of a plateau. In country after country, men were losing heart in the war. In France, that turned into outright mutinies in numerous units, following yet another bloody and unsuccessful offensive. And in Russia things were worse still, with despair both in the military and in the civilian population, leading to the so-called February revolution (that took place in March 1917) which brought down the Tsar.
Only the Germans and the British could still contemplate major offensive actions. And, indeed, Haig organised another, that led to the Battle of Passchendaele, which again caused massive numbers of casualties and failed to achieve its objectives.
This episode looks at how these numbers were now becoming a statistically significant proportion of the total number of men available for service in Britain. That number was kept shockingly low, above all by the effects of poverty, leading to far too few men of military age having the level of fitness necessary for combat.
The most powerful Empire the world had seen couldn’t feed and care for the men of its mother country sufficiently to ensure they could defend their home against an enemy on its borders.
Illustration: Wounded Canadians on their way to a first-aid-post through the mud at the Battle of Passchendaele. Photo: William Rider-Rider / LAC.
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On Easter Monday in 1916, a group of armed Irish republicans took over the main post office in Dublin and several other public buildings. They had little enough popular support, and the British authorities were able to put down the uprising quickly, using Irish troops. Then, however, the military organised a court martial for fifteen surviving leaders and executed them, including a remarkable man, James Connolly, who was so badly injured he couldn’t even stand to face the firing squad and had to be shot strapped to a chair.
Those executions, followed by that of Roger Casement in August, only served to enhance the status of Sinn Fein, the Irish republican movement, wrongly believed by many to have been behind the uprising. As is not at all uncommon, brutal repression only enhanced the status of the insurgents.
Asquith’s government did try to take action to improve the situation in Ireland. It sent in the man of the moment, David Lloyd George, whose performance in government was constantly strengthening his reputation as an effective politician, if not a particularly trustworthy one. He failed in Ireland, but continued to strengthen his reputation. That turned into a major problem for Asquith, whose own standing was being rapidly undermined by the perception that he was indecisive and, above all, by the disaster of the Battle of the Somme, casting doubts on his capacity to manage the war.
In the end, that left him hopelessly vulnerable to attack. Lloyd George joined forces with twos Conservatives, the party leader Bonar Law, and the leader of the Ulster Protestants Edward Carson. They proved too much for Asquith to resist. Eventually, he felt forced to resign, and Lloyd George achieved the height of his ambition, by becoming Prime Minister himself.
Illustration: James Connolly, Irish Republican, Socialist and Trade Unionist, put to death by firing squad by the British Army in Dublin when he was too badly injured even to stand. www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/
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One of the men included in Asquith’s government in coalition with the Conservatives was the former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. He took over as First Lord of the Admiralty, the post Churchill was forced to vacate as a condition of the coalition forming.
But Balfour had already been a member of Asquith’s War Council, the only Conservative on it. One of the major concerns of the Council was to find a way to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. So many approaches were explored: the use of tanks, or of aircraft, or flamethrowers, or of gas. At sea, Britain imposed a blockade on trade to Germany, and Germany had a first campaign of submarine warfare against trade to Britain. The Germans interrupted it in the face of US objections, rather more strident against Germany’s subs than against Britain’s blockade – the US did well out of trade with Britain and was, in any case, rather more sympathetic to the Allies than to the Central Powers.
None of the new weapons or tactics broke the stalemate. So, demonstrating a massive lack of imagination, or of capacity to learn from past mistakes, the high commands in 1916 tried mass offensives by infantry again. The only great change was the use of artillery which, with the machine gun, caused for more casualties than any other weapon in the First World War. The offensives, by the Germans at Verdun and by the Anglo-French on the Somme, again failed as all others had, gaining next to no territory and causing huge losses – over a million, across both sides, on the Somme.
So 1916 ended with a lot more carnage but no progress towards peace.
Illustration: Sir Douglas Haig, the man who was sure he could command the BEF better than anyone else, and presided over unbearable losses for very little gain. By Bassano Ltd, vintage print, 16 January 1917
National Portrait Gallery x15159
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The fallout from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign together with the so-called ‘Shell crisis’, when the army began to find itself short of explosive shells for its artillery, combined to produce an increasingly toxic atmosphere for the Asquith government. Ultimately, he decided that his only way forward was in a coalition government including the Conservatives. Liberals still made up a majority of the ministers, but several leading figures had to go. One of them was Winston Churchill, made the scapegoat for the failure at Gallipoli.
Britain was still not anxious to commit itself fully to the fighting on the continent. But fears about whether the French would stick it out without help on the Western Front made Britain steadily increase troop numbers there, with the results that losses mounted frighteningly in fruitless offensives.
In April 1915, it was the Germans who launched an offensive, at the Second Battle of Ypres. Which was the first time gas was used in the war. By no means the last, of course, and it became a weapon much favoured by many armies, including the British.
Overall, 1915 left the Central Powers ahead of the game, with more territory gained in Europe than lost in German colonies across the globe. Most notably, German-led forces drove the Russians back 300 miles, at huge cost to both sides. But these apparent successes only concealed the gradual swing in fortunes towards the Allies, as they geared up for total war, and increased recruitment into their armies.
Illustration: Ruins in the Belgian town of Ypres after two years of war. Public Domain.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
The First World War was a wonderful opportunity for cockups, seized on with glee by many military commanders or political leaders. In peacetime, such cockups do relatively little harm. In wartime they lead to deaths and injuries, and in this war, to millions of them.
This episode tracks the particular series of cockups that culminated in the catastrophe that was the Gallipoli campaign, with its hundreds of thousands of casualties, to achieve precisely nothing. It follows that up with the story of one man in the campaign, and his strange turns of luck which at first sight looked like terrible misfortunes. He’s someone who’ll be back to inspire more than one episode in the future.
This week also talks about the recruitment campaign that gave Britain its biggest volunteer army, and at the universality of human dumbness, exemplified not just by the British at Gallipoli but also by the Turks in the same campaign and by the Italians, like the Turks, latecomers to the feast.
Quite a spectacle for you to enjoy.
Illustration: ‘Your country needs you’. Kitchener’s image on the iconic recruitment poster. Public domain
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
We’ve been talking about the start of the First World War and, in particular, about the offensives and counter-offensives between French and Germans on the Western Front. What we haven’t considered was the British contribution to the French efforts there. That, in part, is because that contribution was, initially at least, so minimal – some 90,000 men out of a total of 2 million.
And for a while it wasn’t sure that even that number would go.
This week’s episode looks into the dithering on the British side, on the disagreements between politicians, and indeed between generals, often wrapped up with clashing personal ambitions. The dithering continued even after the troops finally went to France, epitomised by their commander Sir John French, who couldn’t make up his mind quite how to use his men or where, and had a curious way of collaborating with his French allies, whose language he didn’t speak, while his opposite number spoke no English at all.
A splendid way to go to war.
By the end of 1914, the British strength had built up considerably from the numbers originally sent. The soldiers had done well, though at the cost of taking heavy casualties. And, of course, by the end of the year they wre sitting in trenches, just like the French alongside them and the Germans opposite.
Illustration: German troops in a trench at Ypres. Public domain.
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This episode wraps up the outbreak of the First World War and the first phase of great offences in which all sides sought glory and, above all, quick victory. Something that eluded them.
We spend a little time looking at the failure of the international socialist movement, then very much in its heyday, to prevent war, even though the warmest supporters of socialism, the workers of different countries, were going to have to supply most of the soldiers put in harm’s way by the fighting. Then we move on to two other great radical movements, the Irish nationalists, who parliamentary representatives partially rallied to the British government, and the Women’s Suffrage movement, with the two main organisations taking opposed directions. The Suffragettes put the campaign for the women’s vote on the back burner and rallied support for the war effort. The majority movement of Suffragists continued to demand the vote and denounced the war for its butchery.
Finally, we briefly review how the early offensives, above all in the west, led only to the appalling construction of a double line of trenches, all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel, and the start of a war of attrition.
Illustration: The ‘taxis de la Marne’ that ferried French troops to the river Marne, to stop German offensive there.
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We’ve now reached the brink of the First World War. Before we dive in, this episode looks at how warfare had changed in the previous hundred years or so, with weapons far deadlier than had existed before, and which moved the advantage in battle from the offensive to the defensive: men with the powerful new firearms, sheltered by a good protective positions, were now well-placed to disrupt or even entirely overthrow any attempt by the other side to attack them over open ground.
Next, we move on to think about how Europe looked different in 1914, with the map of central and eastern Europe dominated by three great Empires which actually touched each other – Austria-Hungary and Germany had a common border with Russia – while all the smaller states that we know today, such as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Finland or even Poland, were simply parts of those empires.
Finally, we look at how the continent spiralled downwards following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, to a general war involving the five greatest powers of the Old World, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Britain.
Illustration: European alliances in 1914. Public Domain
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In this episode we keep following the downward spiral into violence in the years after 1910. There was the violence of the Suffragettes and the brutal treatment handed out to them in return. There was the growing threat of violence as opposing sides armed in Ireland, and some initial outbreaks of actual violence. Meanwhile, though, real violence was shaking the other end of the European continent, when war broke out in the great tinderbox, right down to the present day, of the Balkans. And not just one war but two, as the four nations that first fought Turkey (the Ottoman empire) fell out with each other over the division of the spoils.
That all led to increasingly hostile relations between Serbia, one of the new independent Balkan states, and Austria Hungary, which had major Balkan holdings, including right next to Serbia.
We’ve seen the regular three-yearly crises that afflicted Europe, from Tangier in 1905, to Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908, to the Agadir crisis in 1911. Now the fourth one came along, on 28 June 1914, when a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, then an Austro-Hungarian province.
I think we all know what that triggered…
Illustration: Aftermath of carnage: the scene of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Public Domain
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We’ve reached a time of rising violence in English history. This episode concentrates firstly, and briefly, on the violence around the growing militancy of the trade union movement, worrying and ugly though not even remotely comparable to what was happening in the US at the time – these things are all relative…
Next we return to the women’s suffrage movement, to the growing divergence between the Suffragists of Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Suffragettes of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, as the former stuck to the commitment to campaigning by legal means only and the latter moved increasingly towards violent actions.
But the changes were also producing internal splits within the WSPU itself. We talk in this episode about what happened as the Pankhursts fell out with each other, leading to Adela Pankhurst’s departure to Australia and Sylvia’s expulsion from the WSPU, with her organisation emerging as the East London Federation of Suffragettes, wedded as firmly as ever to the cause of the working class and the Labour Party, and close to one of that party’s most fervent supporters of votes for women, George Lansbury.
Finally, we mention the one martyr’s death for the Suffragette cause, that of Emily Davison, an iconic event in the campaign, though perhaps not quite what many people believe it to have been.
Illustration: The funeral procession for Emily Davison. Postcar print by Ferdinand Louis Kehrhahn & Co, June 1913. National Portrait Gallery x45196
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The general elections of 1910 left Asquith’s Liberal government dependent, to stay in office, on the votes of the Irish Nationalist MPs. The price of their support was a renewed attempt to drive through Home Rule for Ireland. That would recreate the Dublin parliament absorbed into Westminster over a century earlier.
Gladstone had twice tried to introduce Home Rule but it had split the Liberals. The party then left it on the back burner. Now it was back on the front burner.
The problem was that there was powerful opposition to Home Rule, in Britain, but also in Ireland, where Protestant opponents, especially in Ulster, went so far as to raise an armed force to resist it. That meant that Britain might find itself in the paradoxical position of having to use the military against people not for wanting to leave British rule, but to stay within it.
The resistance had support in Britain, right up to the top of the Unionists, led by Andrew Bonar Law, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Antrim in Ulster.
However, the Parliament Act, which Law referred to as the ‘Home Rule in disguise bill’, meant that legislation could be driven through parliament without the agreement of the House of Lords, where the Unionists were in a powerful majority.
Long debates led to no compromise. With the Parliament Act behind it, the Home Rule bill finally became law, as the Government of Ireland Act of 1914. But lack of support in the army for action against the Ulstermen left it uncertain it could ever be enforced.
By then, though, other events had overtaken the whole issue. On 4 August, Britain joined what would become the Great War. Relations between Britain and Ireland would be relegated once more to the back burner.
Illustration: Ulster Volunteer Force parading in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1914. Public domain.
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This week we’re back with women’s suffrage movement, as the conflict heated up and turned a lot uglier.
That was partly because one of the main movements, the Suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst, turned to more violent means, leading to an increasing divergence from the biggest organisation, Millicent Fawcett’s Suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Equally, the ugliness was also down to the increasing violence of the state, force feeding women in prison and displaying brutality at Suffragette demonstrations, notably at the Black Friday event on 18 November 1910.
Meanwhile, parliamentary bills to grant women the vote kept failing due to lack of time for the Commons to consider them, and on the third occasion, because the violence turned some MPs previously in favour, against the measure. And another bill, that would have granted universal suffrage for men and was due to be amended to extend to women, failed when the Speaker of the House ruled the amendment out of order, a strange decision which looked much more politically than constitutionally driven.
It seems, though, that the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, was far from unhappy over this outcome. The suffrage movements realised how lukewarm Liberal support for their demands had become and started to move away from the party. Again, the NUWSS and the WSPU moved in opposite directions: the former towards Labour but the latter, rather more surprisingly, towards the Conservatives.
Illustration: A victim of police brutality at Black Friday, believed to be the Suffragette Ada Wright.
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The year 1911 was action-packed.
Churchill, who’d been made Home Secretary the year before and got caught up in that great fake-news event, the Tonypandy massacre, added to his reputation, not in a good way, at the Sidney Street Siege.
His leader in their radical duo, David Lloyd George, got his National Insurance Act through and set Britain firmly on the road towards a welfare state. Not that everyone was happy about it, including many of the workers it was designed to help. But it’s noteworthy that even when the Conservative came back to power, they left the National Insurance scheme in place.
Then the Kaiser sent a gunboat to Agadir. Europe took a step closer to a major war but avoided it again. For now. Still, Britain decided it had to make some war preparations at last. One involved a change at the top of Navy, with Churchill, in yet another milestone on his career, taking over as First Lord of the Admiralty.
Meanwhile, the Irish and the women had to wait again. Though at least the women had a promise, one first made three years earlier. Now, Asquith made clear, it would at last be kept.
The Irish would have to hang on a little longer.
Illustration: Churchill (the leading figure in the top hat) at the Sidney Street siege. National Army Museum, Out of Copyright
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1910 was a year of battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Which means a year of battle between the Liberals, with their (initially) huge majority in the Commons, and the Unionists with an equally massive (and entrenched) majority in the Lords.
Two issues needed settling between them.
Firstly, what would happen to Lloyd George’s People’s Budget, which the Lords had already rejected once. That would be the issue decided by the general election of January 1910.
It was won by the Liberals, though only just and without an overall majority. However, with help from the Irish Nationalist MPs and Labour, they could form another government and resubmit the budget. Having seen the Liberals win the election, however narrowly, and faced with the threat of the king creating a load more Liberal peers to give them their own majority, the Lords caved and passed the budget.
Secondly, it was time to settle the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament. Since the Lords couldn’t be expected to vote to reduce their own powers, the government again turned to the king to have him create enough Liberal peers to force a measure through. He argued that it would require another election, so Brits were called to the ballot box again in December 1910, for the second time that year.
Again, and for the last time in their history, the Liberals emerged as the biggest single party in the Commons, though again without a majority. Once more, with support from the Irish MPs and Labour, they could form a government. And, again, faced with the prospect of huge numbers of Liberal peers joining the Lords, the upper house caved, passing the legislation that massively reduced its say in politics.
As their price for the support the Liberals needed, the Irish MPs were looking for renewed moves towards Home Rule, while Labour wanted to see more progressive measures adopted. And both groups had the presence in parliament to get their demands listened to.
Which must have been painful for the women’s movement. It needed influence to win the vote. Without the vote, however, it lacked influence.
A frustrating Catch-22 position to be in.
Illustration: The first page of the Parliament Act of 1911.
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Lloyd George wasn't going to be able to fund his ambitious plans for social reform by simply cutting expenditure elsewhere in government, specifically on defence. Instead he was going to have to cover both social assistance and defence.
That meant that he was going to have to raise the money from taxation. His answer was a 'people's budget'. It included a tax on value gained from selling land, and some dramatic innovations in income tax, which would certainly increase its burden.
That raised a heck of a lot of hackles, especially among the wealthy, which included most of the membership of the House of Lords. For a while, the government believed that the Lords would respect the convention, in force for over two centuries, whereby the Lords left 'money bills' alone.
Not this time. They refused to adopt the Finance Bill until the issue had been tested with the electorate. So Asquith and Lloyd George would be going to the country looking for a popular endorsement of the measures in the 'People's Budget'.
Illustration: The ‘terrible twins’: David Lloyd George (left) and Winston Churchill, the radicals of time of the People’s budget. Public Domain
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The big challenge facing David Lloyd George, and indeed the man who had become something of a sidekick of his on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, surprisingly for a former Tory, was how to pay for old age pensions and later for the other social security measures he hoped to introduce.
That was particularly difficult given the pressure to invest more in the Royal Navy, as Germany built itself more ships, and as Germany’s ally, Austria Hungary, pursued an aggressive policy in the Balkans. At one point, Lloyd George seemed to want to fund social security by cutting defence spending. But then he changed, as the Liberal Party set out to spend more on both.
Instead of choosing between guns and butter, Liberals decided to go for both.
Making Lloyd George’s challenge more challenging still.
Illustration: The first of a new class of battleships, HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906. Public domain
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The tragedy that struck Joseph Chamberlain in 1906, a massive stroke that paralysed his right side and left this outstanding orator barely capable of speaking, allowed ex-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to confirm his leadership of the opposition to the Liberal government and of the Unionists in the Commons. He and Lord Lansdowne, in the Lords where the Unionists enjoyed a huge majority, worked hard together to frustrate Liberal legislative proposals.
They did, however, let through the Old Age Pensions Act, at least in part because they accepted the government argument that it was a ‘money bill’, a financial measure, and by convention such bills were initiated in the Commons and accepted unamended by the Lords. It came into effect in 1908 and represented a turning point. It was the first step towards the welfare state, and it marked the point when the Liberal Party abandoned classical Liberalism, focused on curbing government spending and avoiding interventions into what were called ‘condition of the people’ matters. New Liberalism took steps to alleviate poverty and was prepared to accept the increased government expenditure that this entailed.
Illustration: Amedee Forestier, Pension Day Pensioners Collecting their Old Age Pension, 1909, public domain image made available by WikiGallery.org
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The first couple of years of the Liberal government elected in 1906 saw some achievements but also a great deal of frustration. The Unionist majority in the House of Lords annulled the Liberals’ in the Commons. That blocked many of the government’s initiatives.
This period ended in August 1907 when Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, started a series of three heart attacks over the next fifteen months. Ultimately, they left him bedbound until, in April 1908, he became the only Prime Minister to die in 10 Downing Street.
Meanwhile, in the women’s movement, and in particular among the Suffragists of Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the NUWSS, dominated by Liberals, there had been great hopes of seeing progress with a Liberal government in power. They were dashed by Campbell-Bannerman’s refusal to act. In part, this was down to party considerations, since both organisations were looking not for universal adult suffrage, but only equality of voting rights with men, on the existing basis. That would only enfranchise relatively well-off women, and they would be inclined to vote Conservative.
Just as the NUWSS was linked to the Liberals, so the other main organisation, Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was closely bound to Labour. However, the Pankhursts – both Emmeline and her daughter and closest collaborator Christabel – began to lose faith in Labour from the very time they set up the WSPU. They favoured more militant action, such as intervening in public meetings and heckling speakers. The effectiveness of their campaigning in gaining publicity for the movement even persuaded Fawcett took move towards direct methods, for instance in organising the 3000-strong ‘Mud March’ in 1907.
But when HH Asquith, an opponent of women’s suffrage, took over as Prime Minister from Campbell-Bannerman, and it became clear that the government wasn’t going to advance the women’s cause anytime soon, the two organisations’ ways began to part. The SWPU began to explore far more militant tactics yet, which the NUWSS wouldn’t be prepared to adopt.
That, though, is for later episodes…
Illustration: Christabel Pankhurst, by Ethel Wright, in a portrait exhibited in 1909
National Portrait Gallery 6921
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The 1906 general election had given the Liberals a colossal majority in the House of Commons. In the Lords, however, the Unionist opposition still held an unassailable majority against them. This meant that they could block Liberal legislation as they wished.
Some significant measures were lost as a result. On the other hand, some passed, including, strangely enough, some measures backing working-class rights, hardly the kind of initiative you’d expect Conservatives to back. However, they have felt they could win votes that way, as a higher number of working-class voters seemed to support them than might have been expected, and the Conservatives might well be able to take advantage of the fact that in some cases, there were even internal divisions within the Liberals on such issues.
Meanwhile, the new Liberal, and newly appointed Under Secretary for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, agreed with the former Boer general Jan Smuts steps towards giving the Boers equal rights with the British in South Africa. Black South Africans were denied any say in their government. It’s clear that possession of a white skin was a route to privilege even under British rule and long before apartheid.
Finally, the suffragists, as opposed to the more militant suffragettes, gained another success in a new breakthrough achieved by England’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, when she became England’s first femal town mayor.
Illustration: In 1901, during hte Boer War: surrounded by other Boer guerrillas, General Jan Smuts, once Churchill’s captor, later his lifelong friend. Public domain.
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Arthur Balfour’s intention in resigning as Prime Minister but without a general election was probably to oblige Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman to form a government, which might force their divisions to the surface. That would weaken their chances in an election that was bound to be held soon.
There was a curious symmetry between the divisions in the main parties. The Liberals were split three ways over the Boer War. Liberal Imperialist right wing backed Britain’s military intervention, while the left, sometimes called pro-Boer, opposed it, and in the middle a group around the leader accepted the need for war but denounced its most brutal aspects (such as the concentration camps).
Meanwhile, the Unionists were split three ways over tariff reform. The ‘wholehoggers’ backed a full system of import tariffs to protect British trade, the free traders wanted to stick with the old doctrine of tariff-free commerce, and a group around the leader accepted the need for reform but wanted to proceed more cautiously.
Unfortunately, tariff reform was topical while the war had been over for three years. The Liberals were able to unite in attacking the government, specifically over tariff reform. And they won their last landslide in the 1906 election.
Despite the end of the Boer War, the new Liberal government faced a world haunted by the spectre of renewed war. There was uncertainty over who the enemy would be if a new war broke out. The traditional enemy was France, and Britain likes its traditions. But an increasing threat was now coming from across the North Sea in Germany. Politicians and even novelists (the latter best represented by Erskine Childers and his Riddle of the Sands) were beginning to warn that the German threat was the more serious.
The entente cordiale with France in 1904 showed Britain beginning to move closer to France and further away from Germany. Then Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany showed up in Tangier in Morocco, making a speech designed to provoke France, and tensions quickly grew. The conference that ended the crisis failed to address Germany’s issues. That made Tangier just the first of a series of crises that set two groupings of European great powers increasingly at odds with each other.
Finally, this episode also talks about a small step forward in the ugliest of the European colonies in Africa, Congo. Again with a link to a novel.
Illustration: A 1904 British cartoon on the Entente cordiale: John Bull (Britain) walking off arm-in-arm with Marianne (France), turning their back on Wilhelm II of Germany, whose sabre is poking out of his coat. A Punch cartoon by John Bernard Partridge.
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The divisions among Unionists – the Conservative Party and the Liberal Unionists, then in government together – over tariff reform massively damaged their electoral chances and came as a real gift to the Liberals. That was on top of Balfour’s Education Act of 1902, which had allowed the Liberals to heal their rifts over the Boer War and come together in attacking the government.
It looked as though the Unionists were heading for a drubbing at the polls in the next general election. But the Liberals weren’t complacent. One of the things they did was come to an agreement with the new Labour Representation Committee led by Keir Hardie, now with four MPs, not to stand a Liberal candidate against theirs in constituencies where they had a real chance of beating the Tory. This may have been a smart move by the Liberals, maximising Tory losses at the subsequent general election. Then again, it may have been a terrible self-inflicted wound, letting in a party that would soon eclipse them as the main party of opposition to the Tories.
When the election came, it was a disaster for the Conservatives and a tremendous win for the Liberals, which took 397 seats in a House of Commons f 670. Labour too surged, wining 29 seats, 24 of them in constituencies covered by the agreement with the Liberals.
The Liberal majority meant that the doors had opened for the leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman to make some real changes in Britain. Sadly for the Liberals, however, though they didn’t yet know it, they had just had their last landslide election win and would soon have their last elections wins of any kind. They were also starting on their last term in government on their own, rather than part of a coalition.
They might be celebrating the present, but the future would turn out much bleaker.
Illustration: Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal leader who led the Liberals into their election landslide in 1906. The picture is from 1907, by London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, National Portrait Gallery P1700(86b)
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A factor of small but growing importance at the end of Salisbury’s premierships, and during Balfour’s that followed, was offered by the Labour Representation Committee. It had been formed by trades unions working with left-wing parties of the working class, most notably Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party. With no MPs before the election of 1900, it had grown to four by 1903 which, in an environment in which third parties have trouble establishing themselves, was a substantial development.
Meanwhile, the ruling Unionists were beginning to divide against each other. The question that finally split them was Tariff reform, the same issue that had split them back in 1846 when Robert Peel repealed the corn laws to usher in a long period of free trade without tariffs, but in the opposite direction: the tariff reformers at the start of the twentieth century, led by Joseph Chamberlain, wanted to reintroduce tariffs. The aim was both to create barriers protecting British industry and agriculture (even if that meant increasing the price of food, painful above all for the poor), and to allow for imperial preference, the system which would draw the colonies closer to the mother country by exempting their economies from certain tariffs.
Three factions emerged within the Unionist coalition, right up to cabinet level. One, led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, remained wedded to free trade. A second, the Prime Minister’s, was sympathetic but wanted to proceed slowly. The third, Chamberlain’s, was for rapid introduction of tariffs and imperial preference.
Split parties don’t win elections, and now the Unionists were hopelessly split.
With an election looming.
Illustration: Some of the white, male attendees at the 1902 Colonial Conference. Joseph Chamberlain is in the middle of the front row, with Wilfrid Laurier,Prime Minister of Canada to his right (our left).
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A major issue the Balfour government had to deal with was immigration. That became a thinly veiled pretext for anti-Semitism, since increased persecution of Jews inside the Russian empire sent huge numbers abroad seeking for refuge. A great many reached London, though far fewer than was often claimed.
This episode looks at the reactions to the problem, which was often surprising, at least in appearance. Some Jewish leaders backed measures to restrict immigration. So, at one time, did the kind of figure you would imagine to be more sympathetic to people fleeing persecution, such as Keir Hardie in the forerunner of the Labour Party, though he and his colleagues later came down firmly against anti-immigration measures.
Many of the backers, though, were the usual suspects. Some were genuinely convinced that what they were seeking was restriction on destitute and undesirable immigrants. Many others, however, felt that what was really being sought was an anti-Semitic measure to keep Jews out of Britain.
Illustration: Sir William Evans-Gordon, cartoon by ‘Spy’, from ‘Vanity Fair’, 11 May 1905 National Portrait Gallery D45274
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Poor Balfour. He achieved a surprising amount considering how little time he had as head of government. What made it worse was that most of the measures he pushed through attracted at least as much criticism as praise. Often they caused deepening rifts amongst his own Unionists and even, on at least one occasion, strengthened the Liberals by helping to unite them again after their own deep splits on the Boer War.
At least he did manage to get an Entente Cordiale with the French, ratcheting way, way down the traditional tensions between Britain and its neighbour across the Channel.
On top of that, he had to deal with an old friend, George Curzon, who as viceroy of India found himself, like other colonial governors, unable to resist the temptation to launch a military adventure. The expedition into Tibet cost lives, though mostly among the poorly armed Tibetans, cut down by the superior British weapons, and in the end achieved virtually nothing.
Which was entirely emblematic of Balfour's time in the top job.
Illustration: Detail of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Balfour in 1908. National Portrait Gallery 6620
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The first thirty years of the twentieth century were a crucial period in the campaign to win the vote for women. But women’s rights concerned far more than just the vote. Across the nineteenth century, a series of remarkable women campaigners had pushed back the boundaries in significant ways, in property rights and status in law especially for married women, as well as in access to higher education and to the professions, notably in medicine.
They had also gradually won the right to vote in an increasing range of local elections, making it hard to maintain the opposition to their voting for parliament. At least, hard to maintain on the principle that the nature of women meant that they needed protection from the ugliness of politics. Though, as this episode points out, the objection may not have been exclusively one of principle.
At the end of the century, for the first time in Britain a major, unified women’s suffrage movement emerged, the Suffragists, led by Millicent Fawcett. But the episode ends with a group peeling off, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst. These far more militant campaigners would be the Suffragettes.
Both groups would pursue the campaign in the coming years, though with very different tactics.
Illustration: Emmeline Pankhurst by Christina Broom (detail), National Portrait Gallery x6194), and Dame Millicent Fawcett by Walery (detail), National Portrait Gallery Ax38301
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Eventually, Britain brought overwhelming force to bear on the Boer fighters. Combined with the mistreatment of their civilians, that at last forced them to surrender, though that meant abandoning the independence of the two republics and accepting their absorption into the British Empire.
There were some lessons to be learned from the heavy work that the empire had to make to beat the small irregular force facing it. Whether Britain learned them is far from clear. Other nations, on the other hand, quickly cottoned on to the fact that the empire’s power wasn’t anything like as irresistible as Britain had tried to make it look. That gave some of the colonies the feeling that it might not be unrealistic to imagine they could break free from imperial control.
A striking example of someone moving in this direction was Mohandas Gandhi. He was in South Africa and had provided a stretcher-bearer service to the British army. Sadly, his reward had been a medal, followed by reduction to second-class citizen status, when the new British rulers of Transvaal decided to register all Indian and Chinese residents. Gandhi would, of course, soon emerge as the major figure of the Indian independence movement.
Just to add a more human touch to all the high principles, this episode also contains a fine love story, as impressive as the one between Charles and Katharine Parnell.
Illustration: Gandhi in front on his law practice in South Africa by Keystone Press Agency Ltd National Portrait Gallery x137615
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Celebrations over victory in the Boer War, and the landslide general election win it led to for Salisbury, turned out to be premature. Indeed, towards the end of 1900, the war was entering its darkest phase.
The Boers, far from admitting they were beaten, switched to guerrilla warfare. And the British Army responded with scorched earth and concentration camps. Farmhouses were burned, as were crops, and livestock was killed. Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were herded into the recently invented institution of concentration camps, first used by the Spanish colonial authorities fighting an insurrection in Cuba. Many thousands of Boers died, most of them children. And there were camps for black prisoners too, where mortality was also shockingly high.
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t one of the aspects of British imperial history that’s particularly well known in Britain.
The use of concentration camps, and the shameful conditions inside them, were revealed by two remarkable women. Emily Hobhouse, who was close to Liberal circles, first exposed them in the report of her trip to South Africa. Such was the outrage in Britain, that the British government felt it had to send a commission out to investigate, and entrusted it to the suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett, who held Unionist views. However, she entirely confirmed the earlier findings of the Liberal Hobhouse.
Illustration: Emily Hobhouse, by H. Walter Barnett, 1902, National Portrait Gallery x81401
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We’ve been tracking years and years of Tory rule in Britain. It’s as though the once dominant Liberal Party had practically vanished from the scene. In fact, though, things were changing in its ranks, with new figures emerging to lead the party back towards government. One of these, David Lloyd George, we’ve met before but briefly and, in this episode, we get to know him better.
However, despite the moves to start sorting out the Liberals’ difficulties and, above all, the internal divisions that were losing it so much support, it still had more pain to come. The outbreak of the Boer War only revealed more dissension among its leaders and, since split parties don’t win elections, that together with the government’s apparent victory in South Africa as well as against the Boxer Rebellion in China, would cost the Liberals another landslide defeat in 1900.
Another landslide though not quite as big as might have been expected, given how much circumstances favoured the Conservatives and handicapped the Liberals. Was that a glimmer of hope for the future?
As well as Lloyd George, who won re-election in 1900 despite his anti-war stance, two other historic figures entered parliament at that election. Keir Hardie of the Independent Labour Party, who’d lost his seat in 1895, returned in 1900. And Winston Churchill won a seat for the first time, at the start of nearly 64 years in parliament with only a brief interruption.
Illustration: David Lloyd George, by Harry Furniss: fiery Welsh radical giving his opponents a bad time. National Portrait Gallery 3398
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The tide turned for the British in South Africa when they sent enough troops out to overwhelm the Boers entirely – well over half a million over the whole length of the war or approaching half as many again as the entire Afrikaner population. They also replaced some hopeless generals by a couple of more effective ones, Frederick Roberts, who’d served with distinction in the Second Afghan War, with Herbert Kitchener, fresh from his triumphs in Sudan, as his chief of staff.
Better generals and huge numerical superiority turned the war in Britain’s favour. In the course of 1900, the three cities the Boers had besieged were relieved, and British troops drove the enemy back onto their own territory, and then occupied the capitals of both Boer republics. The war seemed to be over and the British government at home was so sure of its victory that it called the first ‘khaki’ election, chalking up a major political win to go with its military success in South Africa.
However, victory against the Boers was by no means as secure as the Salisbury government thought. Indeed, the war was on the brink of its third phase. That we’ll be looking at soon and it was anything but a credit to the British Empire.
Illustration: Robert Baden Powell, defender of Mafeking and founder of the boy scouts, in 1908. Bromide print by H. Walter Barnett National Portrait Gallery x45253
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Two depressingly similar men, unbending, old, bearded, entirely committed to the advantage of their own race, were glaring at each other between the Boer Republic of the Transavaal and the imperial heartland of Great Britain.
President Kruger of the Transvaal was determined to protect the way of life of his Boer people, at the expense of denying the other whites moving into his country any of the rights associated with democracy, while regarding its black inhabitants as entitled to still less consideration.
Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Great Britain, was determined to show that it was Britain that was boss in South Africa. He was also keen on avenging Britain’s humiliation in the First Boer War, when its army was beaten at the Battle of Majuba Hill.
When the two countries came to blows, however, things seemed to be going strongly the Boer Way. After a few months of fighting, at the end of 1899, complacency by the British authorities and some astonishingly bad generalship on the ground, had combined to make it look as though the Second Boer War might go the same way as the first, with another British defeat.
Illustration: Stephanus Johannes Paulus ('Paul') Kruger, President of the Transavaal, by Duffus Bros, 1890s
National Portrait Gallery x19163
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An episode in two parts.
The first is an adventure story, the extraordinary march across Africa of a small detachment of French troops led by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand. He occupied the abandoned Egyptian fort on the Nile at Fashoda. There he was met not by the planned supporting columns of Frenchmen, but by General Kitchener with a massively bigger force. In fact, the two men didn’t fight, but met and were perfectly courteous with each other. It was up to the politicians in London and Paris to sort out the Fashoda incident. Given how precarious the French position was, inevitably it was resolved in favour of the intransigent British Prime Minister, who emerged with a British monopoly on access to the Nile in Sudan. Poor Marchand had to march away again having achieved very little, except to establish himself as a model for little boys to admire.
The second part is about the other side of the coin of imperial Britain. That was the unbearable, crushing poverty in which a huge proportion of the population lived. Charles Booth, arguably the first Social scientist, established in his remarkable research that 30% of the population of London were living below the poverty line, and that line was a lot lower than it is today. Grandeur was the outward-looking face of Empire; behind the scenes, things were a lot uglier.
Fashoda was just one critical incident for Britain in Africa. The next would be in South Africa. And the Empire would be looking for the men to fill the ranks of its army among just those poor, crushed by their misery and undermined by disease.
Illustration: Jean-Baptiste Marchand on the cover of French magazine celebrating his march across Africa. © Paris - Musée de l'Armée, Dist. RMN - Grand Palais / Pascal Segrette 06-506187 / 2001.72.2
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Salisbury had a fairly accurate view of just what Britain could and couldn’t do on its own, given the limitations on British power itself, but also the blocks caused by domestic political opposition . He equally had a clear notion of just what massive damage the new generations of weapons might do in a war in which both sides had them, essentially a war between great powers. Finally, he also understood that the point of empire wasn’t sentiment, it was business.
All this made him deeply suspicious of the Jingoist spirit of many who wanted to push Britain’s imperial interests ever further forward. Instead, however much the Jingoes might criticise him for it, he preferred to concede to rivals in areas where he felt no vital interest was at stake.
On the other hand, where such an interest was on the table, he was more than prepared to fight. He’d decided, in particular, that given his colleagues’ fear of taking on Turkey, the best way to protect the Suez Canal, the vital link to India, was through Britain’s control of Egypt. But Egypt depended on the Nile, and that river ran through Sudan. That’s why, while Salisbury avoided war over West Africa, or over holdings grabbed by other powers in China, or with the US over the Guyana-Venezuela border dispute, he stood firm over Sudan and sent Kitchener in there to win his victory of Omdurman and then against the remaining Mahdist forces as he swept southwards.
Control of the Nile Valley was a goal he felt Britain could achieve and which would be key to its imperial interests. So it was worth fighting for. Even, as we’ll discover next week, when that brought him into conflict with a great power.
Illustration: The main gate to the munitions depot in Quingdao, after the German occupation, in 1898. From the Bundesarchiv of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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The running sore of British relations with Ireland was running still and just as sore. This time another Balfour, Gerald as opposed to his brother Arthur, but like him a nephew of the Prime Minister Salisbury who nepotistically appointed him, was pursuing a policy designed to address some Irish grievances, rather than simply tighten repression.
That was made easier by the reduction in unrest and even of Home Rule fervour in Ireland, together with the loss of the iconic leader Parnell. Balfour felt it was legitimate to reward a quieter Ireland with concessions, while at the same time, it also helped reconcile the Irish to British power and even to undermine still further the demand for Home Rule. That, in turn, weakened the Liberals’ and Irish Nationalists’ position, since they were firmly committed to seeing an Irish Parliament recreated.
Balfour would always claim, however, that these political advantages, while welcome, were never his main aim.
Abroad, Britain sent a joint Anglo-Egyptian force out from Egypt to reconquer Sudan. That would complete the uninterrupted sting of British holdings or controlled territories across the whole continent of Africa, from South to North. It would also provide the opportunity, at the Battle of Omdurman, for a young lieutenant, Winston Churchill, to take part in the last significant cavalry charge in British history.
Illustration: The Charge of the 21st Lancers by Edward Matthew Hale, a key moment in the Battle of Omdurman, and in the military history of then Lieutenant Winston Churchill. Public Domain.
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Henry Labouchère’s amendment of 1885 had criminalised any sexual act between men, labelling it gross indecency, an offence which was a great deal easier to prove than the older charge of sodomy.
In 1895, Oscar Wilde was at the peak of his fame and acclaim, with his play The Importance of Being Earnest having had a hugely successful premier. He was also in a stormy relationship with Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, he of the rules of boxing). Queensberry had already lost his eldest son, killed it was maintained in public in a shooting accident, believed in fact to have committed suicide, following an affair with no less a man than the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. When Queensberry realised that another son was involved in something similar, he hit the roof. He left a card at Wilde’s club with the accusation that he was a ‘sodomite’. Wilde felt the accusation was so serious, he had to sue for libel.
Sadly, his case fell apart, especially under the acute cross examination of a lawyer destined for a brilliant career in the law and in politics, Edward Carson. He defended Queensberry by setting out to show that the allegation against Wilde was true. Sadly, by doing that he provided all the evidence Wilde’s enemies needed to have him condemned in a criminal trial himself.
And with that, Wilde was bankrupted and his career destroyed. “I have ruined the most brilliant man in London,” Carson is reported to have said. Certainly, he contributed. But the real blame was a law that made the unorthodox behaviour of the most brilliant man in London not just a difference to tolerate, but a deviance to persecute.
Illustration: Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, in a gelatin silver photo of 1893, by Gillman & Co, National Portrait Gallery P1122
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Lord Salisbury had decided to serve as his own Foreign Secretary and, indeed, it was events abroad that most marked his third administration.
This episode starts by looking at the great feast of Empire which was Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee of 1897. It was Britain at its peak of might, with the biggest empire the world had ever seen, wealthy, powerful, and with a people broadly united behind the Queen, her Empire and her government.
That last bit was something that men like Salisbury, in the government, made the most of.
But behind the scenes, a rather different picture was beginning to emerge, of a country whose power, while great, was already in decline. This episode looks at three widely different events, out of the many that Salisbury addressed, that suggest this was happening: the Jameson raid in South Africa, the failure to intervene in support of the Armenian Christians against ongoing massacres by their Turkish overlords, and the US support for Venezuela in a border dispute with then-British Guiana.
Illustration: Dr Jameson (fourth from left) and the officers of the Jameson Raid, 1896. National Portrait Gallery P1700(20b)
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Back in chapter 120, we met two extraordinary women, Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale, who transformed the world of nursing. Now we’re looking at four more women who were just as remarkable. They took on the stronghold of the doctors, and broke in. As they did that, they also began to force open the doors of the universities.
The specific task of gaining access to universities for women was taken on by another woman mentioned in this episode, and she directed yet another towards the battle for the vote.
As well as the women, the episode also looks briefly at a Churchill and the strange launchpad for life he provided for another, his son. But that son is a historical giant, so strange or not, it was a launchpad that would work for him.
Illustration: The Elizabeth Garret Anderson Hospital building in Euston Road, London. Photo by Luca Borghi @ (July 2011)
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Salisbury was back for his third term in office, but for now without a majority in the House of Commons. He had to form a government, and for the first time it would include Liberal Unionists as ministers. One of them, Joseph Chamberlain, surprised Salisbury by choosing to be named Secretary of State for the Colonies in preference to either of the great posts he’d been offered. It seemed that imperialism mattered more to him.
With a government in place, Salisbury took the country to a general election. He won with a landslide.
In this episode, however, we take a break from all that to look at some of the great breakthroughs, other than his electoral triumph, taking place at that time, specifically in the sciences. Physics was surging. So were the life sciences. So indeed was medicine, but we’ll come back to that next week, when we look at women in that male-dominated field.
In particular, one man proposed a disturbingly new scientific viewpoint. That was Charles Darwin, with his highly contentious theory of evolution. One of his admirers, it turned out, was none other than the Prime Minister himself. And, even more surprisingly, when Salisbury did differ from Darwin, his argument was well-founded in science. Not something one would expect from most British Prime Ministers.
Illustration: Charles Darwin, pen and ink portrait by Harry Furniis, National Portrait Gallery 6251(16)
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With both eyesight and hearing fading, Gladstone couldn’t last long after his defeat on Home Rule. Though he lasted as long as he could. Even after almost the entire cabinet prevented him from blocking an increase in naval expenditure, demanded by the admirals, and which he feared would merely add fuel to the fire of an arms race, he still clung on for a while longer. Finally though, in February 1898 he went.
But who would replace him? Would it be Spencer, his favoured candidate despite having opposed Gladstone over the naval expenditure? Well, Victoria didn’t even do him the courtesy of consulting him about his successor, so what he favoured didn’t matter.
Might it be Harcourt, the Chancellor and ‘little Englander’ whose cautious view of imperialism was in line with thinking across the mainstream of the Liberal Party?
Or would it be the Liberal Imperialist Rosebery, who’d keep the party firmly anchored to its right wing?
Well, Victoria was quite an imperialist herself. Rosebery was picked. He head a short-lived, inglorious government, torn by internal dissension – Harcourt couldn’t forgive him for depriving him of a position to which he thought he was entitled – which fifteen months later simply imploded and meekly resigned, letting Salisbury form his third administration.
That was the opening of a Tory decade. It was that long before the Liberals got another chance to form a government.
Illustration: Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, by Henry T. Greenhead, published 23 October 1894, when Gladstone’s successor was a fading Prime Minister. National Portrait Gallery D39875
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The 1892 election had given Gladstone his chance to form yet another government and establish two new records: the only man to have been Prime Minister on four different occasions, and the oldest man ever to have held the post.
He formed a government which gave the young Asquith his chance to shine in a senior position, which he certainly did. It also gave the Earl of Rosebery, dithering about it until the end, playing hard to get, blowing hot and cold, the position of Foreign Secretary and a platform, as we shall see, to go still further before long. Finally, it was a government which had some valuable achievements in its short existence.
But one achievement that eluded it was the aim on which Gladstone had set his heart. He got Irish Home Rule through the House of Commons, only to see it thrown out by the House of Lords. What might have turned into a posthumous victory for Parnell, turned instead into his final failure. This episode asks to what extent that was a missed opportunity but leaves the answer to you to choose.
On the other hand, the bloodshed in the 130 years since Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill was defeated, is easy to judge. Simply, unequivocally, it is the stuff of tragedy. By no means the first in the long sad history of Anglo-Irish relations, but it would be a relief if it turned out to be the last.
Illustration: William Ewart Gladstone as a senior statesman, by Harry Furniss. National Portrait Gallery 3381
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The pendulum had been swinging fairly steadily over the twenty years up to the early 1890s, with any party that won an election generally losing the next. That happened again in 1892, although the win was nothing like as decisive as Gladstone had hoped, leaving him instead dependent on Irish MPs to have the votes to challenge for office again.
It also produced a crop of interesting new characters for the politics of the future. The first Labour MP independent of the Liberal Party, Keir Hardie. Edward Carson, the Unionist lawyer from Dublin who’d already won a reputation as a tough prosecutor in Ireland. Herbert Henry Asquith, first elected six years earlier, now on the brink of an important career. David Lloyd George whose future would be closely bound up with Asquith and had been elected two years earlier.
As well as these figures, this episode also talks about Charles Bradlaugh, who had died the year before the election, but whose campaign to allow the non-religious to sit in parliament would have repercussions long after his life and involved many of the people we’ve come to know, though not necessarily love, such as Asquith, Labouchère and Randolph Churchill.
Indeed, after his death – at his funeral indeed – it even involved a figure of huge importance later, one of the towering giants of the twentieth century, Mohandas K. Ghandi.
Yes, that’s right. The Mahatma.
Illustration: Keir Hardie, Labour’s first MP, as he was in 1892, by Arthur Clegg Weston. National Portrait Gallery x13173
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Just two weeks after the end of the divorce proceedings between Katharine and William O’Shea, the Irish Parliamentary Party assembled in Committee Room 15 of the Palace of Westminster, for the most fateful meeting in Charles Stewart Parnell’s career.
The backlash from the divorce and the revelations that emerged about Parnell’s behaviour, left Gladstone feeling that continuing his association with Parnell would fatally undermine the chances of his Liberal Party winning re-election. Paradoxically, that meant that the hopes for Irish Home Rule, which required the formation of a Liberal government, depended on his distancing himself from its most powerful champion. So in Committee Room 15, the Irish Parliamentary Party had to decide whether, to achieve its aim, it had to remove from its leadership the very man who’d brought that aim so close to realisation.
The explosive effect of this destructive paradox would be devastating for the Irish Parliamentary Party and for Parnell himself.
Illustration: Parnell addressing a crowd during the Kilkenny North by-election, from The Illustrated London News, 27 December 1890.
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We break away in this episode from our account of events in Britain’s ever-troubled relationship with Ireland, to look instead at Africa, where things were about to get a lot worse even than they were for the Irish.
From 10% of the landmass being controlled by European colonial powers in 1870, by 1914 the figure had grown to nearly 90%. Some of the drive to extend European possessions had been driven by individuals, such as Cecil Rhodes in British South Africa, or the even more extraordinary character, Leopold II, not a private individual, since he was king of the Belgians, but acting in a private capacity in Africa. He eventually controlled as his own personal domain the whole of what he called the ‘Congo Free State’ (there’s an unintended irony in the word ‘free’), a territory 75 times larger than Belgium where he was king.
We follow the exciting events that led to his incorporating the still-troubled region of Katanga into his holdings, as a telling example of how the Europeans behaved in that unfortunate Congo.
Leopold’s rule over the Congo was particularly appalling, but the other colonial powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain), though less awful than he was, had little enough to be proud of either.
Illustration: Cartoon by François Maréchal in Le Frondeur, (Liège, Belgium), 20 December 1884, showing Leopold II carving up the Congo with Bismarck to the right and a crowned bear for Russia on the left.
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This episode picks up Ireland’s story again, just as the English establishment turned its guns on Charles Stewart Parnell.
Round 1 of its attack was launched through the Times newspaper, in a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’. It set out to show that, despite his public commitment to the parliamentary road to achieving Ireland’s aspirations, in reality and in the background he was prepared to collaborate with men of violence. Indeed, in the second article of the series, the Times published a letter apparently from Parnell to a leading Fenian, in which he seemed to condone one at least of the Phoenix Park murders of 1882.
That attack failed when it emerged that the letter was simply a forgery.
Even so, damage had been done to the Irish movement by the sheer extent of the investigations carried out by the Commission set up to examine the allegations against Parnell. It cleared him but found other mud to throw at different parts of the Irish movement.
Round 2 of the attack came when William O’Shea, husband of Katharine, the great love of Parnell’s life, sued for divorce. The revelations at the trial were immensely damaging to him. In this episode, we follow events up to the point where the Irish Parliamentary Party, having rallied to him at one meeting, have called another to review that decision and Parnell has weakened his position by publishing a manifesto that could hardly have been better calculated to offend people on whose support he needed to count.
Illustration: The Times attack on Parnell, accusing him of association with criminality.
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This episode looks at the strange behaviour of Captain William O’Shea, the husband of Katharine. She was in one of the great love relationships of their time, with Charles Stewart Parnell. O’Shea wanted to get back into parliament and Parnell, to indulge Katharine, perhaps even to deflect O’Shea’s hostility if not blackmail, went to great lengths to make sure he did. And yet, once he had, O’Shea stood down again within just four months.
Next the episode turns to Salisbury, then heading his second government. He decided to fill the recently vacated post of Chief Secretary of Ireland by appointing his nephew Arthur Balfour to it. This is strictly nepotism, since the Latin word nepos means nephew, but to everyone’s surprise, the appointment worked well for Salisbury. Balfour revealed a steeliness no one suspected in him and found the way to impose on Ireland just what Salisbury had called ‘resolute government’. That’s a euphemism for something pretty repressive.
At the same time, he set out to address Irish grievances over landholding and over agricultural incomes, pursuing a strategy he called ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’.
Together with the repression, that worked, and broke the latest wave of unrest. Still, it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t his kindness that Irishmen focused on most. No, it was the stick, not the carrot, that won him his new nickname: Bloody Balfour.
Illustration: Arthur Balfour by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant), circa 1890. National Portrait Gallery P144
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Before we return to the sorry tale of British rule in Ireland, this episode looks at some of the many other issues that Lord Salisbury addressed during his second ministry. What emerges is the portrait of a man of his class, moulded by the outlook of the aristocratic landowner, convinced that his peers were the men best positioned to lead without being ‘defiled by the taint of greed’ and therefore able to ensure that England, and by extension Britain, avoided change that was altogether too radical. That’s too radical not just for him but, indeed, for most Brits.
He was a man for whom all change was necessarily change for the worse. And yet, he could read circumstances well enough to know when certain changes were necessary, and ensure, heavy-hearted or not, they were made. One type of change he particularly disliked was modification of principles to suit electoral considerations, but he could make those too.
Indeed, that willingness of his contributed to driving forward the process that would make of the Conservative Party the most effective election-winning machine Britain has ever seen.
Illustration: Lord Salisbury during his second ministry, Harry Furniss, 1891. National Portrait Gallery 3411
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It was a bad time for Gladstone, defeated in an election held just a few months after the previous poll which he’d won.
It was a bad time for Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party who’d felt Home Rule for Ireland was within their grasp only to see themselves cheated of the prize.
But it wasn’t an easy time for Salisbury either who had to approach building his second government with a lot of care, watching out who he offended and who he couldn’t afford to offend.
But Salisbury’s biggest problem was the most outspoken and best-known parliamentarian his Conservative Party had in the House of Commons, Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the Winston who would ultimately become far better known than he ever was. Randolph Churchill was a problem for Salisbury until the latter showed his skill by turning the tables on the former.
And making it a bad time for Churchill too.
Illustration: Photo of the original performance of Shaw’s Arms and the Man, 1894.
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It was heartbreak time for Parnell. He’d spent eleven years in parliament, leading to the emergence of a powerful Irish Parliamentary Party that eventual won the balance of power. That put Home Rule, the restoration of a Dublin parliament, apparently within his grasp. Yet all that culminated in defeat and disappointment when Gladstone’s bill was thrown out.
The loss led to the fall of Gladstone’s third government and the formation of Salisbury’s second. In turn, that was the start of a long period of Conservative dominance over British politics, lasting for nineteen years. Or, in my view, more like 137 years right up to the present day.
But to get that well launched, Salisbury had to deal with one great thorn in his side. That was Randolph Churchill. And he sorted that problem with his customary skill.
Illustration: George Goschen, the Liberal Unionist found a Conservative seat and made Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a Conservative government, by Lord Salisbury. Pen and ink by Harry Furniss, before 1891. National Portrait Gallery 3577
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The storm that had been building for years over Ireland broke just as soon as Gladstone, with Irish support, finally brought down the Salisbury minority administration. His problem was that quite a few of his own Liberal MPs were unenthusiastic about Irish Home Rule, a policy to which he was now firmly committed, especially as he was dependent on the votes of Irish MPs.
Both the Whig tendency within Liberalism, whose leader was Hartington, and quite a few of the Radicals, following Chamberlain, were beginning to separate from Gladstone’s brand of Liberalism. When, therefore, he went into the campaign for his Home Rule Bill, he faced attacks from two wings of his own party, as well as from the Tories, now openly against restoring the Irish parliament since they were no longer hunting for Irish votes.
He might have handled some of the opposition more tactfully, especially Chamberlain’s. But it may have been a hopeless task anyway, given the depth of feeling against Home Rule among so many in both parties. Either way, the vote on the measure went just the way one might imagine, as Liberal rebels voting with the Conservatives made sure it was defeated.
The first squall of the storm had struck. It had left Gladstone’s attempt at Home Rule in pieces on the floor. And his government was in just as bad a way.
Illustration Joe Chamberlain by Harry Furniss. National Portrait Gallery 3349
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Salisbury, who’d secured his position in the Conservative Party by his clever political work over Gladstone’s 1884 Reform Act, was now Prime Minister. But only at the head of a minority government. That wasn’t something he could live with for long, since it meant that the Liberals had a Commons majority hanging over his head, ready to kick him out whenever they decided it was time to use their strength against him.
The election, when it came, would have nearly three million more voters on the registers than previous time around. Many of them would be Irish, including quite a few Irishmen living in England. So issues to do with the government of Ireland, and in particular Irish Home Rule, would be a key factor in the outcome. Both main parties had contacts with Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party. Gladstone, though he had come around to supporting Home Rule himself, encouraged Parnell’s conversations with the Conservatives, rather hoping to have them introduce Home Rule rather than having to do so himself, if he came back to office heading a new Liberal government.
Salisbury was having none of that since he was opposed to the whole idea of Home Rule. On the other hand, with Irish votes at stake, he didn’t mind people thinking he might be considering the possibility. So Parnell spoke to both sides.
Then, when the election results were announced, it turned out Gladstone had won but without a majority, with the Conservatives second. Parnell’s Irish party had taken 86 seats, the 86 of 86 as they were called, since the parliament only met in 1886.
He held the balance of power.
In the meantime, a bold action by Gladstone’s son with the British press, the so-called Hawarden Kite, had seen the Liberal leader identified as the champion of Home Rule. Parnell could put him back into office. Maybe it was time for him to stop flirting with both sides and commit himself to the Liberals who seemed committed to the goal he was pursuing.
Or were they?
Illustration: Herbert John Gladstone, First Viscount Gladstone, by Sir Leslie Ward, published in Vanity Fair, 6 May 1882. This is Herbert, Gladstone's son and a Liberal MP, who was responsible for flying the 'Hawarden Kite'.National Portrait Gallery 3288
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After nearly five years in power, the strains inside the second Gladstone government were beginning to show. Indeed, both main parties were having trouble, above all with their respective awkward squads. The Radicals in the Liberal Party were always demanding more and greater reform. Meanwhile, the ‘Fourth Party’ launched inside the Conservatives by Lord Randolph Churchill (father of the more famous Winston) demanded more ‘Tory democracy’, though it’s not clear what that meant, except that it always seemed to lead to the political progress of Churchill himself.
With the Reform Act of 1884 as its only major accomplishment, Gladstone’s government staggered on towards its end. Both main parties realised that the Irish MPs would be crucial to the formation of a new government after the next election, the first to be held on the basis of the extended electorate brought in by the Reform Act, and both were therefore courting Parnell. He, indeed, worked with the Tories to bring down Gladstone in a Commons vote on a financial question.
Then, with Salisbury leading a minority government to cover the time until the new electoral register was complete and an election could be held, Parnell took part in negotiations with both sides, in the hope of advancing his cause of Irish Home Rule. That led to a lot of secret negotiations hidden behind a veil of universal dishonesty.
The consequence was that Home Rule was now firmly back on the political agenda. It would be the great issue of the next couple of years. Which, in turn, would make it the determining factor in convulsions about to rock the British political system.
Illustration: Lord Randolph Churchill by Harry Furniss.
National Portrait Gallery 3559
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As the second Gladstone government approached its end, it had little enough to point to as major successes. Some measures had been passed to try to pacify Ireland, but that sad country was still far from reconciled to British rule. There’d been colonial disasters in South Africa and Sudan. There’d been the Labouchère amendment, not perhaps seen as all that significant at the time, but something that would open the doors for eighty years of shameful treatment of gays, leading to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and Alan Turing’s suicide.
Then, at last, the government came up with one really major achievement. That was the 1884 Reform Act, which added nearly three million new voters to the electorate. They were all men and still only 60% of them, but it was still a significant advance.
Lord Salisbury, who’d got his fingers burned in the painful and ultimately failed campaign to block the Arrears Act for Ireland, this time adopted a cannier approach and worked hard to stiffen up his support. He took the line of refusing to let Reform through the House of Lords, where the Conservatives had a built-in majority, unless it was accompanied by Commons seat redistribution, to mitigate the damaging effect on his party’s electoral chances. This time he was successful, reversing the damage to his standing caused by the earlier failure, and putting him in a strong position to become sole leader of the Conservatives when the existing dual leadership with Stafford Northcote ended.
Reform had proved successful for both main party leaders.
Illustration: Cover of the Reform Act 1884. © ParliamentaryArchive
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After the Phoenix Park murders, there was a bit of a hiatus in Parnell’s campaign for Irish Home Rule, while he consolidated his grip on the movement, guiding it firmly into the path of constitutionalism and away from violence. Meanwhile, Gladstone brought in an act to relieve tenant arrears in Ireland, the counterpart to Parnell’s work for pacification within the context of the tacit agreement that got him out of prison and came to be known as the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’.
Salisbury, for the Conservatives, decided to make a stand against the Arrears Bill. At first, he seemed to be strongly placed, with firm support within the party. But as it became clear that there’d be government money for landlords with tenants in arrears, his backing began to drop away until, leaving him isolated and forced to let the bill through. That weakened him in his competition with Stafford Northcote for the Conservative leadership.
Away from Ireland, Britain plunged into some tricky and unfortunate adventures abroad. The First Boer War in South Africa led to humiliating defeat. Then, following a successful campaign to take control in Egypt, General Gordon’s mission into Sudan left him beaten and dead. Gladstone’s failure to rescue him led to his nickname of GOM (Grand Old Man) giving way to MOG (Murderer of Gordon). Not a good look for a politician soon to campaign for re-election.
Illustration: General Gordon’s Last Stand. Public Domain.
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The passage of the Land Act for Ireland provided many tenant farmers with a wonderful way of getting their rents reduced. Sadly, that benefit had a downside, as it undermined the enthusiasm for continuing the campaign Parnell wanted to guide into increased pressure for Home Rule. It was by no means the only unintended consequence of measures taken at this time and which made the relations between Britain and Ireland increasingly tense.
Those tensions culminated in the arrest and imprisonment, without trial and merely to prevent a crime that hadn’t been committed, of several leaders of the Irish Land League, including Parnell. That was so contrary to human rights that it rather underlines the colonial nature of British rule in Ireland.
Imprisonment was particularly hard for Parnell because this was also the time when his overwhelming love for Katharine O’Shea was increasingly dominating his life. She was, indeed, pregnant by him.
But, to ensure that every aspect of the human comedy, and tragedy, is present in this episode, we end with a tale of death, the killings that have come to be known as the Phoenix Park murders.
Illustration: Detail from the miniature of Katharine O’Shea that Parnellkept with him in Kilmainham Prison. Public Domain
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Disraeli didn’t last long after losing power for the last time, dying within a year. That ended a remarkable era, of the long battle between him and Gladstone.
Next, the survivor, Gladstone, had to build a second government, made up of both Whigs and Radicals, the two great wings of his Liberal Party. The relations between them were becoming tense, with friction, between the more conservative views of the Whigs and the more liberal aspirations of the Radicals, beginning to grow. As we’ll discover later.
Gladstone also faced a problem he’d set out to solve in his previous government, when he’d declared that his mission was to pacify Ireland. That nation, which I argue Britain treated as merely another colony, even though its technical status was far grander, was once more experiencing an upsurge in unrest, especially as the effects of a bad harvest struck home.
This episode tracks Gladstone’s attempts to resolve the problem up to the moment he got a Land Act through parliament. It pauses on the way to talk about the origins of the word ‘boycott’. And it concludes that the Land Act didn’t really resolve the problems of Ireland and might, indeed, have been merely a diversion from the real issue. As we'll explore in future episodes.
Illustration: Cartoon of Charles Cunningham Boycott, whose name is now used for an campaign of ostracism directed against a political opponent. Drawing by ‘Spy’ (Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair. Public Domain
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As the end of the parliament elected in 1874 approached, Gladstone confirmed that his re-emergence from retirement hadn’t been a one-off. He was ready to launch himself once more into full-time politics. The result was the Midlothian campaign, ostensibly intended to win him a new parliamentary seat in Edinburgh, though in fact assisting the Liberal Party to a national majority and re-establishing him as its dominant figure. When the Liberals won the 1880 election, it became impossible to deny Gladstone the premiership, and he formed his second administration.
Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, Charles Stewart Parnell was emerging as the leading figure of Irish politics. When excessive rain in 1879 damaged the harvest and raised again the spectre of famine, he emerged as the president of a Land League campaigning for tenants’ rights, despite being a landlord himself. Despite that, Home Rule with the re-creation of an Irish parliament remained his top priority. The 1880 election strengthened his hand within the Home Rule group of Irish MPs and he won their leadership too.
Gladstone as prime minister and Parnell as leader of the Irish opposition were now facing off to each other, ready for the Irish conflict that would dominate the following years.
Illustration: Charles Stewart Parnell as President addressing a public meeting of the Irish Land League. Public Domain
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It had all been going so well. The Congress of Berlin had been a huge success, allowing Disraeli (and Salisbury) to bring back peace with honour. Things should have been flowing the Conservatives’ way.
But then there were a couple of bad military adventures, launched by over-powerful and out-of-control colonial administrators. Both ended up costing a lot of money and a lot of lives, for little gain. One, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, was even launched from India while a famine that eventually cost 8 million lives was raging and relief budgets were being cut to save money, although funds were being poured into waging war.
At the same time, the British economy was doing badly, with a recession and bad harvests.
That all added up to a rather bleaker picture for the Conservatives than their successes might have implied.
This episode also introduces three people we'll be hearing more about later, and who had significant moments in the 1870s (in one case, the moment was birth, a pretty significant event, without which it’s hard for anyone to make a name for themselves).
Illustration: Graveyard at Isandlwana, site of Britain's worst defeat in a colonial war since the American War of Independence. Photo from Zulu Kingdom Travel Guide.
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We start this episode with a Russian army north of Constantinople ready to invade the city, and a British naval squadron in the waters to its south ready – or at least apparently ready – to resist it. In the end, it was the Russians who blinked. With war avoided, the Berlin Congress of all the European Great Powers met and left Russia with a much reduced list of gains from its war against Turkey, than it had try to secure in the Treaty of San Stefano.
Disraeli and Salisbury conducted preliminary negotiations to ensure that they had commitments to the outcome they wanted before even going into the Congress. That allowed Disraeli to proclaim on his return that he had won ‘Peace with Honour’. In his case, that was probably true, which can’t be said of many of the people who’ve used the expression since.
The Congress was the major and substantial foreign policy achievement of a premiership which had also contained some earlier symbolic successes, such as the purchase of Suez Canal shares and the granting to Victoria of the title ‘Empress of India’. For now, the only shadow was Disraeli’s own health, that drove him in tiredness from the stressful environment of the Commons to the calmer waters of the Lords.
Finally, the episode talks of the appointment of a bookseller as First Lord of the Admiralty, and how that fed into the glorious Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, HMS Pinafore.
Illustration: Detail from a publicity poster for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. Public domain
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Here’s the episode where we learn where the word Jingoism was born.
After talking last time about the remarkable achievements on the domestic front of the second Disraeli government with its social reform, this week we start to look at what interested him far more: foreign affairs. And the biggest affair of them all was the ‘Eastern Question’, precipitated by yet another war between Russia and Turkey. That in turn followed on from the massacres carried out by Turkish forces in the Balkans, specifically what came to be known as the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’.
Gladstone re-emerged from semi-retirement to denounce those horrors. Disraeli, on the other hand, was far more worried about the behaviour of the Russians and intent on blocking their expansion. As time went on, public opinion seemed to swing increasingly in his direction. “We don't want to fight,” claimed the music hall song, “but by Jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.”
In deciding how to confront the Russian threat, Disraeli found himself working increasingly closely with a man with whom he’d previously fallen out badly, Lord Salisbury. And, we’ll see, their collaboration worked.
Illustration: HMS Alexandra, flagship of the BritishMediterranean fleet in the 1870s, and one of the ironclads that forced theDardanelles. Public domain.
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Disraeli’s second government was an administration of progressive conservatism, a strange moment in a general history of the Conservative Party as essentially, well, conservative. Partly that was politically expedient, looking for support among the working class, but partly it was sincere, based on a deep revulsion at the conditions in which most of it lived.
Much of the reforming legislation was piloted by Richard Cross, Disraeli’s imaginative, and bold, choice as Home Secretary. It included the conclusion of the long campaign led by many but above all by Lord Shaftesbury, to limit the hours worked by women and children. It also abolished the use of ‘climbing boys’, the use of kids as chimney sweeps. It, astonishingly for a Conservative government, extended union rights, including decriminalising the right to picket. And it even included the introduction of the Plimsoll line on ships, to prevent overloading and the many sailors’ deaths to which it led.
On all these reforms, resistance was loud and strong from business interests. And, the final surprise of this time, they were being faced down by a Conservative government.
Illustration: Samuel Plimsoll, Lithograph by by Richard Childs, 1874
National Portrait Gallery D42829
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We've reached the point where the political pendulum has at last swung the Conservative way, giving it a working parliamentary majority for the first time in three decades.
Despite all his efforts to get that majority in 1874, Disraeli seems to have been surprised by the extent of his success. He took power without a properly worked-out set of policies to apply. In particular, since he was more interested in foreign affairs, he had little in place in the way of a domestic programme. For that he would depend on his ministers, so getting their selection right was a major task.
One of the most difficult nuts to crack would be getting Salisbury into his government, if only to stop him sniping from outside. This he pulled off in part thanks to the intervention of the Countess of Derby, though her relationships with Salisbury and other leading figures in the story is worthy of a soap opera.
The absence of a good domestic programme left a space open into which the Archbishop of Canterbury was able to insert a nasty piece of Church legislation, in the course of the last ever parliamentary session that would be overwhelmingly devoted to a religious matter.
That was in strange contrast with the instincts of Disraeli’s government which, despite being Conservative, were strangely progressive socially.
Illustration: the lady with a background worthy of a soap opera, Mary Catherine (née Sackville-West), Marchioness of Salisbury (later Countess of Derby), by Camille Silvy. National Portrait Gallery Ax53033.
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A sea change took place at the 1874 British general election.
The previous year, Gladstone and his government, exhausted by its searing pace of reform, lost a parliamentary vote on what he saw (and many of his colleagues didn’t) as the essential third leg of his tripod of measures to pacify Ireland, the foundation of a Catholic university in Ireland. They resigned but Disraeli, in a brilliant political move, refused to take his place. So Gladstone had buckle on the armour again and his failing government struggled on for a few months more.
Over those months, a scandal hit them and, in the course of reshuffling his ministers, he decided to take on the Chancellorship of the Exchequer himself, a further burden on a man already worn out by his responsibilities.
So, when the election was finally called, the Conservatives went in revitalised while the Liberals fought it already half defeated. The result? For the first time in 33 years, the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority and Disraeli could finally form a government with a chance of lasting a while.
What’s more, a new party representing Irish interests took a big block of seats too. Far from pacifying Ireland, all Gladstone had done was preside over the appearance of a new organisation speaking out against British rule. And even against his own party.
Another episode in the unravelling rule of Britain in Ireland…
Illustration: Gladstone, cartoon by Carlo Pellegrini published in Vanity Fair, 6 February 1869
National Portrait Gallery 1978
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“My mission is to pacify Ireland,” Gladstone had declared when he took office as Prime Minister.
This episode looks briefly at Disraeli’s behaviour as he left power, including the peerage he sought for his wife (rather than for himself). Then we move on to Gladstone’s attempts to secure peace in Ireland, first through disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, then through new legislation concerning Irish land ownership. They involved serious and exhausting battles, though they achieved very little in the way of pacifying Ireland...
As the exhaustion of these struggles began to affect the government, and indeed Gladstone, Disraeli found new form and came back to the attack. Notably with one of his best known denunciations of ministers, as a series of dormant volcanoes. The pendulum was swinging back his way.
Illustration: William Ewart Gladstone by Sir John Everett Millais, 1879. National Portrait Gallery 3637
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The Liberals are back, and they're being liberal. Gladstone followed Disraeli into Downing Street, and led a reforming government. So Disraeli with the Conservatives managed to reach the top of the greasy pole first, but he got only ten months before being kicked out unceremoniously by Gladstone and the Liberal Party.
Oddly, though, Gladstone didn't too well personally, losing his parliamentary seat - as he had at the previous election too. He only managed to cling on in parliament by being nominated for another seat at the same time, and winning that one.
His government brought in a slew of reforms followed in the military, in education, in trade union law and, as another key step on the road to democracy, in legislation to introduce secret ballots in national and local elections.
This was also the time when Germany emerged as a nation, proclaimed as the Second Reich in, of all places, the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles, in defeated and humiliated France. German victory was a warning to the other powers, one that Britain failed to take seriously enough.
Meanwhile, trouble was continuing in Ireland. But since pacifying that country was Gladstone’s self-declared mission, we’ve left that to our next episode.
Illustration: Anton von Werner, The proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles. Painted in 1885, it shows the subjects, including King William I, about to be made emperor, at their 1885 ages rather than as they were when the event took place in 1871. Public Domain.
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We're reaching the moment when Disraeli, fresh from outwitting Gladstone over electoral reform, climbed, in his own words, to the top of the greasy pole. Indeed, becoming Prime Minister after Derby resigned, was the first major milestone in a political career that Disraeli had hit before his rival. And it was the big one.
Meanwhile, Gladstone had followed John Russell into the leadership of the Liberals. So the two great adversaries were facing each other in the top jobs of the two sides of parliament, Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition. And Gladstone was ready to hit back at Dizzy.
The opportunity was provided by that long-running, ever-recurring sore in the history Britain, its misrule in Ireland. And this time it was Disraeli’s turn to be outmanoeuvred.
Illustration: Contemporary cartoon of Disraeli, riding the horse Reform Bill, outpacing Gladstone (left) at the Derby, though warning that the result might ultimately depend on the weigh-in at the end (the next election)
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It’s time for a master class in opposition by the man who said that the role of the Opposition is to oppose. Disraeli and Gladstone, both now leaders in the House of Commons of the Liberal and Conservative parties respectively, faced off over electoral reform. And Disraeli displayed real genius in outflanking Gladstone, first to defeat him by opposing reform when the Liberals proposed it while they were in government, and then by backing it when the Conservatives took over and proposed their own legislation.
So a glorious example of opportunism pursued with dazzling skill in the pursuit of power.
Illustration: Dishing the Whigs, from the magazine Fun Lord Derby (left) andn Disraeli (right) have dished their Whig (Liberal) opponents by introducing a reform measure more liberal than they had. The two Conservative leaders now present the heads of the Liberal leaders to Queen Victoria.
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The American Civil War, like the war led by Prussia against Denmark, showed that Britain was no longer the superpower that had emerged from the Napoleonic wars. In both those conflicts, Britain had views – rather changeable ones, switching from one side to the other, in the American case – but couldn’t influence the outcome. Instead, Palmerston’s government could do little more than watch events take their course.
What the American war also demonstrated, however, was how British workers, in particular the workers put through great hardship by the Lancashire Cotton Famine the war had precipitated, could put principle above personal interest. Despite the pain they were suffering, they had called on President Lincoln to go right on prosecuting the war until the defeat of the South and the emancipation of the slaves.
Now, that didn’t loosen any purse strings. For some more decades, relief for people who needed help would continue to mean the Poor Laws with the workhouse in the background, and whatever voluntary help people felt they could spare. However, at a time when the question of extending the right to vote was re-emerging, the principled behaviour of the Lancashire workers encouraged those backing such a move, by revealing that artisans too could reach mature, even admirable, political judgements.
But the atmosphere wasn’t right in parliament yet. Besides, Palmerston was still opposed to electoral reform at least in the short term. However, when he died, and he was the last British Prime Minister to die in office, he opened the door to that debate again. Which will be the subject of our next episode.
Illustration: Prince Albert and Queen Victoria in 1859, by George Milner Gibson Jerrard, after Frances Sally Day. National Portrait Gallery x197484
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After talking last week about wars in China and Italy, and potentially with France, in this episode we turn to the United States where one of the biggest wars of the nineteenth century was just breaking out. That was the American Civil War.
We’ll see how the secessionist southern, slaveholding states, soon to call themselves the Confederate States of America, made a disastrous miscalculation, by blocking their own exports of cotton. It was a lethal self-inflicted wound, but it also caused terrible hardship in Britain where the textiles and its feeder industries had become the nation's biggest employer.
Britain remained divided over the war, with many in government, including three of the most important ministers, Palmerston, the Prime Minister, Russell, the Foreign Secretary, and Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, favoured the South. Indeed, at one point it looked as though Britain might well get involved in the war against Abraham Lincoln’s Union side.
In the end, though, Britain remained neutral. One of the contributory factors had to be the extraordinarily courageous, and self-sacrificing, behaviour of the people in Lancashire who were suffering the most from the cotton embargo. When Lincoln turned the war into one against slavery, they met and wrote to urge him to keep up the fight, despite the suffering it was causing them, until the Confederates were defeated, and the slaves freed.
And they even got back a reply from the President with a tribute to their spirit.
Illustration: Francis Bicknell Carpenter, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation (detail). Public Domain. Lincoln is on the left, Seward the seated figure to the right.
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When the Earl of Derby’s second government fell, Victoria tried to impose a Prime Minister of her choice on the elected politicians who felt rather differently. That, though, was obsolete thinking. In the end she had to take Palmerston back.
He was now 75, though as ready for hard work as ever. He faced a number of foreign affair challenges, most of them wars. A war with China to complete successfully on behalf of drug pushers. A war to avoid with France, which he did with a little help from two non-ministers, Richard Cobden in Britain and Michel Chevalier in France. A war in Italy. A German war against Denmark.
One big lesson was that the days when Britain could dictate terms to its neighbours and get its way, were gone. If any country was going to be able to play that game, the experience of Denmark showed it would be more likely to be the Germany Prussia aspired to build and lead. Britain might not have seen it yet, but the writing was on the wall for its global military power, which was beginning to ebb.
Meanwhile, another war was raging across the Atlantic. It too would have a major impact on Britain. But that’s for next week.
Illustration. Henry John Temple, third viscount Palmerston, in later life, by Francis Cruikshank
National Portrait Gallery 3953
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This week we’re into Dizzy times again.
Disraeli, or Dizzy as he came to be known, had played a leading role in bringing down the Palmerston government in 1858. That allowed the Earl of Derby, leader of the Conservatives, to form his second administration. With Derby in the Lords, responsibility for managing the government’s affairs in the Commons fell to Dizzy, as Leader of the House of Commons, and he also became Chancellor of the Exchequer again.
The Derby government brought in the legislation that ended the East India Company’s rule in India, replacing it by direct rule from London and launching the British Raj. Next, Disraeli picked up the cause of electoral reform, surprisingly for a Conservative. He realised, as few in his party had, that extending the vote might actually benefit the Conservatives, and that there was no inevitability to artisans voting Liberal.
But the reform proposals failed as the Liberals, finally getting their act together, rallied enough force to defeat the government, and then did it again following a general election in which the Conservatives did well but not well enough to win an outright majority.
The second Derby government had lasted sixteen months, barely more than the ten months of the first. And Dizzy had to move back into Opposition.
Illustration: Benjamin Disraeli, photo from the early 1860s, printed by Henry Lenthall, after William Edward Kilburn. National Portrait Gallery Ax46252.
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After discussing his relative success with a moderately liberal programme in England last time, in this episode we talk about Palmerston’s far greater difficulties abroad. There was another Opium War in China, as Britain fought to enforce the East India Company’s right to push drugs there, and then an uprising in India, which Brits still like to think of as a mutiny though many Indians see it as a War of Independence.
Both events involved extensive brutality, most of it by Britain, but Palmerston did just fine in the debates on both. The stumbling block proved to be something far less significant: a terrorist outrage in Paris by a man who’d had some connection with England. The French demanded that Palmerston take action, and he responded by proposing new legislation. That had seemed to many like kowtowing to the French, and the Opposition in parliament was able to engineer a victory in a vote against his government’s behaviour.
Oddly, that was on the very night after his victory over military action in India. One evening, he was victorious, the next he was out. Events, you see, events are the real killers in a statesman’s existence.
Illustration: Sepoy Mutiny, 1857 by Charles Granger, showing a scene from the 1857 Indian uprising. From Wikimedia Commons.
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After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the troops came home from Crimea, as did the remarkable women we talked about last week: Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale. They came back to different lives: Nightingale went on to do seminal work in nursing and in healthcare analysis – she revealed an unusual grasp of mathematical methods and became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society – while Seacole faced bankruptcy and closed doors. Could that be down to her blood running, as she put it, “under a duskier skin” than that of most Brits?
Before we finally leave Crimea, this episode includes a quick digression about another remarkable healthcare specialist, this time on the Russian side, the military surgeon Nikolay Pirogov.
Then, like the troops, we return to England. There Palmerston was pursuing a liberal domestic policy programme, but as we’ll explore more next week, he was about to encounter events in foreign affairs that would put a spoke in his wheels.
Illustration: Detail from Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the East (1858) by Florence Nightingale, a coloured pie chart to illustrate causes of death in the British Army. Public domain in its source country on January 1, 1996 and in the United States.
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Mary Seacole, Jamaican and Mixed Race, and Florence Nightingale, White and from the English middle class, both in different ways did extraordinary work in Crimea as nurses. They both opened the doors to a different kind of nursing, in which practical steps such as good hygiene was vital, alongside a caring attitude towards patients. The two met but never worked together.
For the kind of radical change in nursing they ushered in, both showed the necessary qualities to an impressive extent. However, Seacole found that the authorities, and even Nightingale herself, made it far harder for her to be allowed to give all she could to the sick and wounded of Crimea. Which makes it hard not to ask, as she did, whether it might not be because her “blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs”.
Illustration: Mary Seacole by Albert Charles Challen, National Portrait Gallery 6856 (image reversed left-to-right), and Florence Nightingale by Jerry Barrett, National Portrait Gallery 2939
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Conditions in Crimea were appallingly bad, and all sides lost more men to disease than in combat. Britain did particularly badly in the first year, when the French performed rather better. However, in the second year (two years, note: the quick war the Allies had hoped to fight had transformed into a grind) the British did far better, and much of that was down to a radical change in healthcare. Next episode we’ll be looking at two people who played key roles in that process, Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole.
With the slow siege of Sevastopol grinding on with little progress, while the cost in lives and treasure constantly climbing, the government eventually fell. The hunt for a new one revealed two striking facts: William Gladstone was an increasingly key figure in British politics, and the pressure propelling Palmerston onwards and upwards was finally going to get him into Downing Street.
He would be in charge in Britain as the war ended, with limited concessions from Russia, all of which would be reversed within 24 years. Leaving the question, was it all worth it? And wouldn’t the expenditure, seven times higher than relief for the Irish famine, have been far better spent there than on this bitter, costly and ultimately unproductive war in Crimea?
Illustration: Combat dans la Gorge de Malakoff by Adolphe Yvon: the French capture of the Malakoff,. Public Domain.
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Extraordinary! For once, instead of being at war with each other, Britain and France are going to war together against someone else. In this instance, Russia. And eventually in Crimea. Where the war is pretty much a constant succession of cockups, mostly by Britain, but from time to time by France too.
One of the most spectacular is also the most celebrated moment from that whole ghastly war, the Charge of the Light Brigade. Usually presented, not least by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem , as heroic it is in fact a ghastly case of incompetence compounded by personal conflicts leading to needless deaths for no useful gain.
Emblematic of the whole war, as it happens.
Illustration: The Relief of the Light Brigade by Richard Caton Woodville, Jr., public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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Just as, after the Second World War, the Western European powers were grateful to Russia for using its colossal military force to ensure the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, while still being frightened of that military, so in the 1850s, those same powers were grateful for the role Russia played in bringing down Napoleon, while feeling nervous about the huge military power it had used.
In the 1850s, Russia’s threat was growing again. The Tsar, Nicholas I, saw himself as the protector of Orthodox Christians and Slavs. Everywhere. That included the 14 million inside the Ottoman (Turkish) empire. When he issued a demand to be officially granted authority to provide such protection, and that demand was rejected, Russia and Turkey slid quickly to war.
The Western Powers watched aghast. Despite their ancient rivalry, even France and Britain, pulled together in the face of this Russian action. Gradually, and against the resistance of many, even at the top of government, Britain found itself sliding towards war.
It was finally declared, by both Britain and France, in March 1854. Setting the stage for what would come to be known as the Crimean War.
Illustration: Ivan Aivazovsky’s 1853 The Battle of Sinop (Wikimedia Commons)
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The tale of the first government led by the Earl of Derby (whom we first met as Lord Stanley), in which Benjamin Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, from its start to its fall such a short time later. And then, the start of the Aberdeen government, in which the same post was held by William Ewart Gladstone, perhaps rather more successfully. He did have one major advantage, granted by simple circumstance, but even so, there's no denying he did better.
So this is also the episode where we first meet the intense, and from then on lifelong, hostility between Gladstone and Disraeli. A hostility which led to battles between these two giants that would dominate three decades of British politics.
And, in their confrontation, it has to be said that first blood went to Gladstone.
Illustration: The Bucks election - Mr Disraeli addressing the electors in the County Hall, Aylesbury, 1852, by Frederick James Smyth
(National Portrait Gallery D45902)
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It was time for Disraeli to break through. Not yet to the top job: that, as Melbourne had predicted years before, would go to Stanley, now known as Derby. But Disraeli would land a big job in government, that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not an easy job for a man who was no financial expert. His major challenge was that he represented a political group opposed to the Repeal of the Corn Laws, just when Britain was at the top of its world leadership in economics, to which that repeal had contributed: the British had created a business environment that could benefit fully from free trade internationally (at least where it suited them). British success would be celebrated in a colossal show, the Great Exhibition, to be attended by millions, many of them taking advantage of the new mobility provided by the railway age. Meanwhile, Disraeli would be set the task of coming up with a budget in keeping with the times, but which would secure the support of people focused on the interests of the one group that had suffered most from the loss of tariff protection, the gentlemen farmers, with good landholdings though not as massive as those of the great noble families. Keeping them loyal mattered, since Derby and Disraeli's wing of the Conservatives was short of support (and of talent) after the business interests had deserted them to go with Peel.
Illustration: The British contribution to the Great Exhibition, from Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (public domain) Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
We’re back in 1848, with the Year of Revolutions, a few of which succeeded, most of which were put down – not least in Northern Italy, where Joseph Radetzky, celebrated in a cheerful Strauss tune, proved far less cheerful in his treatment of opponents to Austrian rule.
Britain, on the other hand, saw no revolution, though many feared one from the Chartists. In the event, the last shout of Chartism turned out to be little more than a whimper, disarmed by improved economic conditions and channels to funnel protest into less harmful directions.
!848 also saw the moment when the majority wing of the split Conservative Party, the Protectionists, opposed to Repeal of the Corn Laws, could have found a new leader in Benjamin Disraeli. But he was just too eccentric, perhaps too Jewish, somehow too foreign, and he was passed over. The first of several occasions when he was denied, until late 1851. Then he at last secured the position of Leader of the Party in the Commons (under the overall leader, Stanley).
At least that meant that he was in a leading position just as his party formed a government again. So he was poised to enter government for the first time, and in a senior position too.
Illustration: On the barricades on the Rue Soufflot, Paris, 25 June 1848 by Horace Vernet
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We saw last week that the Russell government stood back from the Great Irish Famine to the point of practically criminal negligence. But what was it doing in the meantime?
Well, it turns out that it wasn’t achieving much. It was a minority government, only able to hang on to office because of the divisions in the Conservative Party. Indeed, the most dramatic events mostly surrounded the figure of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. His most remarkable action as his behaviour over the Don Pacifico affair, a striking example of the use of gunboat diplomacy.
It was also another instance of the maverick behaviour which ultimately led to his fall. And, thanks to his tit-for-tat with John Russell, that was quickly followed by the fall of the whole government. It had stayed in office thanks to the divisions in the main Opposition party, and it was brought down by the divisions in its own.
Illustration: Pen and ink portrait of Lord Palmerston, by Harry Furniss
National Portrait Gallery 6251(46)
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A million dead. Over a million emigrants. A population that has never recovered to its level before the disaster.
The Irish starved while the British government stood back and decided to let the market solve the problem for it. Or even to allow what it saw as God’s will to work itself out. The legacy is a deep well of bitterness against Britain.
With the descendants of the emigrants in the United States outnumbering the Irish population by nearly six times, it’s not surprising that the bitterness is particularly strong there. Which, while it doesn’t make my experience of living through a terrorist campaign any pleasanter, does perhaps at least explain why it was funded from across the Atlantic.
Illustration: The Irish Famine: scene at the gate of the work-house. Public Domain
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Peel’s name is tightly bound up with the issue of Corn Law Repeal, the striking achievement of his only full period in office (the hundred days he had before didn't really count). The repeal was, however, double-edged: a major success but also a (politically) fatal self-inflicted wound, obtained only at the price of splitting his own party and having to accept support from the Whigs, or Liberals as they were increasingly known.
Although it was the Corn Laws that left him vulnerable to being brought down, the final blow came from another quarter, that other cauldron of suffering, and of trouble for British governments at the time, Ireland. When the Liberals withdrew their support over a new Irish Coercion Bill, Peel realised he'd reached the end of the road and resigned. Although they were in Opposition, the Liberals had become the masters of the government's destiny.
It was time for another major realignment in British politics.
Illustration: A meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League in Exeter Hall, London. Unknown author. Public Domain.
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As Melbourne left the scene, so men like John Russell could step into his place. Russell had indeed been adding to his reputation as a liberal, just as his Whig Party was increasingly being transformed into the Liberal Party.
A fellow liberal, but increasingly a rival, was Lord Palmerston. He was highly critical of his successor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, but the behaviour Palmerston denounced as weak seems more a case of using soft speech, rather than simply wielding a big stick. How he handled tensions with America rather supports that viewpoint. By way of contrast, Aberdeen did sometimes resort to the stick, in particular in two conflicts that Palmerston had got going, in China and in Afghanistan, and in the first it was ugly, while in the second it was disastrous.
Illustration: Elizabeth Butler Remnants of an army, showing William Brydon reaching the British fort at Jalalabad, after the retreat from Kabul.
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The curious relationship continues between Queen Victoria and her first Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne. It is, however, perhaps less easy than in the past, as the young queen becomes more wilful, more determined on getting her way.
One of the things the queen’s particularly determined about is not having that “cold unfeeling disagreeable man” Peel as Prime Minister. However, when Melbourne decides it’s time to resign, the first choice to replace him, the Duke of Wellington, says it has to be Peel. She brings herself to see the man she dislikes so much, and manages, on this occasion, to put him off. So she forces her favourite, Melbourne, ageing and increasingly unwell, back into office.
She can’t pull it off a second time, though. On the back of a good election win, Peel finally forms a government with a solid majority behind him. He brings into office many of the old crowd – Aberdeen, Stanley, the dynamic and thrusting Gladstone. But one man he leaves out: the new young MP for Maidstone, Benjamin Disraeli.
That may turn out not to have been his wisest decision.
Illustration: A dramatic encounter between the Duke of Wellington, dressed in armour bearing a large sword, and Queen Victoria with Lord Melbourne kneeling in supplication and two ladies in waiting. Coloured lithograph by H.B. (John Doyle), 1840.
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After the last few episodes and their focus on domestic issues, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Grey and Melbourne governments had practically no foreign policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a global power with a huge empire, Britain was actively pursuing foreign policy objectives. And in Lord Palmerston, it had a foreign minister far more activist than, Melbourne, to guide it.
In some instances that went well. But, as today, Afghanistan would prove a problem. Then when Britain used military force against China to maintain its right to push narcotics into that sad and declining empire, you might even find that it had behaved shamefully.
Illustration: Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston in 1844-45, by John Partridge
National Portrait Gallery 1025
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After Peel’s 100-day stint in office, Melbourne was back. He took advantage of his return to rid himself of some figures he disliked in his government, though he had to keep Palmerston in place, despite his dislike of all activism.
That dislike was based on his pursuit of an easy life, so it’s not surprising that though he had a few achievements, there weren’t many and they weren’t spectacular.
Much more important were the women who marked his second administration. The first was Caroline Norton, whose husband sued him for adultery. More important still, was the new young Queen who came to the throne in 1837 when her uncle William IV died. Victoria had arrived. Melbourne would be her mentor.
Illustration: Queen Victoria, replica by Sir George Hayter, 1863, based on a work of 1838
National Portrait Gallery 1250
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It was time for Melbourne. But not a long time, as the king decided to try the old royal trick of getting rid of a prime Minister, the last time a monarch attempted that. So, like Napoleon, Peel got a hundred days.
What’s more this episode takes a look at the curious private life of Melbourne, using the word 'curious' in a broad sense, extending as far as an Epstein-like appetite. In addition, we’ll talk about the search for Peel in Rome, in an expedition executed expeditiously, not that Peel showed any gratitude for it, though it ended with him back in London as Prime Minister.
Illustration: William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne, by Sir Edwin Landseer, at the time he was Prime Minister in 1836. National Portrait Gallery 3050.
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Another significant measure passed by the Grey government was a lot less creditable than the Great Reform Act or Abolition of Slavery. The 1834 Poor Law mandated the construction of workhouses and set out to achieve the aim of making public assistance to the unemployed, sick or old, a lot less pleasant than work – an aim often pursued by politicians today as well and which it achieved.
It wasn’t that which brought Grey down, however. It was that constant bugbear of British governments, Ireland. Emancipation hadn’t quietened tempers among the Catholic Irish, it had merely refocused anger on another issue, the requirement on the Irish, the majority Catholic, to pay for the support of the Church of Ireland, the equivalent in the island of the Church of England, which was Protestant and immensely wealthy.
The effort to do something about that grievance, however, opened splits in the Cabinet, and the resignation of Ministers. In the end, that culminated in the resignation of the Prime Minister himself.
Earl Grey was gone.
Illustration: Cartoon of the interior of a Workhouse. Public Domain
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Just how great was the Great Reform Act?
It was passed in an atmosphere that came close to being revolutionary. That drove the passage of the Act.
It didn’t, however, make it a revolutionary Act. On the contrary, its aim was much more to head off revolution. Indeed, its entrenchment of landowning interests in the counties, and its extension of the franchise to the middle class but not to workers, it can be seen as an aristocratic act, with only certain provisions taking Britain in a democratic direction.
Its immediate impact, though, was substantial. It forced the parties to work far more closely with voters, laying the foundation of the present party system.
In turn, that meant parliamentary candidates had to pledge themselves publicly to specific policies. The abolition of slavery was the major one at the first election after the Act. It was carried, the second great achievement of Grey’s government, though the its handling of compensation, specifically who received it and who didn’t, leaves rather a lot to be desired.
Illustration: Slaves cutting sugar cane in Jamais. Public Domain
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The shift from Tories to Whigs in government in 1830 was dramatic enough, but nothing like as dramatic as the changes that had taken place in Britain as a nation. Both the impact of the Industrial Revolution, creating large new middle and working classes, and the continued decline in the power of the throne, meant that there was a growing and eventually irresistible demand for new groups of people to have a say in power, and that meant in Parliament.
That didn’t, however, make Reform a smooth process. There had to be three attempts to get the Reform Act passed, accompanied by a lot of unrest, as well as another General Election which gave Earl Grey, and the Reform movement he led, a huge majority in the House of Commons. Even so, the King got in the way, and the House of Lords did what it could to block the Act or leave it toothless. But, in a further measure of their own increasing powerlessness, they ultimately couldn’t stop it.
Britain at last took its first step in Parliamentary reform when the Great Reform Act was passed in 1832.
Illustration: Painting by W J Müller of the burning of the Bishop's Palace in Bristol, October 1831, from https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/bristol-1831-the-queens-square-uprising/
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Just who were these Whigs? It turns out that, though theirs would be a government having to undertake reform, in its make-up it would be the most aristocratic of the century. Since the biggest obstacle to reform were the aristocrats and their acolytes, that was a tad ironic.
The problem was that the pressure to do something about the condition of the poor was becoming irresistible. And there was increasing awareness that if change was needed, it now had to come from Parliament. Royal power was continuing to fade as Parliament’s grew.
That just made it all the more urgent to get some kind of voice there.
Illustration: Sir George Harter, The House of Commons, 1833, during Earl Grey’s Government. National Portrait Gallery 54
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It had been 46 years. In all that time, apart from the 14 months when they had led the Ministry of all the Talents in 1806-1807, the Whigs had been excluded from power. But in 1830, they at last came back.
A lot of that was down to the divisions in the Tory Party – now increasingly called the Tory Party again, even by its members – which under the pressure of civil reform (Emancipation of Protestant Dissenters and then the even more historic Emancipation of Catholics) and economic difficulties, had begun to split into Liberal Tory and High Tory wings.
George IV died. William IV took over. Wellington mishandled the Commons. And the Whigs took over.
With Reform of Parliament the great pending question on the agenda.
Illustration: Charles Grey, Second Earl Grey. Based on a mid-19th century work by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
National Portrait Gallery 1190
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To greet our reaching 100 episodes, we’re going to pause and recap how far we’ve come.
When we started, England, was just a small country on the edge of Europe, trying to punch above its weight, giving far more powerful nations – notably Spain – a bad time. But then it grew, sorting some of its constitutional problems as it went, often painfully, as in the Civil Wars and the execution of the King. In the course of the eighteenth century, it fought war after war against France, and also kept going with its constitutional progress, reducing the power of the monarch in relation to parliament. Military advances and constitutional change were, however, also accompanied by another and even more powerful development: the emergence of an environment encouraging business, backed by a major, reliable and effective financial system, including a well-run stock market, which produced the conditions for technical and scientific innovation to launch the industrial revolution.
By the early nineteenth century, England, which had merged first with Scotland and then with Ireland to become the leading nation of the United Kingdom, was an economic powerhouse. With victory in the final war against France, it had become the global superpower of its time.
A long way from the upstart snapping at the heels of grownups at the top table we saw back in episode 1…
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The cops are what Robert Peel’s best remembered for. Thanks to him, the world’s first professional, civilian police force was launched. It hasn’t always lived up to initial expectations, with London’s Metropolitan Police going through particularly difficult times just now but, boy, it’s an initiative that has left its mark. And not just in Britain.
There was controversy about setting up a police force, with some resisting the idea of paying people to keep an eye on them and make sure they behaved. To libertarians, that felt like an incursion on basic freedoms. But far more controversial still was the extension of political rights to non-Anglican religious groups.
First, it was dissident Protestants, and Peel had to change his tune to support their emancipation.
But next it was the Catholics, and his U-turn was even more shocking. Nicknamed ‘Orange Peel’ for is backing for the Protestant (Orange) cause, it was astonishing to see him leading the charge for Catholic Emancipation in 1829. But Peel's dramatic changes of view would astonish a lot of people, a lot of times in his career.
Illustration: Photograph of a ‘Peeler’ of the 1850s. Public domain (PD-US-expired).
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Reformers were on the move. Elizabeth Fry was notable as a woman speaking out in a man’s world, campaigning for prison reform, especially for women prisoners. But there were many others, notably the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who found a strange way of having his body dealt with after death. A slightly ghoulish way.
But whatever clarion voices campaigned for reform outside Parliament, real change could only come from inside, and specifically from Ministers. And this led to a strange phenomenon: some first steps towards essential reforms being taken by a man whose reputation was as anything but a reformer. He was the new Home Secretary, and he was taking a highly innovative approach to public opinion, one much closer to politicians’ attitudes in our own times.
That’s Robert Peel storming back onto the scene.
Illustration: The reformer and champion of women prisoners, Elizabeth Fry, by Samuel Drummond, ca. 1815. National Portrait Gallery 118.
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That poor, saintly William Wilberforce. He’d spoken with such courage and dedication for the slaves for so long. And yet now, with a more radical movement emerging championing the poor and oppressed in Britain itself, he found himself the target of hostile attack. Aging and with his health going, He withdrew from public life in 1825.
Meanwhile, Canning was back in government, serving under Lord Liverpool, who was endeavouring to deal with the difficulties of the time.
Above all, they were caused by the growing hardship suffered by the poor, and this episode looks briefly at some of the economic factors that were making things worse. That just added fuel to the fire of the Radicals, who were demanding action to improve the lives of British workers, whose poverty could hardly be justified in the nation with biggest economy per capita in the world.
Essentially, that would determine the battle lines in politics for the next two decades: parliamentary reform, to give the underprivileged a greater voice, and the end of the Corn Laws, which served great landowners well but kept food prices high.
Illustration: William Cobbett, by John Raphael Smith, engraved 1812. Note the portrait behind him of John Hampden, the great leader of the resistance to Charles I in the seventeenth century, also an icon for the American rebels in the eighteenth.
National Portrait Gallery 6870
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A scandalous episode: first the king trying to divorce his wife and a major domestic row developing between them, all conducted in public, with armed guards and slammed doors to exclude the Queen from her husband's coronation. Wonderful proof that the Royal family’s gift for generating bad publicity, and entertaining the population with it, is nothing new.
Next, a repressive government is met by an attempt at armed revolt, leading to public executions enjoyed by a crowd of thousands.
And finally, driven by overwork and mental illness, a much-maligned giant of the political world puts an end to it all.
Three scandals in one episode. Who could ask for more?
Illustration: The Trial of Queen Caroline 1820, by Sir George Hayter, 1820-1823. National Portrait Gallery 999
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Popular belief, back in the nineteenth century and also today, was that the British Empire in India may have been flawed and imperfect, but it set out to benefit the native peoples. In this episode, we take a look at that belief, and find that actually it did a great deal of damage, that the benefit it might have produced was already being pursued by local figures who might have got a lot further left to their own devices, and that it deliberately sacrificed Indian economic interests for the sake of British ones.
Nowhere was that truer than in the cotton industry.
Illustration: Man's Indian Calico robe from the late seventeenth century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: http://metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/140005504
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Pete, Dave and Bobby are the subjects of this episode. But Pete’s a place not a person. It’s St Peter’s Field near Manchester, site of one of those epoch-shattering, and epoch-shaming, events that would mark British politics for the next decade or more.
Dave is another in the series of remarkable economists that started with Adam Smith. Apparently, he was also rather a nice guy.
As for Bobby, he was a new breed of politician, from a new class to produce leaders for Britain, and someone we’ll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes.
Illustration: Engraving depicting the Peterloo Massacre, by Richard Carlile. Public domain.
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The Congress of Vienna set up peace in Europe for decades. Indeed, it prevented any kind of general war across the whole of the Continent for nearly a century, until the First World War broke out in 1914. But it wasn’t quite as straightforward as the outcome might suggest. The power of Russia, with 600,000 troops now occupying many parts of Europe, led to a quick rehabilitation of the former enemy, France. And some very clever diplomatic work, by the remarkable trio of the French Foreign Ministers of France, Talleyrand, Austria, Metternich, and Britain, Castlereagh, proved necessary to put the Russian bear back in his box.
The other aspect of the Congress is that what it ushered in was a Peace of Kings. Ideas thrown up by the French Revolution, of the rights of man, of popular sovereignty, of equality between citizens, were decidedly out of fashion. Which was going to prove problematic in a Britain facing harsh conditions and growing discontent.
Illustration: The Russian Bear inspired fear in the west: Tsar Alexander I published by Colnaghi & Co on 2 May 1814. National Portrait Gallery D15858
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Napoleon makes his second bid for power, and comes unstuck, as Wellington and Blücher prove too much for him at Waterloo.
It’s a victory the Brits like to celebrate as a great triumph for the country, up on a par with Trafalgar ten years earlier. The truth, though, is that even within Wellington’s army, there were more Germans than Brits. And, when you add in Blücher’s Prussians, Napoleon’s defeat owed far more to German soldiery than to British.
Though Wellington’s generalship, alongside Blücher’s, was a crucial factor. The Iron Duke stood firm. Just as the old man Blücher kept his word and came to his aid, personally leading his troops, despite his advanced age and his injuries. Between them, they finished Napoleon's rule.
Illustration: A British infantry square withstanding cavalry attack. Elizabeth Thompson, The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras. This work is in the public domain including in the United States, because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1927.
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It was peace at last. For the first time, apart from one short break, for a generation.
Peace, however, requires managing, just like war does. That management took the form of a new approach to the relations between European states, with the old concept of a Balance of Power giving way to the new one of a Concert of Nations. The innovation meant that nations would find a way to settle their differences by diplomatic rather than military means, instead of lining up in two hostile camps, of slightly varying composition down the decades, with only fear of each other to keep the peace.
After all, that Balance of Power approach hadn’t worked too well. Remember how many wars we’ve talked about as we worked out way through the eighteenth century?
To give the new thinking a secure foundation, the victorious allies set up the Congress of Vienna, where a minister from the United Kingdom would play a key role: the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh would draft most of the documents, just as he drafted the terms imposed on defeated France. Which, in passing, meant he had no time for the simultaneous negotiations of a peace treaty with the United States, ending the War of 1812. Perhaps explaining why the British representatives at that second set of discussions were perhaps outmanoeuvred.
And then, just to spoil the moment, France, and above all its deposed Emperor, showed the world that they didn’t take their defeat as conclusive.
Illustration: Frontispiece of the Final Declaration of the Congress of Vienna (public domain).
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Although Britain was in the closing stages of a long and desperate struggle with France, it somehow managed to get itself sucked into a separate war with the United States. Called the War of 1812, accurately for the start, hopeless for its end – in 1815 – it was unnecessary and avoidable. As a Canadian historian, Pierre Berton, put it when talking about the final accord, the Treaty of Ghent, “It was as if no war had been fought, or to put it more bluntly, as if the war that was fought was fought for no good reason”. For all that, it cost quite a few lives, and a lot of treasure and, as a by. Product, it ended for ever the capacity of Native American to resist further US encroachment on their lands.
It also taught a lot of lessons about how not to fight wars at a time when firepower had become far more devastating than in earlier times. Lessons that weren’t, unfortunately, learned. To the cost of a lot of dead or maimed soldiers from future wars.
Illustration: Battle of Lake Erie in the war of 1812 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Photo by William Henry Powell, from https://www.goodfreephotos.com
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1812 was a year of turning points.
It was the year that Spencer Perceval was murdered, the only British Prime Minister to have met such a fate, and his successor Lord Liverpool was appointed.
Just a tad more significantly, it was also the year when Napoleon, sick of seeing his anti-British blockade, the Continental System, being undermined by nations ostensibly part of it, decided to invade territory belonging to two of them. The first was Sweden. The second, far more dangerously - for him as it turned out - was Russia. He won battles during his march to Moscow, but his retreat from that city has become a byword for military catastrophe. It wiped out the colossal and highly effective army he'd built.
Meanwhile, at the other end of Europe, Wellington saw the tide turn in his favour in the Peninsular War against the French in Spain. Not, as we discover, that there was much that was glorious about that war.
After the defeat in Russia, France found itself facing another Coalition, the Sixth. It proved too powerful for him. Russians, Austrians and Prussians arrived in France from the East. Wellington with his British, Spanish and Portuguese troops arrived from the Southwest. Napoleon was forced to abdicate and went into exile on the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy.
It was peace at last. Though not for Britain. That crucial year of 1812 had seen it embroiled in another war in parallel to the one in Europe. But that's the subject of the next episode.
Illustration: Retreat from Moscow by Franciszek Kostrzewski, 1854. Public domain
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This is where we start to get to know the future King George IV, in the time when he became Prince Regent. We also meet his friend ‘Beau’ Brummel and talk about the disastrous way that friendship ended. Disastrous, that is, for poor old Beau.
This was during the premiership of Spencer Perceval. It was while he was in office that the Peninsular War really started to get some momentum, behind Arthur Wellesley, by now Viscount Wellington (he would become Duke later). Even so, Britain's war effort against France was still mostly economic , through its blockade of French ports. That blockade, however, hurt Britain too, as well as neutral nations whose ships were being intercepted. Among those neutral nations, the United States were particularly resentful of British actions, and relations were swiftly deteriorating to a point where war seemed imminent. Indeed, the blockade became such a double-edged sword that Perceval was on his way to the Commons to debate whether it was time to slacken off a bit, when a waiting assailant turned him into a unique figure among British Prime Ministers: the only one to have been murdered.
Which is practically the only thing people remember about him, if they remember anything at all.
Illustration: Spencer Perceval, by George Francis Joseph, 1812
National Portrait Gallery 1031
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The Ministry of all the Talents has fallen and the Duke of Portland, after a record-breaking gap of 24 years, has formed a new government. The people making it up are now referred to as Tories and think of themselves that way. As for the Whigs, who had a brief taste of power with the Talents, their first in 23 years since 1783, they’re going to have to wait to return to power until 1827.
Meanwhile, the war continues to go badly for the nations fighting France. The Fourth Coalition collapsed like the Third. Now a Fifth, which does produce the first ever defeat of an army personally commanded by Napoleon, ultimately goes the same way as the Austrians are once more massively defeated within a couple of months of that victory. Vienna is occupied again and Napoleon helps himself to an Austria Princess as his second wife, to cement a new alliance.
Only in the Iberian Peninsula are things beginning to move a little in the direction of the enemies of France as a General, still for the moment referred to as Arthur Wellesley, wins back Portugal.
Illustration: The British fleet bombarding Copenhagen in 1807, by Christian William Eckersberg. Public domain.
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Slavery: finally, the time had come for a major step to be taken. Oh, no, not the actual abolition of slavery itself. But at least the abolition of the trade in slaves.
Funnily enough, that’s something Pitt might have taken on. But he didn’t. He seems to have been a man who understood that politics was the art of the possible. Though sometimes he saw as impossible what might have been in his grasp. Like the slave trade abolition.
In the end, that fine move had to be undertaken by his successors. They were the Ministry of All the Talents. Or, depending on your point of view, the Ministry of all the Blunders.
Illustration: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Medallion designed for the British Anti-Slavery Campaign by Josiah Wedgwood and either William Hackwood or Henry Webber, 1787. Public domain.
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It’s time for Pitt’s second go as Prime Minister, and for another round of war in Europe. But Pitt was no longer the conquering hero he once had been. On the other hand, there was one notable moment of conquest during his second term in office: what remains the greatest naval victory in British History, the Battle of Trafalgar.
Which, oddly enough, led to two fine illustrations of the ambiguities in men’s minds over the ideas of England and of Britain. Nelson at Trafalgar told his sailors that England expected them to do their duty. And, in response to the victory, Pitt referred to England’s saving itself by its own exertions. As neat a summing up as anyone could provide of the uneasy relations between the dominant nation of the United Kingdom and that Kingdom as a whole.
Illustration: Frederick Stanfield Clarkson, The Battle of Trafalgar, 1836.
Public domain in its source country on January 1, 1996 and in the United States.
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An episode about interludes…
The first of these looked like the end of an era, when William Pitt the Younger stepped down as Prime Minister, after seventeen years in power, and still younger than any other British Prime Minister has been on even first taking office. It turns out, though, that seeing it as an end was premature. It was, indeed, an interlude.
The other was the Peace of Amiens. The treaty signed in the northern French city brought an end to fighting between Britain and France, for the first time in nearly a decade. Sadly, however, that wasn’t to be an end either, but merely another interlude.
Illustration: Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth.
Sir William Beechey, oil on canvas, engraved 1803.
National Portrait Gallery 5774
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After talking about Britain’s biggest and most lucrative colony, India, we now turn our attention to its oldest, closest and most troublesome, Ireland.
We've seen that Pitt had tried to establish free trade between the two islands. He failed, when the British parliament demanded concessions for British business that it was impossible for the Irish parliament to accept. So, faced with the impossibility of getting agreement between two parliaments, he decided it was time to have just one instead.
Until then, Britain and Ireland had been technically two countries with a single king. Now Pitt pushed through legislation to bring them together into a single nation, as had happened with Scotland nearly a century earlier. To make the move more palatable to the Irish, he decided to accompany the measure with improvements to the political rights of Catholics. Catholic Emancipation was, however, still opposed by many, and above all by a still over-powerful king. Pitt had always previously managed to win him around to accept, if only grudgingly, positions he’d previously opposed. Not this time.
After seventeen years in office and having just brought about the union of Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom, Pitt had at last met an immovable obstacle. He felt he had no choice. He resigned as Prime Minister.
And Catholic emancipation would have to wait nearly thirty years longer.
Illustration: The Great Parliament of Ireland, Henry Barraud, John Hayter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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We’re back with Britain’s great imperial project in India, going great guns (often literally) despite the war in Europe. It was still in principle being run by England’s old East India company, though increasingly that was little more than a fiction behind which the British state exercised direct rule.
There were more glorious wars against rebellious local leaders, where ‘rebellious’ meant ‘more inclined to exercise power themselves than have it exercised from London’. Governor General Cornwallis, who’d had such a bad time in America at the hands of other rebels, scored some successes in India, as did his successor Lord Mornington, aka Richard Wellesley. The younger brother of Mornington, far better known later by his own alias of Duke of Wellington, got some invaluable military experience out there, and explored some interesting new tactics, such as the use of terror against local villagers.
On a more positive note, we also get to meet a British judge in India, a remarkable linguist, William Jones. He deeply respected local culture, learning Sanskrit and providing the first translations of some Hindu sacred texts into English. Above all, he was struck (as some others before him) by the similarities of languages from South Asia with most European languages, so today he’s generally seen as the father of international linguistics and of the study of the Indo-European language group.
Illustration: Sir William Jones, by James Heath, after Sir Joshua Reynolds
Stipple engraving, published 1799. National Portrait Gallery, D36735.
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Things just got worse and worse for the Austrians after the Battle of Marengo, until they were defeated again by the French, and much closer to home, at Hohenlinden in Bavaria. They made peace with France, as did Russia, leaving Britain as the only major power still in the Second Coalition, which was now all but dead. Britain did win a couple more victories, notably in Malta and then, with the Turks, over the isolated remnants of the French Army of Egypt. Most spectacularly, it won the great naval Battle of Copenhagen, where Nelson won undying fame for his laconic comment “I see no signal”, though the truth was slightly less creditable to him, and a lot more creditable to his commander than the legend allows.
News of that victory would have been balm to William Pitt the Younger’s soul. But, oddly, he was no longer Prime Minister to receive it. After seventeen years, he’d gone two weeks earlier.
Illustration: The British fleet off Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, 28 March 1801 [before the Battle of Copenhagen], by Nicholas Pocock, 1810. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
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A tale of good and bad luck among high-ranking military men. That’s the fortunate Admiral Nelson and his far less fortunate victim, the Neapolitan Admiral Caracciolo. And Napoleon as a general enjoying the good fortune of being saved by the far less fortunate Desaix.
Plus the difficulties of building the Second Coalition, especially for a British diplomat who had to wade through to icy water to try to put it in place. Only for his bit to fail, followed by the whole thing rapidly beginning to unwind.
Illustration: Death of General Louis Desaix by Jean Baptiste Regnault. This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.
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It’s a time for duels. The one between the nations you already know about, and we’re simply following its next stages. But the one between two men is more than a little strange, especially as one of them was the British Prime Minister.
Also in this episode, we see Nelson hitting the big time with a major victory of his own. And Napoleon reaching for the big time, as he sets out to win supreme political power, to add to his lustre as a general.
Illustration: Thomas Luny, ‘Battle Of The Nile August 1st 1798 At 10pm’ (the explosion of L’Orient). This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
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We’re wrapping up on the curious year of 1797, when Britain saw success at sea against its external enemies, but also a terrible threat from within its own Royal Navy, in the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. It saw economic problems and the struggle to keep funding the war, both resolved by more touches of William Pitt’s financial genius. It also saw Pitt negotiating for peace with France, failing, and having to reconcile himself to war.
And, at a personal level, it saw Pitt having to deal with his marital prospects, ultimately dashed, quite possibly because of his sexual orientation.
Illustration: ‘The nuptial-bower; - with the evil-one, peeping at the charms of Eden' (Eleanor Eden; William Pitt; Charles James Fox)
by James Gillray, 13 February 1797
NPG D12597
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Strange times for Britain. And for William Pitt the Younger. While at the beginning of his time as Prime Minister, he’d had to contend with being in a parliamentary minority, losing votes right and left, he’d enjoyed extraordinary economic success. Now, though, with a powerful majority, he faced economic hardship and the unrest to which it led.
Partly that was due to bad harvests as well as the impact of war. The turbulence was met with repression. Nowhere was that worse that in Ireland, where Britain put it down ferociously, though without addressing the fundamental problems, which would only lie in wait to preoccupy Pitt again later.
As for the war, Britain, with its allies dropping out one after the other, was doing badly on land. But it was doing superbly at sea, as each of its three main rivals, France, Spain and Holland went down to spectacular defeat.
And yet it was in the Royal Navy itself, that he came closest to facing his own defeat, as it too was caught up in the unrest sweeping the country.
Illustration: ‘The Delegates in Council, or Beggars on Horseback’. George Cruikshank. A contemporary cartoon of the delegation of sailors who devised the terms of settlement of the Mutiny of Spithead, 1797. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
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Having dealt with all the background, in revolutions both French and Industrial, in this episode we move into the War of the First Coalition, Act I of the long series of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that ended at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In passing, in this episode, we deal with the height of the Reign of Terror in France, culminating in the execution of its main architect, Robespierre. To give credit where it’s due, we also talk about how he pulled off one trick which at the time was beyond the anti-slavery lobby in Britain: he banned slavery in all French territories.
Finally, we take a look at the early stages of the irresistible rise of a Corsican artillery officer soon to be known as Napoleon Bonaparte.
Illustration: Capture of the Dutch Fleet by French cavalry at Den Helder on 23 January 1795, by Léon Morel-Fatio. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.
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During the long sequence of wars that engulfed Europe between 1792 and 1815, there was one constant: whoever else might shift allegiance, Britain and France were always against each other. Britain was the wealthiest nation in Europe. France was the first to build a mass army. Those were ingredients for an entirely new kind of war.
This episode looks at how Britain became so wealthy, France so powerful military. And, along the way, it explodes a few Industrial revolution myths about the Protestant ethic, the effect of climate and British genius.
Illustration: Schematic of a Newcomen atmospheric engine, fired by coal and driven by steam. It was used above all to pump water out of mines. Invented in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen, it was the first practical device designed to use steam power to produce mechanical work.
Copyright 123rf royalty free images
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Last time, we looked at the developing impact of the French Revolution, but mostly from the French point of view. We saw how France slipped towards increasing violence in its politics and eventually into war. And then how, despite suffering many defeats, it also managed a surprising victory allowing it to launch a counter-invasion against its enemies.
This time, we see how Britain had to cope with developments that were similar to what happened in France, though less intense. And we see how the Pitt government reacted to them, both internally – with some pretty heavy-handed repression – and then externally - resisting being sucked into war on the continent.
Ultimately without success.
Illustration: Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie ca 1797
National Portrait Gallery 1237
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We’re into the slide into the most destructive of the series of wars of that rocked the eighteenth century. It would be a war that had a devastating effect on most of Europe. It was also the last war between Britain and France, and by far the biggest.
But, oddly enough, in the run up to it William Pitt had worked hard, and with an apparently high degree of success, to rebuild Britain’s status as a world power and to use that status to ensure that the whole continent was at peace, and stayed that way. Indeed, apart from a certain intransigence from the Russians, the only factor that denied him complete success was the refusal of the House of Commons to back him on the last key step in his plans.
Shades of his defeats in 1784…
Although, given the slide to war, all of that effort for peace was a little irrelevant. Events way beyond Pitt's control were driving Europe towards war. They were happening in France, where the revolution was still far from over.
Illustration: The Battle of Valmy, September 20th, 1792, by Horace Vernet. This was the surprising victory of the French revolutionary forces over the Prussian, a sign of things to come…
Public domain. Published anywhere (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before 1927 and public domain in the U.S.
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The French Revolution! A turning point in the history of the world. Or so it’s frequently claimed. But in the myth-busting spirit of this podcast, this episode questions that belief, without denying that the wars to which the revolution led had a pretty dramatic impact. At least in Europe, though claiming that a European event changed the world may be a slight overreach.
It also takes a look at how Britain and France had similar developments of parliamentary systems way back in ancient history, but then the two nations diverged. Some of the aspects that made France different set up the crisis that led to the revolution. Then two lousy harvests and the hunger that followed ensured that the most oppressed sectors of society rose too, in a resentful fury that made the whole thing all the bloodier.
So don’t expect rose-tinted glasses in this assessment of the revolution.
Illustration: The Taking of the Bastille, by Jean-Pierre Houël. Public domain.
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The mid-1780s were a good time for Pitt. He’d mastered the nation’s finances and cleverly manoeuvred government spending not just into balance, but into surplus, despite spending more on the navy than before. Even the Opposition had to congratulate him. He was facing down the French and he was bringing the possessions in India more firmly under Britain’s control. Even after the king went mad, he called on his remarkable skill as a politician to make sure that, when his extraordinary luck came to his assistance once more, he could take full advantage of it.
But then an event took place over which he had no control whatsoever. The suffering people of France rose in revolt against the misery to which their bankrupt nation had condemned them. That epoch-making moment hit Pitt just as he thought he was going to be able to enjoy a well-earned holiday.
Illustration: King George III in later life. Studio of Sir William Beechey, circa 1800. National Portrait Gallery 6250
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Like so many good things, this one could have some fairly lousy consequences.
Just like the United States, if not quite to the same extent, Britain after the War of American Independence was pushing forward the notion of limited government. The king, while still powerful, couldn’t do just what he wanted. So while he’d campaigned hard to get his man, William Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister, it had been made clear that Pitt saw himself as his own man.
Similarly Pitt, despite a big majority in the House of Commons, couldn’t get everything his own way either. He had some wins, but he had some big losses too. Which is a good thing, if you’re not keen on any individual having too much power.
On the other hand, it was a pity that Pitt’s big losses were on a measure which might have gone a long way to fixing the relationship between England and Ireland, and on starting to reform parliament and doing away with some of its worst abuses, which was long overdue.
A pity that British parliamentarians decided that those were the issues on which to limit the power of the British government…
Illustration: Cicero in Catilinam by James Sayers, published by Thomas Cornell by 17 March 1785. Pitt is standing and speaking at the dispatch box in the House of Commons. Opposite him, the obese Fox is listening and the nearly-blind Lord North is peering at a document.
National Portrait Gallery 12236
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Losing an Empire? Not a problem if you’re the world power Britain was in the late eighteenth century. You just have to build a new one.
In part that would come from new journeys of so-called discovery (the people in the ‘discovered’ lands didn’t think they’d been undiscovered before the Europeans showed up). The most famous of the British explorers was Captain James Cook, whose sad end showed that the process didn’t always run smoothly.
But the biggest contribution to the new Empire would come from land Britain already held, specifically in India. There, though, its power wasn’t exerted directly, but had been outsourced to the East India Company. Which led to a host of problems. A number of people tried to solve them, including Edmund Burke who attempted to impeach the Company’s first Governor General in India, Warren Hastings. But no one spoke out more forcefully for India than the MP George Dempster, who went so far as to argue for its independence.
Sadly, no one was listening.
Illustration: Thunder, lightning and smoke published by William Moore and by W. Dickie, hand-coloured etching, 22 April 1783
National Portrait Gallery D15004. Burke and Fox float overhead with impeachment as their weapon. Lord North, beaten in North America, now lost, lies in rags on the left. In the centre is Charles Francis MP, who tried to get parliamentary control over Warren Hastings, on the right, who’s rebuilding the British Empire, but this time in India. And in his own, or the East India Company's, way.
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As we emerge from the serious instability in Britain caused by the defection of the American colonies and the war that followed, and as we stand on the brink of Britain’s pursuit of a second empire to replace the first, we pause for a moment to talk about Adam Smith, a man whose ideas have rung down the centuries to today. It turns out they’re not exactly what many of his admirers might suggest. But then, from his time on, most of them have been ignored by the people in power anyway.
Illustration: Adam Smith, etching by John Kay in 1790. National Portrait Gallery D16843
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After a period of serious instability, the fifth government in a period of a mere two years secured itself a position in which it would last for the best part of two decades. The process was a particularly curious one, since it involved what has been referred to as a coup d’état by the king against his own government. That succeeded only thanks for the clever work of the monarch, and above all of the man who would become Britain’s youngest Prime Minister ever.
Illustration: ‘Aside he turn’d for envy, yet with jealous leer malign, eyd them askance’, by James Gillray. National Portrait Gallery D12302. Fox on the right glaring at Pitt, second from left.
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While there’s much talk about the huge gains made by the American colonists, and the triumphant launching of the United States of America, far less is generally said about the effect of the American war in the mother country itself. Since Britain was also fighting France, Spain and Holland, the impact on its economy was massive, and on the political establishment if anything even more massive. Loyalty swung wildly, old allies became new adversaries, or vice versa, administrations were formed and fell in rapid succession. All this happened while in the background the latest battle was being fought between king and parliament over who would have the greatest authority over government.
Illustration: Soldiers deployed during the Gordon Riots, by John Seymour Lucas, in a painting of 1879. Public Domain
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With the fall of Lord North’s government, king George III found himself obliged to submit to the authority of parliament and appoint a government led by the Marquess of Rockingham, a man he deeply disliked and distrusted. His resentment was all the deeper because Rockingham, almost certainly at the urging of his secretary the remarkable Edmund Burke, laid down conditions for the formation of the government, and in particular the staggering words, “The king must not give a veto to the Independence of America.” A subject telling the king what he must not do? That was a small revolution.
Rockingham’s was the first of three short-lived governments whose most important achievement was the granting of US independence, the end of the war in America, and the end of the wider, world war to which it had led.
Illustration: The Treaty of Paris, by Benjamin West, 1783. The painting is unfinished because the British delegation to the treaty negotiations refused to pose for it.
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We’ve seen how the British war in North America led to yet another world war, and how that war then reacted back on the American fighting by, in effect, making the victory of the rebel colonists ultimately all but certain. In this episode, we think about what the impact of all that was on life in Britain itself. There, it played a huge role in the never-ending battle between royal and parliamentary power.
The king, George III, was fighting to hang on to his still considerable prerogative, in particular to appoint ministers, including the leading figure in a government, increasingly though still not officially called the Prime Minister. Against the king and his loyal government, led by Lord North, many in the Whig Opposition wanted to see power move still further towards the parliamentary side.
With the war not going particularly well, and indeed going exceptionally badly in North America, North found his position increasingly embattled. And the Opposition moved in for the kill, to bring him down and to claw more authority from the king. Successfully in the end.
Though North did have the last laugh. Which must have been fun, though perhaps not enough to make up for the failure of his administration…
Illustration: Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guildford (Lord North in his time as Prime Minister), by Nathaniel Dance, 1773-74. National Portrait Gallery 3627.
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What led to the British defeat in North America? Was it a battle at Yorktown in Virginia, brilliantly won by George Washington and the Count of Rochambeau's American and French armies? And did that victory at Yorktown immediately lead to US independence?
This episode sets out to give the context to Yorktown and reinterpret the common narrative about the Franco-American victory. Essential to a new understanding is to take into account that Britain was no longer fighting just a war in America, but another world war, after the Seven Years' War. This time, though, a decade and a half of ill-planned economy measures had left the country desperately badly prepared to fight it.
That, more than any one battle, even as disastrous a defeat as Yorktown, made it inevitable that Britain would lose its American colonies.
Illustration: The Battle of the Chesapeake (sometimes called the Battle of the Virginia Capes). Public domain.
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The revolting Americans, by the time of this episode, have decided they’ve had it right up to here with the Brits. It’s time to part company. So they adopt a Declaration of Independence, basically serving divorce papers on the Mother Country. Which refuses to sign them, of course, ensuring that the ugly dispute lasts another few years.
As for that dispute, it goes on with the advantage swinging from one side to the other. William Howe wins a couple of victories over the still inexperienced Washington, but fails to follow them up. Washington gets good at dodging destructive defeats and keeping the cause alive. But then, to everyone’s surprise, he even wins a couple of impressive victories.
Then the Brits launch a cunning scheme to win a decisive victory, which goes colossally wrong, leading to their worst defeat of the war, at Saratoga.
Meanwhile, back in England Pitt is still trying to persuade his countrymen to take a more sensible stance. “Conquering America is impossible,” he tells them, but they aren’t listening. Then, when a voice is raised in Parliament for the recognition of American Independence, he pretty much dies opposing it – it actually takes him nearly five weeks to die, but the attack from which he failed to recover hit him in the House of Lords, while he was struggling to speak out.
A nasty divorce. With plenty of fighting. And a lot of bad blood on the way.
Illustration: Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, 1796. National Portrait Gallery 2001.13.
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Enjoy the words of two remarkable people in England who battled on for the cause of conciliation between the home country and the colonists in America. Neither was listened to. This was a time when many in Britain wanted only to turn a deaf ear to the Americans and their concerns.
Meanwhile, back out there, General Gage was still in command of a military force occupying Boston. He decided it was time to use his military force militarily and sent troops to two Massachusetts villages that have since entered American legend. They are Lexington Green and Concord.
While they were there, a hostile confrontation led to a shot being fired, and we were off: what had been a war of words became a shooting war.
It started badly for the British. We’ll discover soon that it would end just as badly. But it would take some seven years.
Illustration: Portrait of Edmund Burke from the studio of Joshua Reynolds, circa 1769. National Portrait Gallery 655.
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It’s time for that exciting moment in American (and British) history, the Boston Tea Party. But tea, as well as being a commodity deeply rooted in the British soul, is also a wonderful link between the two wings of Britain’s growing Empire, India and North America.
In India, of course, power was still being exercised by the East India Company. That had disastrous results in the subcontinent, and a corrupting effect in Britain. But the government found itself powerless to do anything about it, while the Indian people, especially of Bengal, suffered tragically.
As for North America, that was where the East India Company, then going through lean times, was hoping that exports would help it rebuild its fortunes. Tea was to be the product that would do the trick. But in fact, it only led to another grinding step downwards in relations between mother country and colonies, one that brought closer the approaching disaster (for Britain).
Illustration: Boston Tea Party. Original uploader was Cornischong at lb.wikipedia - Source:W.D. Cooper. ‘Boston Tea Party’, The History of North America. London: E. Newberry, 1789.Engraving. Plate opposite p. 58. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. Transferred from lb.wikipedia
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The moment has arrived. The Americans are, at last, revolting. And it was far from inevitable. What made sure it would happen was the brainlessness of British leaders, most specifically in this episode, General Thomas Gage in America and Lord North in London.
Gage landed troops in Boston to restore order. But putting an army amongst a resentful civilian population was never going to end well. And it didn’t. The killing of a child and then the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre kept the resentments alive.
But still a spark was needed. And that would be provided, as we’ll see in the next episode, by Lord North.
Illustration: The Landing of British troops in Boston, 1768. Public domain
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Faced with deepening and increasingly violent resistance to its rule in the American colonies, Britain's new Prime Minister, the Marquess of Rockingham, repealed the Stamp Act that had excited so much anger. William Pitt, in particular, spoke out forcefully against that Act, and Benjamin Franklin warned British parliamentarians of the difficulties ahead. However, Rockingham and even Pitt, still believed that Britain had the right to impose its will on the colonies. Repeal of the Stamp Act was followed up two months later by passage of the Declaratory Act, asserting British control in America, at just the time when that control was beginning to unravel. With its back to the wall, Britain was clearly unable to read the writing on it.
Note and apology: To anyone who listened to the first version of this episode: it incorrectly stated that William Pitt the Elder had already been raised to the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham when he spoke for the repeal of the Stamp Act. In fact, that didn't happen until later the same year. I've corrected the episode to remove that error.
Illustration: Rockingham, the Prime Minister who repealed the Stamp Act, but then passed the Declaratory Act asserting Britain’s control over the colonies. After Sir Joshua Reyonolds, ca 1768 National Portrait Gallery 406 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
The British government of the 1760s couldn’t complain that nobody had warned it of the catastrophic consequences of trying to inflict taxes on the American colonists, without their consent. 'American' was increasingly the right word for them, as various forces, including non-English immigration, began to change the nature of the population.
Even so, they remained for the most part wedded to their British roots. Their anger at the government’s behaviour wasn’t just a rejection of British highhandedness. On the contrary, many of them spoke out as Brits against Britain’s trampling on long-established British rights they saw themselves as defending.
It wasn’t just the American-British of the colonies speaking out. There were voices in Britain itself defending their cause. One of the more remarkable was that of self-made soldier and MP, Isaac Barré.
An interesting man to get to know, as we do in this episode.
Illustration: Portrait of a passionate spokesman for the American colonists: Isaac Barré by Gilbert Stuart, ca 1785.
National Portrait Gallery 1191
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Lord Bute, as Prime Minister, did what he could to attack the British public debt by reducing costs. But there were limits to how far he could go. Eventually, he needed to raise taxes too. With his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt’s former friend and now political enemy George Grenville, he pushed through a tax on cider. Then, after Bute fell and was replaced by the same Grenville, it was time to try taxing the American colonists.
There were widespread objections to the Sugar Tax, but eventually it was grudgingly accepted and generally paid. Sadly, Grenville couldn’t simply accept that small win. He overreached with another tax he thought was an exceptionally smart move: the Stamp Act.
And with that he effectively drove the first nail into the coffin of Britain’s imperial position in North America.
Illustration: George Grenville, the ‘Gentle Shepherd’, published by Richard Houston, after William Hoare, circa 1750-1775
National Portrait Gallery D20047
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It may not come as a surprise to discover that many authorities believe that, if you’re doing a long journey at sea, it can be helpful to know where you are.
Working out your latitude was relatively simple and had been known for a long time before the eighteenth century. Longitude was another matter. The British government even put up a prize for the first to come up with a really viable solution.
Enter John Harrison, a remarkable craftsman. He started as a joiner, so a skilled woodworker. When he started building clocks, he used wood for the work. But he realised that, to build a chronometer, a device that could tell sailors at sea the time in a specified distant location, e.g. London, he would have to work in metals. So he taught himself to do so.
He impressed the Board of Longitude in 1737 with his first prototype, but he wasn’t happy with it himself. So he spent another 27 years building three more, with financial support from the Board. In 1764, his fourth prototype, the size of a large watch, passed the test required for the prize.
A lot of this work had been funded by the grants from the Longitude Board, a public body. That’s a model for research that persists to this day. As do the techniques that followed the success of his chronometer: mass production of the devices, exploring techniques that would be the hallmark of the industrial revolution.
The Longitude story is about helping sailors navigate at sea. But it’s also about ways of dealing with Research and Development, and with Manufacturing processes, that went far further still. It shows how much can be achieved by the clever use of government funds well invested.
Illustration: John Harrison by Thomas King, with his successful fourth prototype chronometer. Science Museum Group Collection, released under Creative Commons
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You may like or loathe the British Empire. But if the aim was to build it, few people did it with such skill or such success as William Pitt the Elder when, at last, he found himself the driving force in government. However, to achieve his goal, he spent huge amounts of money, for which he drove up the national debt to levels many thought unacceptable, because unsustainable. And one of those people was the king.
This is a recurring occurrence in English history. From time to time the cost-cutters take charge. When it comes to bold or dramatic initiatives, that means killing them. The architects of such initiatives are, of course, simply discarded.
So failure was the reward for all Pitt’s success, when he was driven from office.
Illustration: William Pitt after the failure with which his peers and his king had rewarded all his success. After Richard Brompton, based on a work of 1772
National Portrait Gallery 259
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The second of our Two Young Men Unleashed, after James Wolfe, is Robert Clive. He too was of minor gentry background, but the resemblance ends there. His childhood was marked by some violence, courage, and even criminality: he ran a protection racket for a time. These qualities served him well as he emerged as an unexpectedly gifted soldier in the service, not of Britain, but of the British East India Company, using military force as well as bribery to advance its interests, and his own, in the subcontinent.
In this way, he helped turn India into a source of colossal wealth for the shareholders of the company, while also making a massive fortune for himself, even though it reduced the people from whom that wealth was being sucked, to dire poverty and even famine. His lack of scruples fits with an adolescence marked by violence and criminality.
Or, to put it differently, that past fits well with the nature of the imperial power he helped launch. Driven by profit, it treated all other concerns as secondary. And the Indians paid the price.
Illustration: Benjamin West, Shah 'Alam, Mughal Emperor, Conveying the Grant of the Diwani (the right to collect taxes in Bengal) to Lord Clive, August 1765. In reality, the transaction happened in Clive’s tent, with the throne being a chair placed on top of a table covered by a cloth.
From Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain, including in the US.
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The original jewel in the British imperial crown wasn't India but North America. And William Pitt the Elder, Prime Minister in all but name since our last episode, was going to make sure the armed forces there were up to the task of breaking the stranglehold of the French. That meant spending what was needed, but also making sure that forces were well-led. Pitt was ready to do whatever it took to make that happen, even if it meant breaking with centuries of tradition, and promoting men on merit not aristocratic background.
That made it possible for the first young man unleashed, of the two in this and the next episode, James, or General Wolfe as he came to be known, to win a comprehensive and decisive victory over the French in Canada.
Plus, in this episode: the extraordinary victory of British and Hanoverian infantry over French cavalry at the Battle of Mindon, was as spectacular as it was unprecedented.
Illustration: The Death od General Wolfe, by Benjamin West - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160192
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An Admiral’s career reaches a sticky end as he’s shot to encourage the others to do better. A remarkable politician, denied advancement repeatedly, finally breaks through to power. Another war spreads across the world but, with fine leadership, this time Britain will spend the money necessary to make sure it’s truly decisive.
It’s the beginning of the Seven Years’ War and the time of William Pitt the Elder.
Illustration: William Pitt the Elder in 1754, from the studio of William Hoare
National Portrait Gallery 1050
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In the uneasy peace between the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War, Britain set about securing its growing imperial power. Central to it was its position in North America, as many visionaries saw, not least the then committed supporter of the Empire, Benjamin Franklin, in Pennsylvania. But that meant dealing with the French stranglehold around the British Colonies in what is now the United States. Three attempts, first manned and led by Americans (George Washington's first and defeated command), and then directed by Brits (to no better success), all failed spectacularly, demonstrating nothing so much as the incompetence of the British military whether colonial or from the mother country.
On the other hand, British force did well in another appalling and shameful act of ethnic cleansing, very much in the spirit of the Duke of Cumberland's actions towards the Scottish Highlanders, up in Nova Scotia, present-day Canada.
Illustration: At one time a visionary for the British Empire: Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Wilson, in 1759. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
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While the British army was on the European continent, putting up a pretty useless fight against the French in the Austrian Netherlands, Charles Edward Stuart launched a new uprising - or possibly rebellion, depending on your point of view - back in Britain. Known as Bonnie Prince Charlie to some, his uprising - the final attempt to put the Stuarts with their absolutist views of monarchy back on the throne - was far from bonnie in its consequences for the people of Scotland. Partly because he turned out to be a less attractive character than one might believe, but even more because of the programme of ethnic cleansing run in the Highlands by the Duke of Cumberland, who came to be known as 'Butcher Cumberland', the king's younger son and a hopeless general against armies, but highly effective against disorganised insurgents and civilians.
Nothing bonnie about this ugly episode in the history of the British nations.
Illustration: Not so bonnie in later life. Prince Charles Edward Stuart by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, circa 1785
National Portrait Gallery 376
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There was no real problem with a woman inheriting the Austrian throne. But it could be a useful pretext for war by nations keen on advancing their own interests militarily. Frederick II of Prussia was quick to go to war - the Philosopher Prince became a Military King when he had the power to - and he seized the rich Austrian province of Silesia (which is actually Polish, but neither the Austrians nor the Prussians cared about that).
Britain kept fighting the War of Jenkins' Ear against the Spanish, but then it got subsumed into the War of Austrian Succession, which it joined on the Austrian side as it had in the War of Spanish Succession. It did badly in the land war, under George II who, at Dettingen, became the last British sovereign to appear on a battlefield, and his younger son, the Duke of Cumberland, who proved pretty hopeless. They fought the French in America, chiefly through the Massachusetts colonists, and in India, through the East India Company.
Most gains were handed back at the end of the fighting, except that Prussia hung on to Silesia. With British backing. Which annoyed Austria a lot, and that had consequences for the next war. A war that was bound to come, since this one had sorted out very little, apart from allowing Maria Theresa to mount the Austrian throne after all.
Illustration: Empress Maria Theresa, portrait by Martin van Meytens, 1759. Public domain (published anywhere (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before 1926 and public domain in the U.S.)
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Ah, those were the days. When Britain went to war over a sea captain who'd had an ear cut off. And taught the Spanish a thing or two.
Except, of course, that Britain didn't go to war for that reason. And they taught Spain nothing. In fact, the Spanish taught the British a lesson, though we shall discover later that it wasn't listening.
It took Britain eight years to decide to go to war with Spain, ostensibly over the outrage of Jenkins' Ear. That delay shows how little the war had to do with the atrocity. In reality, it was about bringing Walpole down, on the one hand, and looking for new business opportunities, on the other, with war as the means to break the stranglehold of competitor nations.
Besides, despite a promising start with a famous if trivial victory for which all the Portobellos in Britain are called, Admiral Vernon went on to massive defeat at Cartagena. Though, oddly enough, that has a monument too, in a place that is certainly iconic, but in American rather than British history. Proving once more that history is full of ironies.
Illustration: Robert Jenkins hands a dismissive Prime Minister Robert Walpole his severed ear, as his companions lift off his wig to show the scar; one of Walpole's associates displays total indifference, preferring to converse with a lady. Satirical Cartoon, 1738, British Museum, London. Public domain
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Britain, its idealists claimed, was launching an Empire of Freedom. The reality, sadly, was rather different.
Europeans, with Brits in the forefront, had developed a love of tobacco, and above all a sweet tooth. They wanted sugar for their cakes and pastries, but above all for their coffee, chocolate and, that new British institution, tea. But sugar production requires backbreaking work under terrible conditions. This was work, and in conditions of heat, humidity and disease, few Europeans felt they could handle.
And so Africans were brought in to do it instead.
Not voluntarily.
The British Empire of Freedom was built, and from early in its existence, on a foundation of slavery.
Illustration: William Clark, Slaves cutting sugar cane. Held and digitised by the British Library, and uploaded to Flickr Commons.
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'Robin', or Robert Walpole, Britain's first and longest-serving Prime Minister, came to be known as 'Cock Robin'. Possibly because people around him felt his success had made him cocky. The regime over which he presided was termed the 'Robinocracy'.
It was an era of peace, stability and improving government finances. Not enough to save him ultimately from his adversaries, dissident Whigs such as George Grenville and William Pitt the Elder - in other words, members of his own party. He'd given them peace, but they wanted war. Specifically, they wanted Britain's voice to be heard on the world stage.
We're on the verge of Britain becoming an imperial power, which we'll be finding out more about in coming episodes. But to make that possible we needed to be a lot more warlike than Cock Robin wanted. So the Robinocracy had to end.
Illustration: The Stature of a Great Man or the English Colossus". Satire of Sir Robert Wapole alluding to his "extreme reluctance to engage in war...to resist the aggressions of Spain and France". Caption reads: "Why Man, he doth bestride of narrow World Like a Colossus, and we petty Men – Walk under his huge Legs, & peep about To find ourselves, dishonourable Graves Men at some times are Masters of their fates: The fault, dear P––y is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are Underlings —Shakespear [sic]". Public domain picture, from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b03411.
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The title 'Prime Minister' used to be a term of abuse. To be honest, depending on the holder of the office, plenty of people would maintain it still is.
The first person of whom it was used as a real title in Britain, even if still not officially, was Robert Walpole. We've already met him, as a man who did rather well out of the South Sea Bubble, if more by good luck than by good judgement. That and the support he offered some powerful people in the wake of the scandal around the bubble, above all the king himself, helped him into office: he was seen as a safe pair of hands.
A reputation he did much to nurture and generally deserved.
Illustration: Robert Walpole, First Earl of Oxford, by Arthur Pond, 1742
National Portrait Gallery 6085
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Not all bubbles are all that bubbly. The South Sea Bubble made some people a lot of money - such as Isaac Newton, the physicist but also skilful financier - or a colossal amount of money - such as Thomas Guy, who founded Guy's Hospital, still one of England's great teaching hospitals. But it also ruined a lot of others. Rather like every bubble, down to the present day.
This bubble also opened the door for a man who might sort the fallout so competently that not too many in the English elite would suffer badly. Which would make him Britain's first Prime Minister. Truly proving that even a financial disaster could make the fortune of some people...
Illustration: Edward Matthew Ward, The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in ‘’Change Alley in 1720, Edward Matthew Ward. Presented by Robert Vernon 1847. Photo: Tate. Tate Reference: N00432. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
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England in the early eighteenth century was undergoing great changes. London was Europe's biggest city. And the country was rapidly emerging as a major business centre, displacing the Netherlands from that position. It had a thriving stock exchange and huge overseas trade, led by the venerable East India company.
It was also becoming a far livelier place in politics and in thought, with more tolerance for unorthodox ideas and political opposition than most countries. Though, as the experience of Daniel Defoe showed, there were still strict limits to just how far tolerance went.
Limited or not, political dynamism, and above all the strong economy, would be the springboard for British imperial dominance in the future.
Illustration: The Royal Exchange in London in the late eighteenth century
By Thomas Bowles - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:RoyalExchangeThomasBowles1751.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2360480
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an extraordinary woman, both in her personality and in her contribution to the world, specifically in medicine.
This episode looks at both aspects, trying to pick out the complex character behind her image, in particular her possibly ambivalent and certainly far from obvious sexuality.
Then, however, it looks at how she became a leading benefactor to humanity, by introducing to England, and through England to Europe, the life-saving procedure of immunising against smallpox by inoculation with the disease itself. That makes this episode not entirely suitable for anti-vaxxers, especially as it ends with a quick look at how her campaign led to the launching of actual vaccination, as opposed to the variolation she promoted. The anti-vaxxers won't like hearing that the procedure has saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Illustration: William Powell Frith, Alexander Pope declared his love to Lady Mary, who responded with laughter.
The writer Pope is said to have made a declaration to Lady Mary who simply found it uproariously funny, offending him deeply and turning him into an open enemy.
The painting dates from 1852, so it’s a later retrospective and imaginary depiction, but more fun than the contemporary and more serious portraits, which is why I chose it. It’s in the library at Otago, New Zealand, and the image is in the public domain.
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In the dying days of her reign, we see Queen Anne refusing royal assent to a bill, a historic moment only because it was the last time ever that a British monarch blocked a bill passed by both Houses of Parliament from becoming law (but she did do it on the advice of her ministers...)
We also see her engineering herself a Tory government, backing her High Church Anglican views. Not for long though. When she died and George I took over, he lined up with the Whigs, especially on the terms of the Peace of Utrecht at the end of the War of Spanish Succession, which he thought sold Britain short. So he in turn engineered a Whig majority and many Tories, realising they were in for a bad time, fled abroad. Where some of them went over to the side of the Stuart claimant to the throne, James Edward.
We now get him having another go at conquering Britain. Not just once. Not even twice. But three times in under fifteen years. What a bore they were, the Stuarts, weren't they? They just couldn't learn to go away. And as we know from our own experience, a head of state who won't go through the door when he's shown it, is a real pain.
Illustration: Prince James Francis Edward Stuart. Studio of Alexis Simon Belle, circa 1712
National Portrait Gallery 348
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It's time for a new country. Time to shake off the old bickering small nations around the island of Britain. It's time for Great Britain to emerge as a powerful new player on the world stage, bringing together Scotland on the one hand and England-and-Wales on the other. Though the fact that Wales is already just an adjunct of England shows what's likely to lie in store for Scotland down this road.
How did Scotland get bought, browbeaten and bribed into joining a union with England? Well, by being bought, browbeaten and bribed. This episode investigates the steps that took it there. And how Queen Anne's assertion of deep-rooted Englishness was a reliable indication of what was to come in the future, when Scotland gave up even the pretence of independence.
Illustration: The King’s Colours, merging English and Scottish flags into one, before the Irish cross was added to make the modern Union JackMusic: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
The War of the Spanish succession was really just the continuation of the Nine Years' War, but this time with the specific issue of the succession to the Spanish throne at stake. That, incidentally, meant that Spain swapped sides, fighting with France this time around, since the dying Spanish king had triggered the war by leaving his crown to a claimant from the French royal family.
It was a war where the Grand Alliance, again led by Austria, Britain and Holland, won a few battles. It was its turn, after all, following the French victories in the Nine Years' War. But just like those earlier wins, it didn't lead to an outcome from the war any more decisive than the previous time around.
What it did come up with was something rare in British history, an effective general in the Duke of Marlborough. A costly one, though, since many of his victorious battles, often fought with his friend and equally skilled Austrian counterpart, Eugene Prince of Savoy, were practically Pyrrhic in their losses for his own side.
It was also a war in which, though England went in, Great Britain came out. But why is the subject of episode 39.
Illustration: The Duke of Marlborough greeting Prince Eugene of Savoy after their victory at Blenheim, Robert Alexander Hillingford. Public domain. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Officer) before January 1, 1926
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As William III, reigning alone since the death of his wife Mary II, approached the end of his reign, there was clearly a vital issue to address. Mary's sister Anne was the only Protestant heir to the throne recognised in law, and England was certainly not going to put up with another Catholic monarch, after James II. But to find a non-Catholic heir meant going back up the royal family tree quite a way, to James VI/I indeed, and making his granddaughter, Sophia, wife of the ruler (Elector) of Hanover, next in line after Anne to the throne.
The Act, however, did more than that. It had measures that further strengthened the authority of parliament. And by just declaring that parliament could decide the succession, it also underlined that it would take this kind of decision. Was the monarch appointed by God, as the Stuarts maintained? No, replied the parliamentarians. The law - and that means us - will decide the succession.
That was another step towards parliament being responsible for more and more decisions generally. In turn, that meant that political parties would be taking them. Which makes it all the more important that the growing power of business was becoming such a major influence in political life.
Business would, in particular, be a major factor in the war that started at this time, not three years since the end of the previous one.
Illustration: Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Anne as a young woman, when she was still simply heir to the throne, as Mary II’s sister, before she became Queen herself. National Portrait Gallery 1616
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Just as soon as William III could free himself up from wars in the British Isles, to secure his throne (and his wife Mary II's), he got stuck into the fighting on the Continent, on behalf of his home country of Holland. This was the Nine Years War, where the Grand Alliance fought to block the attempts of Louis XIV's France to win the territory it needed to give it what it regarded as defensible borders (its 'natural' borders).
It might have looked as though France was championing Catholicism against Protestant Holland, except that the Grand Alliance included Catholic states, most notably the major power Austria and the waning but still significant one, Spain. Getting the religion right obviously mattered, but never as much as serving the national interest.
This was the Nine Years' War, and nine years was a long time for pre-industrial economies to wage war. In the end, exhausted, the combatants were forced to the negotiating table. Changes were small, and the biggest questions left unanswered. The biggest of them all is what would happen once the inbred, deeply ill and childless king of Spain, Charles II, died. Who'd inherit his throne and his country's still considerable territories?
By not deciding such pretty crucial matters, the powers only left them to provoke another war in the near future. Just as soon as the Spanish king died. Which he did, not three years later.
Illustration: Charles II of Spain, by Juan Carreño de Miranda, showing the Hapsburg jaw, outwards sign of terrible health handicaps caused by generations of inbreeding.. Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado
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That’s it: we’ve reached the great and dreadful moment of the Battle of the Boyne, an event that casts its shadow right down to the present day. Each year – on an oddly chosen anniversary date – Orangemen, called after William of Orange, march in Northern Ireland to remind everyone of their triumph over Catholic forces.
Then the episode switches its attention to Scotland, and events just as iconic, occurring in the picturesque valley of Glencoe.
The Boyne and Glencoe: they demonstrate just how little the word ‘bloodless’ applies to the Glorious Revolution. And in what a limited sense it was even glorious.
Illustration: Jan van Huchtenburgh: Battle of the Boyne. Public domain, original in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1926.
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It's the run up to the Battle of the Boyne.
So we're chatting about the many motivations for William III's invasion of England. Yes, the aims of the Glorious Revolution, protecting or simply implementing a particular view of a certain number of English liberties, mattered. But there was also the much more personal objective of protecting his wife's claim to the English throne, which he would share with her. And then, as a Dutchman, he wanted to get on with fighting Holland's war against France. For that, English neutrality would be a great improvement over its potential involvement on Louis XIV's side; even better, having it join with Holland would be a huge boost. And if he were king, couldn't he make sure that happened?
A lot was at stake when the sides met at the Boyne. But it wasn't just the fate of the English and Scottish crowns, or of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. It was also the hopes of defeating France in a much wider European war.
That made the Irish campaign one theatre in that war.
Illustration: King Louis XIV of France, ‘Louis the Great’, the ‘Sun King’. The figure dominating the European scene and threatening the other powers.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchased through a generous contribution by Joseph Verner Reed to the Victor Proetz Memorial Fund
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The Glorious Revolution led to England having two reigning monarchs for the price of just one: William III and Mary II, or Williamandmary, as we like to think of them.
It started with a Bill of Rights, which no one signed and never became law, but it was destined to have a great role in the future. Curious, isn't it, how something with no immediate impact can turn out to be historic?
Some bits of it led to legislation, including the Settlement Act, which legitimised the new monarchs' rule, a pretty remarkable step, seeing as it made the sovereign's power dependent on parliamentary authority. Above all, the new approach firmly rooted the notion that the monarch needs the consent of parliament to some of his (or her) actions. That was especially true of the more expensive ones, since it and it alone would control taxation in the future.
All this was hardly the beginning of democracy, but it did mark the end of arbitrary royal power. A pretty significant development, given how absolutist other regimes were, notably in France, Europe's leading power at the time.
Illustration: King William III; Queen Mary II by Jakob van der Schley, after Hubert-François Gravelot (né Bourguignon)
National Portrait Gallery D10672
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Was it glorious? Was it even a revolution?
The Glorious Revolution brought to an end the short and little lamented - indeed, lamentable - reign of James II of England, James VII of Scotland, and with it, the Stuart dynasty on the throne of England.
But there was little fighting, particularly as James behaved uncharacteristically and fled abroad, after offering little resistance. And while there was certainly significant change, in that William III and Mary II replaced the king, and did so on the invitation of parliament, not by divine right - a revolution in seventeenth-century terms, as the wheel of fortune revolved - it was hardly revolutionary in our understanding of the word.
Little glory, then, and barely a revolution. But all the same, a highly significant event, as we shall see.
Illustration: JMW Turner, Prince of Orange landing at BrixhamIndianapolis Museum of Art
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We stand on the brink of saying goodbye to the Stuart kings, at last (not, alas, to the Stuarts though: they'll be back a couple more times to haunt us).
The history of England saved the worst to last: James II, or James VII in Scotland, was the bottom of the barrel, the worst of the Stuarts, the man whose only achievement was to help shorten his reign by his sheer ineptitude.
We'll find out how, we'll find out who was standing in the wings ready to take over, and how he needed to be invited before he'd come to the party.
Illustration: Anne Hyde, the king's wife, with James II.
By Sir Peter Lely
National Portrait Gallery 5077
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In the course of Charles II's reign, we saw governments fall and an opposition beginning to emerge. The result was the formation of two distinct groups, the Whigs and Tories, the former looking for limited royal power, the other more strongly royalist. Neither was keen on Catholics, but the Whigs were rather more intent on protecting the country against what they saw as Papist plotting to overthrow the Protestant regime.
It was in its early days, and it wasn't yet the party political system we know but perhaps don't love, but this was the beginning of its emergence.
Illustration: A Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, an engraving based on Stephen College, showing an event organised by Whigs in 1680, with effigies of the Pope, Cardinals, and other Catholic ecclesiastics, carried through the streets of London to be burned on bonfires.
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When we last took a look at the so-called golden age of Charles II, we talked about the persecution of Catholics and, in particular, the witch hunt launched against them during the Popish Plot craze launched by Titus Oates's fabrications.
But Catholics weren't alone in being given a lousy time. Puritans, the more fundamentalists of Protestants, were also targets. They were seen as the main architects of the English republic that had just ended. They were also seen as dangerously unorthodox, when conformity was viewed as the right way to go. This was the last time, indeed, when anyone made the attempt to impose a single faith on Britain. So Episcopalians, the trend within the Church of England that was as close to Catholicism as you could get without giving up on Protestantism altogether, also persecuted Dissenters and Non-Conformist Protestants. And it wasn't a nice sight either...
So this was another group of people for whom the age wasn't terribly golden.
Ultimately, that was something that also revealed the relative loss of power of the king, and the emergence, notably in parliament, of tendencies of opinion opposed to each other, for or against the king. Religion and politics melded. And, for our next episode, we're going to see how that led to the beginnings of the party system.
Illustration: The martyrdom by drowning of Margaret Wilson, a Scots Presbyterian who refused to bow to Episcopalian authority. Engraving from a nineteenth-century drawing by J E Millais.
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Was that golden age, following the restoration of the monarchy in England, really that golden?
This episode looks at how it lost its sheen, particularly when the champion fabricator or fake news and false denunciations, Titus Oates, came along and plunged the country into the hysteria of the Popish Plot. That was like so many other witch hunts, even the McCarthy anti-Communist hunt in the 1950s. And, like most conspiracy theories, based on pure fiction. Or, rather, impure fiction.
Illustration: Titus Oates, engraving after and unknown artist
National Portrait Gallery D16604
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Charles II's Golden Age continues in this next episode, although the title, with its trace of irony, rather betrays some of the things that were going on under the surface. A lot of duplicity by the merry monarch, as well as some fine mistresses, and a growing head of steam for more active anti-Catholicism, drawing considerable encouragement from the behaviour of the monarch himself
Illustration: Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, with an unknown female attendant
by Pierre Mignard, 1682
National Portrait Gallery 497
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As any fan of Tolkien's Lord of Rings can tell you, nothing beats the return of a king.
After the chaos that followed Richard Cromwell's following Oliver as Lord Protector, the restoration of Charles II, another Stuart, to the English throne seemed a relief and a promise of stability. What's more, his character - not for nothing is he called the Merry Monarch - promised lots of good things. Sadly, though, there weren't just good things...
Illustration: Nell Gwynn in about 1680, by Simon Verelst
National Portrait Gallery 2496
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In the 1650s, power concentrated in England into fewer and fewer hands, until in the end a Lord Protector was appointed and - surprise, surprise, since he dominated the Army Council which appointed him - Oliver Cromwell got the job.
As it happens, a (somewhat cowed) parliament worked alongside him, so in a sense England had reached the point which parliament had sought before the Civil Wars: shared authority between a single ruler and itself. But most of the people running the system remained the same as before, or at least of the same class and mentality, and there had been no real revolutionary change. So it isn't hard to see that the republic would slide back into monarchy once Cromwell had died.
This episode also looks at a couple of lasting legacies, however: Jews allowed back into England, and the triumphant bursting of coffee onto the scene. Long before tea...
Illustration: Interior of a London Coffee-house, 17th century
Anonymous: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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Who could imagine that England could ever be a republic? And yet for eleven years it became one.
Still, it would be a serious mistake to confuse 'republic' with 'democracy'. It swiftly became clear, as Oliver Cromwell rose to the summit of power - a power he never sought for personal satisfaction but saw as a necessary chore to take the country in a godly direction - that it was going to become something far closer to a despotic regime. A limited one, without the persecution of opponents you might expect, but not by any means a state based on the consent of the governed. That, the hope of some including, most notably, the Levellers, was not going to happen.
Illustration: Cromwell turns out the Rump Parliament because of itscorruption, 1653
©petervick167/123RF.COM
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We start with Charles I's son mounting a throne in Scotland as Charles II, and end with him hiding up an oak tree, throneless once more. In between, lots of exciting battles, all rather boringly won by the same Cromwell with the same army, and the even more thrilling betrayal and execution of the Marquess of Montrose. Betrayed by the 'master fiend Argyll' or perhaps betrayed to Argyll by the very master, Charles II, he sought to serve so faithfully?
Illustration: Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll, after David Scougall
National Portrait Gallery 3109
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This is the chapter where we reach the Third English Civil War. We've seen that though their concerns may have been mainly English, the civil wars were by no means limited to England. They were, indeed, wrapped up in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. So far, I've tended to ignore Ireland a bit, and this episode will put that right. Especially as Cromwell's actions in Ireland are a major element of his career, showing him to be once more a victorious general, but not a particularly humane rules, or even a merciful one.
That being said, there's no need to overstate the horrors associated with his campaign in Ireland. There's certainly been exaggeration down the centuries. But, frankly, the truth of what happened in Ireland during Cromwell's campaign is quite horrific enough anyway.
In a long history marked by terrible moments, Cromwell's campaign in Ireland was one of the bleakest in the relations between Britain and that long-suffering island.
Illustration: Oliver Cromwell by Robert Walker Oil on Canvas, circa 1649
National Portrait Gallery 536
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When the Scots began to worry about the increasing power of the New Model Army, and even whether it might be a bigger threat to them than the king, they decided to open negotiations with him. The result was a strange alliance between former enemies. Charles escaped and joined them, launching the Second English Civil War.
Which he lost, just like the First.
This time, though, his enemies had run out of patience with him. They decided that he had to go. For that, they organised a show trial, but even to get that they first had to pull off a military coup.
With all that in place, they got their trial and eventually the execution they wanted. Which Charles went to with courage and dignity, that won him widespread affection again. In fact, he handled his death so well that it seems rather a pity he didn't handle his life as wisely.
The illustration is an engraving from Nalson’s Record of the Trial of Charles I. Plate 2 from “A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court”, taken by J. Nalson Jan. 4, 1683. Credit: British Museum / Commons.
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The First Civil War had ended. King Charles I had lost, which wasn't just a military or political problem, but a religious one too: after all, if God had made him king, and God also determined who won wars, who could make sense of what was going on? Had God sided with Parliament against the king he'd set on his throne in the first place.
In practical terms, Charles was in captivity, a prisoner of Parliament. In the country at large, normal politics could have restarted, if politics had been anything like normal. There were tensions between Parliament and Parliament's army, which was beginning to do some of its own political soul-searching. Which was particularly interesting, since it was the most powerful organisation in the country. And, within the army itself, there were tensions too, as new trends appeared, among common people, wondering whether, what will all the fighting they were doing, and all the sacrifices they had made, they shouldn't be given a bit more of a say in the running of the state.
Fascinating debates. Sadly cut short. Because Charles may have been down, but he wasn't yet out. And he could still do something destructive and self-destructive.
The illustration is the front page of one of the versions of the Leveller document, 'An Agreement of the People', laying out demands for wider political rights.
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Parliament getting serious about the Civil War, getting its act together on military matters - above all by launching its New Model Army - and starting to win some key battles.
Against that context, and helping Parliament on its way to success, there's the meteoric rise of Oliver Cromwell, a man whose military ability hadn't been suspected before. Not that this will be the end of his surprises for England.
The episode ends as the First Civil War - ironically referred to as the 'Great Civil War' - also closes with poor old King Charles I in pretty dire straits.
General Oliver Cromwell at Marston Moor, 1644
Engraving by William French after Ernest Crofts ARA, published by J S Virtue and Company Limited, London, 1860 (c).
National Army Museum. 1999-04-158-1
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Oh dear, oh dear. Charles I pushed and pushed. Eventually, the other side pushed back. First it was the Scots, who turned out to be a lot better at fighting than Charles had imagined, and gave him a considerable black eye. Then, when he turned to Parliament in London, after eleven years without calling one, far from getting the funds he needed to fight the Scots, he found himself at loggerheads with them too.
And then things turned even nastier...
The illustration is courtesy of the National Army Museum, and shows 'roundhead' cavalrymen in Moorland.
Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
Charles I, like his father, proved extremely good at not being at all good at getting on with people he really needed to be really good at getting on side. Just like with his Dad, that mainly meant Parliamentarians. People like John Hampden, one of the great warriors against royal overreach, and a certain Oliver Cromwell who - and I don't think this is a spoiler - would have a pretty big role to play later.
There was one big difference between father and son, though: James managed to avoid things getting so bad that they degenerated into actual warfare.
Welcome to the threshold of the English Civil Wars.
King Charles I, by Gerrit van Honthorst, oil on canvas, 1628
National Portrait Gallery, London, 4444
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Charles I started his reign in just the way he'd go on with it, and in just the way his father James I/VI had ended his: by getting right up the noses of most of his subjects in Scotland as well as England, and falling apart big time with the Westminster Parliament.
Having failed with one attempt at a marriage with a Catholic Princess from Spain, he just organised himself a different one, with a Catholic Princess from France - Spain's deadliest enemy but just as Papist. He got into disputes with Parliament and Protestants generally about anti-Protestant, or even pro-Catholic action, and with Parliament specifically about taxation, since he could never raise enough for his needs without their authorisation, which he resented. In this neat way, he set up all the pieces for the painful clashes he'd face over the following years.
The illustration is a portrait of King Charles I, by Gerrit van Honthorst, oil on canvas, 1628
National Portrait Gallery, London, 4444
The music is Bach Partita #2c by J Bu.
Both image and music are licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License
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The end of James Stuart's reign over Scotland and England was no more impressive than the earlier part. One of the wonderful, crazy and ultimately futile episodes was the 'Spanish Match', involving the future Charles I and his father's favourite, the future Duke of Buckingham, travelling to Madrid to try and grab a bride for Charles. An attempt which involved a bit of stalking, understandably rejected by the lady involved. And it was a total failure, unsurprisingly.
And yet... Charles was greeted by cheering crowds on his return to England.
Illustration: Maria Anna of Spain, by Diego Velázquez
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The marriage of James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, to Anne of Denmark started off with some romanticism, including a dangerous sea crossing to fetch her home, and it certainly produced a lot of pregnancies (very much a royal couple's duty), though things then rather faded. That's possibly because James wasn't quite as interested in women as the initial gesture suggested. But there was no way he could be openly gay at that time.
There were also quite a few conspiracies against him, most famously the 'Gunpowder Plot' in which Guy Fawkes played a major role. That left Britain with its annual bonfire nights, including the burning of the unfortunate Guy in effigy. Not perhaps the most charming of traditions.
Illustration: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, favourite of James I of England
Portrait by Michiel J. van Miereveld
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James I of England (VI of Scotland) had clear ideas of what kingship meant. It meant he'd been chosen by God to run the show and Parliament wasn't going to get in his way. The trouble was, Parliament controlled the money. And James's attitude wasn't going to make any friends there.
A fine scholar, he proved himself pretty useless as a politician. No wonder they called him "the wisest fool in Christendom".
Illustration: Title page of a King James Bible, lasting legacy of the first Stuart King
©Maharage Don Janaka Dharmasena/123RF.COM
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Boy, did it take a long time for James VI of Scotland to get from his proclamation as King of England, down to London to take the throne as James I. Partly that was because he had other things to do on the way down. A spot of hunting, for instance. And hanging a man without due process, not the English way of doing these things, but something of a sign of what was to come with the bright new Stuart dynasty.
Well, perhaps not that bright.
James VI of Scotland and I of England.
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With no children of her own, what had Elizabeth I done to guarantee a smooth succession after her death? The answer is precious little. Which meant there had to be some clever footwork by her Chief Minister Robert Cecil, son of the William Cecil who had served so ably before, to ensure that the transition went well, peacefully and the way he wanted it. You'll not be surprised to learn that part of "the way he wanted it", was the way that ensured he kept his job. You can tell how that turned out by the illustration, which shows him confirmed in his post, a year later, at an international peace conference with Spain.
As well as clever footwork, the death of Elizabeth was followed by exciting hoofwork, as the crazy Robert Carey galloped at breakneck speed northward to bring the good news to James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England too. Not that it was that crazy, seeing how well he did out of his adventurous dash (eventually)...
The illustration shows the Somerset Conference of 1604, with Secretary of State Robert Cecil at the far right, with writing implements in front of him
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Elizabeth was the virgin queen. And indeed she had no children, which would be a bit of a problem for when she finally popped her clogs and the survivors had to try to find a way to make the succession to the throne reasonably peaceful.
But was she really a virgin? And if she never married, was that down to careful international politics, equally careful national politics, or even the weird experience she had, as a teenager, of having an older man 'romp' with her?
The illustration is a portrait of Elizabeth I
©Jose Georgios Kollidas/123RF.COM
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England loves stories about its great victory over the Spanish Armada. But it talks far less about its sequel. And, boy, was there a sequel: England's own Armada, against Spain.
From England's point of view, it didn't go anything like as well as Spain's attempted invasion. Which probably explains why it's talked about some much less in English schools.
The illustration shows a turret from the old fortress in A Coruña (Corunna)
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Spain sent its Armada against Elizabethan England, and the expedition ended in disaster, though far more for its failures of planning and the lousy weather than for anything the English did.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth I had a great time when she went down to inspect the militia at Tilbury. Can you imagine? The only woman among 4000 admiring solders. She loved it. And gave an iconic speech to mark the occasion.
The illustration shows the Spanish Armada in crescent formation pursued up the Chanelle by the English fleet under Lord Howard of Effingham
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They may have been preying on ships, attacking them, stealing their cargoes and holding their crews to ransom, but they knew for sure that they weren't pirates. They were loyal English sailors in Queen Elizabeth I's service. After all, she was making money from their victories, and no Queen could possibly be profiting from piracy, could she?
Well, the Spanish had no doubts. They were certainly pirates. And they were seriously annoying.
Chapter 7 of A History of England is about the seamen of Elizabeth's reign and their exciting acts of derring do (or piracy).
The illustration shows the captain of the Spanish galleon Our Lady of the Rosary surrenders to Sir Francis Drake of The Revenge
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You may have noticed that religion has been a pretty significant factor in the happenings of the first few chapters, as it will be in quite a few of the ones ahead. So it makes sense to pause a moment and take a look at the role of God in the evolution of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Illustration: The ceiling fresco Glory of Holy Trinity in church Santuario del Santissimo Crocifisso by Gersam Turri (1927-1929).
©sedmak/123RF.COM
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An exciting moment! Anne Boleyn's daughter, bright as her mother, in sharpness of mind as well as redness of hair, has made it to the throne. She's sick of all those quarrels between Protestants and Catholics, and decides that there's no need to pick fights with any Catholic subject who's discreet about his beliefs and remains loyal to the throne. The trouble is that the Pope keeps making life difficult for her, by denying her legitimacy and therefore her right to the throne. Can she therefore count on Catholic subjects who owe allegiance to the Pope as well as to herself?
And what about her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots? She's openly Catholic. And, with French connections herself, she's Queen in a nation that sees itself as close to England's enemy France. When she falls out with her own people and has to take refuge in England, how should Elizabeth react?
Episode 5 will tell you.
The illustration is a later engraving of her chief adviser William Cecil urging Elizabeth to take action against Mary Queen of Scots.
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A Bloody Mary may be a fine drink, but Bloody Mary was hardly the most desirable of Queens. As the nickname rather suggests.
She was England's last Catholic monarch, and she set out to undo her brother's Protestant work (though without giving any of the money back). Apart from that, she lost England's last Continental possession, Calais, and she married the man who would become King Philip II of Spain. His great contribution as King of England? To sort out the Navy, a high-minded action but one unintended consequences for which he'd pay heavily later.
The illustration is a portrait of Mary Tudor, who became Queen as Mary I, but is best known as Bloody Mary.
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At last, Henry VIII's wish could be fulfilled. He left the throne to his son. A male heir, just what he'd always wanted.
Well, it wasn't that simple, First of all, Edward VI was only 9 when he came to the throne. Real power was exercised by a Regency Council that was - and this may shock you - not massively competent and rather more concerned with its own interests than with the nation's. What's more, Edward was England's first definitively Protestant monarch. A second shock for you will be to discover that a zealot for the oher side could be just much of a vandal as his enemies on the other.
The illustration is a 19th century engraving of Edward VI, ©Georgios Kollidas/123RF.COM
We got to know Henry VIII a bit in chapter 1. We also talked a little about his wives, and it seems only right that we think about them a bit more now, especially since having a lot of wives is what Henry's best known for. So chapter 2 takes a look at their stories, at why Henry married them (well, the other reasons, apart from his attraction to young women), and to what extent he hit his objective.
And, to surprise and amuse us all, we end with an unusual example of foresight and enlightened thinking from a monarch generally better known for self-serving authoritarianism.
The picture is a detail of a British stamp showing the face of Catherine Howard, the wife who was rather too free with her charms for the taste of of her husband.
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Welcome to A History of England.
We can't get started without taking a moment to acknowledge the Spanish journalist and novelist, Arturo Perez Reverte. It was his Una Historia d'España, A History of Spain that inspired me to make this series. I like the idea of really short chapters, which I've imitated. I like the use of a normal sort of language, and not fine, carefully modulated diction. But above all, what I liked was the idea of A history and not The history of the nation. I make no pretence at writing some academic tome. I make no pretence of academic detachment. I do make a pretence, or rather the attempt, to get the facts as right as possible. However, it's a particular view. Above all, it's less about discovering what England did at any particular point over the last few centuries, as about understanding how, by doing it, England got Britain to where it is today.
Let's get started. With, sensibly enough, Chapter One. It's dedicated to Henry VIII or, as I think of him, Bloody Henry.
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