British history in the nineteenth century (1782-1901)

Front matter

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Preface

Tue object of this book is to enable the student or general reader to obtain, in the compass of one volume, a picture of change and development during the hundred and twenty years when things certainly, and probably men and women with them, were undergoing a more rapid change of character than in any previous epoch of our annals. I have tried to give the sense of continuous growth, to show how economic led to social, and social to political change, how the political events reacted on the economic and social, and how new thoughts and new ideals accompanied or directed the whole complicated process.

For such a purpose, it would be a mistake to confuse the narrative with too much detail, but I have put into the story the main events which directed the course of the current, or were regarded as specially symbolic of each passing age. I cannot hold the epicurean doctrine, sometimes favoured nowadays, that because history increasingly deals with generalisation it is safe for the student to neglect dates, which are the bones of historical anatomy. Still less is it safe, in pursuit of generalised truth, to overlook the personality and influence of great men, who are often in large measure the cause of some “tendency ’ which only they rendered ‘inevitable.’

Political writers, social philosophers and founders of movements must take their place beside warriors and statesmen in any account of social and political changes in modern times. But religion, literature and science are only mentioned here in connection with social or political developments of which they were in some degree the cause or the symbol. I have made no attempt to appreciate their real significance in a century of British history famous for all three of these supreme efforts of the human spirit.

I have called the book ‘ British History,’ because, though it cannot claim to be a History of the Empire, it is more than a History of Britain. It is indeed, mainly, a history of Britain, but it treats of that island as the centre of a great association of peoples, enormously increasing in extent during the period under survey. The course of events in Canada, Australasia, vii

Vill PREFACE

Ireland, India and British Africa have been indicated in broken outline. In particular, I have tried to show the relation of the various phases of our home affairs to each of those separate stories of Imperial development, and the effect of politics and persons at home on our relations with Europe and with the United States.

Where should a British History of the Nineteenth Century begin, and where break off ? Clearly it should stop where the nominal century and the reign of Queen Victoria come to an end together. The finish of the Boer War leaves us on the threshold of our own times, whichare still too near us to be seen in perspective.

Where to begin is perhaps less obvious. It would, I think, be absurd to begin exactly with the new century, with Addington and the Treaty of Amiens, at a moment’s pause in the battle with revolutionary France, and in the most terrible years of the initial agony of our own Industrial Revolution. It is necessary first to describe the starting-point of this great era of change, to give a sketch of the quiet, old England of the eighteenth century before machines destroyed it, and the political scene before the French Revolution came to disturb it.

The fifty years that stretch from the loss of the American Colonies and the fall of George III’s personal government down to Lord Grey’s Reform Bill, compose a single epoch in our political history; no true starting-point can be found between 1782 and 1832. I have chosen the former year, which among other advantages permits the inclusion of the whole career of the younger Pitt, who was, both in date and in spirit, the last great statesman of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century.

The curious may chance to detect a few sentences or paragraphs that have occurred in a former work of mine. Where it happens that the same thing has to be said at the same length, it is an affectation to vary the words. But, generally speaking, the point of view from which I have here told the history of a nation’s growth differs in some important respects from the outlook of the biographer of a statesman who was but one part of a gigantic whole.

G. M. TREVELYAN.

BERKHAMSTED, January 1922.

Contents

IntTRopucTION ; > : .

CHAPTER I England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution (I)—Village life and agriculture—The roads—Town life and apprenticeship—The Municipal and Parliamentary system—London : :

Chapter II

England on the eve ot the Industrial Revolution (11)—County Elections —The gentry, their life and culture—The magistrates—The clergy—Universities and Education—Justice—Scotland in the Eighteenth Century .

CHAPTER HI The end of George III’s personal government, 1782—Fox, Burke, Shelburne—Pitt as Peace Minister—India—Slave Trade, Wilbetforce and the evangelicals—Australia—Canada :

CHAPTER IK V The reactions on English politics of economic change and of the French Revolution—Anti-Jacobins and Democrats—Fox and the Whig via media—Suppression of the Democratic movement—Course of the French Revolution—Causes of war with France .

CHAPTER V

The War with the French Republic, 1793-1802—Its four periods— Naval supremacy of Great Britain and continental failure of her allies

CHAPTER VI

Ireland, 1782~1800—Grattan—The United Irishmen—The ’ninety-eight—The Union—End of Pitt’s long Ministry—India under Cornwallis and Wellesley . : : : : ‘ :

CHAPTER VII

The Napoleonic struggle, I., 1803-1807—British parties—The war renewed—The ‘Trafalgar campaign—Deaths of Pitt and For— Their successor-—Tilsit—Napoleon and Nationality .

ix

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CHAPTER VIII The Napoleonic Struggle, II, 1808-1 s—wWellington and the Peninsular War—The Commercial struggle and the blockade—Leipzig and Waterloo—Castlereagh and the resettlement of Europe . :

CHAPTER IX

The Industrial Revolution—Rural: enclosures and Speenhamland— Urban: machines and factories—Material and moral influences on the new society—Popular education—The Mechanics

CHAPTER X

\/ ¢ Macadamising ’"—Highways and horses—Hunting, shooting, boxing—

Sports and athletics—Public Schools—The army and the nation— Canada and the American War of 1812—Castlereagh’s American policy, 1817-8 .

CHAP R XI cu After the War, 1815-22—Brougham, Bentham, Owen, Cobbett—T he

Radical movement and the Second Repression—Peterloo and Cato Street-—The Queen’s Trial—Death of Castlereagh

CHAPTER XII

Liberal ‘Toryism, 1822-27—-Canning, Peel, Huskisson—Francis Place and the Combination Acts—The Corn Laws—Canning’s Foreign Policy : Spain, America, Greece

CHAPTER XIII

The break-up of the Tory party, 1827—30—IIlness of Lord Liverpool— Ministry and Death of Canning—The Wellington Ministry— O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation—Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway—London University : : .

CHAPTER XIV

Wellington, the Whigs and the nation, 1830-2—French and Belgian Revolutions—The Grey Ministry formed—The Reform Bill

CHAPTER XV

The Whigs and the Reform Era, 1832-5—Reform in Scotland—Municipal Reform—Factory Acts—Poor Law—Socialists and Chartists .

CHAPTER XVI

The Whigs and the Empire—Abolition of Slavery, 1833—South Africa, the Great ‘Trek—Emigration and Gibbon Wakefield —Australasia—Canada, 1837-54: the Durham report and Lord Elgin’s Governorship—Responsible government and the Imperial connection . : é : ‘ ° . . .

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XVII

The Crown after the Reform Bill—Peel, Cobden and the Anti-Corn- Law League—Disraeli and the Peelites—Beginning of Victorian prosperity—‘ New Model’ Trade Unionism—The Co-operative Movement—Chadwick and Public Health. : : ‘

CHAPTER XVIII

Evolution in the Church—Parliament, Church and Dissenters—Scottish Kirk disruption—Ireland, 1830-47: famine and emigration— America and the Oregon Settlement, 1846

CHAPTER XIX

The abortive revolutions of 1848-9: British attitude—Palmerston— Napoleon III—The Crimea and Florence Nightingale

CHAPTER XX India from the Napoleonic Wars to the Mutiny

CHAPTER XxXI

The last days of Whig-Liberalism—‘ The Triumvirate’ helps Cavour to make Italy—Cobden’s commercial ‘Treaty with France—The American Civil War—Canadian Federation—Denmark—Death of Palmerston, 1865 . : ‘ : : : °

CHAPTER XXII

Mill, Darwin and the new era—Bright, Gladstone and Disraeli enfranchise the town labourer, 1866-7—-Gladstone’s reform Ministry, 1868-74—Irish Church and Land—The Education Act—University, Civil Service and Army Reform : ‘ ‘

CHAPTER XXIII

The Franco-Prussian War—The new era in Foreign Affairs—Fall of Gladstone—Disraeli’s Ministry, 1874-80—T rade Union and Social legislation—The Eastern Question: Disraeli, Gladstone and the Turk : : : : :

CHAPTER XXIV

Gladstone’s Second Ministry, 1880—s—South Africa—Egypt and the Soudan—County Franchise—Ireland—The Home Rule split, 1886. . : . : : : : -

CHAPTER XXV

The Salisbury Ministries—Socialist influences—The new Trade Unionism—Municipal development—The fiz de si@cle—Ireland, Parnell and the Liberal interlude x!

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PAGE CHAPTER XXVI

Salisbury and Chamberlain—Imperialism—Africa—Cecil Rhodes—The

Soudan conquered—Venezuela—The Boer War—The Queen’s Jubilees and Death . : : : ° . . + 410

Appenpix. Enclosures of Land . : : ; : . © 425 List of Ministries, 1770-1902. 426 List of Books. (Readers ae find these books useful for | more detailed study.) . ; ‘ : . > 427.

Inpex . , : ° = ; . : ‘ : « A433 MAPS 1. ‘The 'T'wo Canadas and the Maritime Provinces, 1791 . : os 57. 2. Europe in 1810, at the Height of Napoleon’s Power s 119 37) Lhe Development of the West Canadian Border with the U. S.A. in the Nineteenth Century . > . 179 4. The Crimea. Neighbourhood of Sebastopol : - i 308 From Tout’s ‘Advanced History Z eoee Britain? 5. India early in Nineteenth Century . . - 310 6. Indiain 1906. . te From Tout’s ‘Advanced History of Great Britain? 7. Balkan Peninsula, 1800-78 . : : . 4370 8. South Africa, 1899 . ara

From Tout’s ‘Advanced History of Great Britain?

Introduction

Durinc the last hundred and fifty years, the rate of progress in man’s command over nature has been ten times as fast as in the period between Cesar and Napoleon, a hundred times as fast as in the slow prehistoric ages. Tens of thousands of years divided man’s first use of fire from his first application of it to iron. Even in the civilised era, when literature, science and philosophy were given us by Greece, the art of writing preceded the printing-press by tens of centuries. In those days each

reat invention was granted a lease of many ages in which to Pace its own characteristic civilisation, before it was submerged by the next. But in our day, inventions, each implying a revolution in the habits of man, follow each other thick as the falling leaves. Modern history, beginning from the England of 1780, is a series of dissolving views. In each generation a new economic life half obliterates a predecessor little older than itself.

One example will suffice, that of inland transport. In the reign of George III the civilisation of the riding-horse and the pack-horse gave way to that of the coach, the waggon and the barge, because the soft road was at length superseded by the hard road, flanked by the canal. But no time was given to develop a new civilisation on that basis; Macadam had not yet taught Lord Eldon and the Duke of Wellington that they were living in a new world, before Stephenson’s locomotive in its turn replaced the barge, the waggon and the coach. And then, before the society based on steam has worked out its peculiar destiny, petrol in our own day gives a new life to the old roads, and opens out the pathways of the air.

The changes going on during the same period in sea-traffic, in manufacture, and in the transmission of messages, tell the same story of a series of economic civilisations rapidly superimposed one on another.

Under these conditions, new in the history of man, races set apart for zons of time have been suddenly thrust together, not always in fraternal embrace. The vast, unvisited interior of Africa has been not only explored but overrun by Europe.

mv INTRODUCTION

The mysteries of Asia have been opened out. The conquest of

America has been completed. Offshoots of our island civilisa-— tion have overspread continents hidden in the bosom of the

Southern Seas, and have ploughed up the Canadian wilderness.

Allthe while, Europe herself has suffered convulsions at home, | in the endeavour to adjust her political and social fabric to the rapidity of economic change.

The terrible pace at which the world now jolts and clanks | along was set in our island, where, first, invention was harnessed to organised capital. For fifty years that great change was left uncontrolled by the community which it was transforming. So new was the experience, that for a while the wisest were as much at fault as the most foolish. Burke for all his powers of prophecy, Pitt for all his study of Adam Smith, Fox for all his welcome to the new democracy, no more understood the English economic revolution, and no more dreamt of controlling it for the common good, than George III himself.

Weare so like our ancestors of that period, and yet so unlike; so near them in time and in affection, so far removed from them in habits and in experience. There lie the paradox and romance of modern history. Our daily avocations, our modes of travel, our ways of life differ from theirs as much as theirs did from the Anglo-Saxon. Yet we should feel at home if we found ourselves among them. We speak their language, little changed. We think and feel much as they did, though the things that we have to think and feel about are so different.

A British officer in Flanders in 1918, transplanted to a British messroom in the same country in 1793, would be more at home than in a foreign messroom of to-day. Though he would find the drinking too heavy for him, he would be surrounded by presumptions indefinably familiar. He would be critical of much, but he would understand from inside what he was criticising. Most of us would be at home taking tea at Dr. Johnson’s, hearing the contact of civilised man with society discussed with British commonsense and good nature, with British idiosyncrasy and prejudice. Only we should be aware that we had stepped back out of a scientific, romantic and mobile era into an era literary, classical and static. Dr. Johnson and Burke had never heard of ‘ evolution’ in our meaning of the word. They thought that the world would remain what they and their fathers had known it. With them, time moved so slowly that they thought it stayed still withal. A very

INTRODUCTION XV different experience has taught us to perceive that the forms of our civilisation are transient as the bubbles on a river.

In politics, a comparison between our age and theirs presents the same likeness in utter divergence. We are still involved in the outcome of what happened to Ireland in the days of Grattan and Pitt, to North America in the days of George III and Chatham. Our naval policy, and our interest in the independence of the Netherlands, were the same in 1914 as in 1793. In spite of Tom Paine, we still have King, Lords and Commons, and an established Church; the very mace still lies on the table as when Oliver ordered it away; half the customs of the House would be familiar to Fox, if he strolled in to a debate. But these forms sheltered, for our great-grandfathers, an aristocracy based on the tenure of land, with certain political rights reserved for the Crown and certain others for some of the common people. For us, the same forms enshrine a democratic system of representative government, extending over Imperial, national and local affairs, in town and in country, for Motherland and Dominions—a democracy in which the women as well as the men of all classes, having in large part been educated at the public charge, are invited to take an equal part. There has been no solemn revision of the principles of our Constitution, only a constant amendment and extension of its details, and an entire though gradual change of view. There has been no revolution. Yet in 1794, Pitt’s Attorney-General claimed that it was High Treason for any man to agitate for the establishment of ‘ representative government, the direct contrary of the government which is established here.’

Between that interpretation of the Constitution and our own there lieonly 130 years. But into that brief space of time, which two human lives would outspan, has been crowded the long sequel of the French Revolution, now calculable by history; the European War and revolution of our own day, not yet calculable; and, more important than any series of political or military events, the Industrial Revolution, still in progress, that has forced and is still forcing politics and society to follow the suit of the inventors, the men who destroy and create classes, constitutions, countries and modes of life and thought.

During the first half of the period surveyed in this book, these new forces work at their will, with no conscious aim but the production of wealth, to the cry of Jaissez faire; in the second half, attempts, increasingly systematic, are made to xvi INTRODUCTION control them in the interest of the community that they are constantly re-shaping. In the first fifty years, ending with the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the Industrial Revolution is, in its social consequences, mainly destructive. It destroys, in town and country, the forms and pieties of the old English life, that could not be harnessed to the new machinery. The government, while it prohibited all legal and political change as * Jacobinism,’ urged on the economic revolution. The result was that by 1832 there was scant provision for the political, municipal, educational or sanitary needs of the population, most of whom were not even tolerably clothed or fed. The laws and institutions had been kept back in one place, while the men and women had been moved on to another, where they were living as it were outside society, under a guard of yeomanry and magistrates,

The second half of the period is the story of the building up of the new world, of a wholly new type of society, infinitely more complicated and interdependent in its parts, more full of potentialities for progress or disaster, than anything the world has before seen. It has been the work of all classes and of all parties, whether in co-operation or in conflict, over a space of eighty years of gradual but rapid and continuous reform. The contemporary experience of foreign lands, involved a little later than ourselves in the throes of the same industrial revolution, has more and more influenced us by example, as the distance between countries and their mutual ignorance has been reduced. But the work of reform has in our island been British, and most of its ideas and expedients have been of British origin.

The same fundamentals of British character and temperament that we observed in the quiet old eighteenth century— British commonsense and good nature, British idiosyncrasy and prejudice, when brought face to face with this prolonged and terrible crisis in human affairs, has produced, after labours, errors and victories innumerable, the strange world in which we live to-day.

BRITISH HISTORY IN THE NINE- E TEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER I

England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution (I)—Village life and agriculture—The roads—Town life and apprenticeship—The Municipal and Parliamentary System—London.

Wuen George III came to the throne in 1760, the old-world system of economic and social life had undergone little change. Prosperity and personal independence, though very far from universal, were widely diffused. Although few had any voice in the government, many had a stake in the country. The agriculturist or manufacturer in his cottage accepted his lot in life, whether easy or hard, as part of the order of things. It did not occur to him to question the framework of society, or to regard the oligarchy under which he lived as an oppression. He only raised his voice against the political and municipal corruption all around when it resulted in England being worsted by the French.

On one such occasion, the free spirit latent in our never wholly fraudulent Constitution enabled the people to raise up as their tribune, William Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, to give us victory in either hemisphere. After that, the reign of folly and corruption was resumed, this time under the King’s favourites instead of the Whig oligarchs. But John Bull, though more suspicious and grumbling than before, had no means of exerting continuous control over government. At length, in 1782, he was again exasperated into action, by discovering that the corruptionists had lost him America. Then, after two years of confused counsels, he found for himself a second William Pitt.

When the French Revolution broke out, the political and legal institutions of the country were still unreformed. The second Pitt was doing all that an honest and able man could do as the administrator of a corrupt system. That system had become more than ever out of date, for by this time Great Britain B

L/si-ol was in process of rapid transformation. The Industrial Revolution had laid rude hands on the social fabric of old England.

At the time of George III’s accession there had been no canals; few hard roads; practically no cotton industry; no factory system; few capitalist manufacturers; little smelting of iron by coal; and though there had been much enclosure of land, there had not yet been a wholesale sweeping of. small farms into big. In these and many other respects, changes due to inventions and improved methods were in full progress soon after 1760. But it was only during the last ten years of the century that the pace of the movement became terrible. Then, too, it became disastrously involved in ‘ Jacobin’ and ‘ anti- Jacobin ’ politics, and in the economic consequences of the war against the French Republic. Then first it began to attract the attention of statesmen. In that later period, the most characteristic developments of the Industrial Revolution will command our attention. But this and the following chapter are devoted to a sketch of the old England as it was in the early years of George III, already touched by the coming change, but not yet transformed.

In the life of our day, the characteristic unit is the town, the factory or the trade union. Then it was the country village. Village life embraced the chief daily concerns of the majority of Englishmen. It was the principal nursery of the national character. The village was not then a moribund society, as in the nineteenth century; nor was it, asin our own day, a society hoping to revive by the backwash of life returning to it from the town. It contained no inspected school imparting a townmade view of life to successive generations of young rustics,

1 The reader must bear in mind that no single decade can be named for any one of the processes that together make up the Industrial Revolution. Even the most cataclysmic of the changes was not an event but a process. Dr. Cunningham suggests that the Industrial Revolution begins about 1770, ‘commencing with changes in the hardware trades.’ The date will serve, if we remember that since 1720, if not before, there had been signs of the increase of capitalist industry and the decay of the apprentice system, that the improvement of roads had begun to be rapid about 1750, and that the movement for absorbing small farms into large farms was at least as old as that. Yet none of these movements were complete till well on in the nineteenth century. Brindley’s Manchester-Worsley canal was opened in 1761; Brindley died in 1772 ; but only in 1790 were some of his greatest canals completed and opened. Which, then, is the decade of Brindley’s canals ? The same kind of problem arises in every case, See chapter ix, below, on the Industrial Revolution.

THE VILLAGE 3 preparing for migration to other scenes. City civilisation, with its newspapers and magazines, had not supplanted provincial speech and village tradition. At most a single news-sheet of four pages, with advertisements of the latest books, snippets of news from all countries, and attacks on the Ministry by * Anti-Sejanus ’ and ‘ Patrioticus,’ went up twice a week to the “Hall or the Rectory. After some days, a well-thumbed copy might find its way into the parlour of the inn.

The squire and the parson were usually resident. Even if they were absentees, their agents and the shadow of their greatness loomed large over everything. A few hardy Dissenters enjoyed a legalised exclusion from the religious domain of the parson. But against the landlord magistrate there was no group of men who could stand out, except his brother squires.

Among the villagers collectively subjected to this rule, there was a considerable measure of equality and independence. Large tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers entirely dependent on their wages, did not then constitute the whole village society. It varied from place to place, but everywhere there were many classes, many sizes of holding, many forms of rights on land, and many occupations and means of livelihood.

In the first place, the village was less purely agricultural than it became in later times. Its craftsmen supplied its requirements locally in many articles now fetched from the towns. The wives and families of the yeomen and agricultural labourers, and the labourers themselves when field labour was slack, carried on various branches of manufacture in their own cottages. Spinning was the special task of women and children. But there were often in the villages professional weavers, men who never tilled the soil except of an evening in their own back gardens. This class was found thickly congregated in the stonebuilt villages around the infant Thames, or on the steep banks of Yorkshire dales. In Yorkshire, indeed, some of these rural communities were destined to change by imperceptible stages into urban districts.

The villages of England fed with the labour of their hands the great staple industries, like the woollen trade, by help of which our oversea commerce had already taken the lead of the world. Commerce had to be centred in the towns, but much of the manufacture that supplied it was put out to farm among the country cottages, and collected by the cloth merchants going round with their long trains of pack-horses—the constantly moving shuttles that wove together the threads of far-scattered British industry. So long as this system of manufacture continued, the rural population was much more numerous than the city population. A dozen of the southern counties retained more inhabitants to the square mile than any shire in the north, until the general adoption of machinery brought in the factory system.*

The work of women and children played as large a part in these cottage industries as in the factories that replaced them. We shall never know enough about the hours and conditions of their home work, for any sure comparison with subsequent factory conditions. But it is safe to say that there was a greater variety of treatment, when the circumstances of each family, or the temperament of its most strong-minded member, dictated the habits of each household. The discipline of the home could seldom have been as severe, and never as artificial and dehumanised as in the mills of the worst period before the Factory Acts. On the other hand, the sanitary conditions in most of the cottages, and the long hours of labour in many, would not be tolerated by the factory code of the present day.

But the village was, first and foremost, an agricultural community, as indeed was England herself. Although our methods of tilling the soil were wasteful and antiquated, especially in the great corn-growing area of the Midlands, we were still able in 1765 to export corn abroad, after feeding the small population of seven millions in England and Wales. Afterwards, during the Napoleonic Wars, when the numbers rose to eleven millions, it became necessary to conduct agriculture on the principle of extracting from the soil the utmost possible quantity of corn. But in the early days of George III there was no such pressure of hungry population in the island, and the political economy of the village sought only to provide ‘ subsistence’ for each family resident in the parish.

‘ Subsistence agriculture,’ as modern historians call it, was the theory and practice of our fathers from the earliest times until the Industrial Revolution. In the eyes of statesmen and economists, alike in the days of Alfred, Elizabeth and George II, the duty of the village to the State was to breed and maintain not less than its traditional number of stalwart and contented

1 Viz. Middlesex, Surrey, Wilts, Somerset, Gloucester, Oxford, Bucks, Hertford, Suffolk, Northants, Rutland, Warwick, Worcester. Yet by 1801, only Middlesex was in the category above Lancashire.

‘SUBSISTENCE AGRICULTURE’ 5 men, rather than to accumulate wealth for taxation or to grow corn for the consumption of the towns.

“Subsistence agriculture’ was still the rule! in the first years of George III, and it must needs have been so when the means of transport were so bad. Without canals, and with few roads capable of bearing wheeled traffic, the constant distribution of great quantities of foodstuffs was impossible. The first object in cottages on remote heaths and in hamlets at the end of miry lanes, was that there should be enough food of all sorts produced in the immediate neighbourhood for the subsistence of all who dwelt there.

The object of the village was to supply itself not only with enough corn, but also with dairy produce, meat, pigs and poultry, all of which a small peasant-holder and his wife could attend to better than a large farmer. The village produced also a part of its own purchases in cloth, basketwork, farm and household furniture, according as local conditions allowed. To grow corn on a large scale for distant markets was often but a secondary consideration. The subdivision of the land among so many of the inhabitants tended to the supply of these very various wants. The small holding was indeed the true ‘ political economy,’ provided the population of the island remained stationary, and so long as England and the whole world with her desired to be stable and contented rather than progressive and rich.