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The Hanoverians
A chronology of Britian’s history during the period of the House of Hanover
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Headlines are in brown.
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Context and local history are in purple.
Geographical context is in green.
The Stuarts
The House of Hanover
1714
When the last true Stuart, Queen Anne
died in August 1714, and following the process of the Act of Settlement 1701,
the electoral prince of Hanover, George Ludwig von Braunschweig - Luneburg,
became George I.
George I, 1714-1727
George I was even less an English King
than James VI and William of Orange. He brought with him an exotic entourage;
did not bother to learn English; and his speeches were read by the Lord
Chancellor. He was, though, a ‘toned down’ monarch, the Hanoverians having not
the money nor desire to aspire to the opulence of the Sun King in France. He
rather lived on a domestic scale at Kensington Palace.
No bill has ever failed to gain royal
assent since George’s accession. The monarch still governed,
but required parliamentary consent to do so. A constitutional balance
was thus achieved. Parliamentary Sovereignty became a fundamental
constitutional principle. The absence of a constitution in a British context
really means the absence of a written constitution which limits the powers of
Parliament.
Most Tories accepted the Hanoverian
succession, assuming that the Tory government would continue
and the Church would be protected.
However George was not apolitical and threw out
the Tories, angry at their Peace of Utrecht and supported a Whig ‘coup’. The
Whigs then impeached the former Secretary of State, Robert Harley and Henry St
John, Viscount Bolingbroke (who had negotiated the Utrecht terms), the latter
who fled to France.
The combination of executive and
legislative powers ended the purist form of the separation of powers to that
extent.
At his Coronation in October 1714, there
was an outbreak of violence. In Catholic Ireland and Highland Scotland,
Jacobitism was strong. In England there was increasing discontent at high
taxes. Plans started to emerge for a Jacobite uprising. A small armed rebellion
materialised in Catholic area of Yorkshire and Lancashire.
1715
However disaster struck early for the Jacobites
when their intended primary supporter, Louis XIV died in September 1715, just
as the Earl of Mar rallied a Scottish army.
The Jacobite Rebellion of 1715
The Jacobite rising of 1715 (also
referred to as the Fifteen or Lord Mar's Revolt), was the attempt
by James Francis Edward Stuart (also called the Old Pretender) to regain the
thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland for the
exiled House of Stuart. A diversionary rising had been planned in
Northumberland to accompany the main rising in the West. The rising in the West
was forestalled by prompt Government action, but the rising in Northumberland
went ahead on 6 October 1715.
The English Jacobites joined with a
force of Scottish Borderer Jacobites, led by William Gordon, 6th Viscount
Kenmure, and this small army was joined by Mackintosh's contingent. They
marched into England as far as Preston, where the Government forces caught up
with them.
This led to the Battle of Preston, on
12–14 November. The Jacobites won the first day of the battle, killing large
numbers of Government forces, but Government reinforcements arrived the next
day and the Jacobites eventually surrendered.
The first Jacobite rebellion petered out
by November 1715.
George I was sufficiently unflustered to
visit Hanover for five months in mid 1716.
1716
The Septennial Act
1716 reduced the frequency of elections to seven years. Jean Jacques
Rousseau quipped that the English were free, but only once every seven years.
1718
The first factory opened in Derby,
producing silk.
1720
The South Sea Bubble, 1720
Both France and Britain accumulated vast
debts due to the wars. A Scot, John Law, persuaded the French government in
1717 to adopt his new scheme to swap state bonds for shares in a new monopoly
trading company.
The British caught wind of this and set
up their own similar scheme, through the South Sea Company, in 1719.
The South Sea Company (officially The
Governor and Company of the merchants of Great Britain, trading to the South
Seas and other parts of America, and for the encouragement of fishing) was a
British joint-stock company originally founded in 1711, created as a
public-private partnership to consolidate and reduce the cost of national debt.
The company was also granted a monopoly
to trade with South America and nearby islands, hence its name (the modern use
of the term "South Seas" to refer to the entire South Pacific was
unknown in England at the time).
When the company was created, Britain
was involved in the War of the Spanish Succession and Spain controlled South
America. There was no realistic prospect that trade would take place, and the
company never realised any significant profit from its monopoly.
The South Sea Company share price
rocketed top 700% and many flocked to jump on the bandwagon, just as the better
informed (including Robert Walpole) decided that it was time to cash in.
The bubble burst in 1720.
Company stock rose greatly in value as
it expanded its operations dealing in government debt, peaking in 1720 before
collapsing to little above its original flotation
price; the economic bubble became known as the South Sea Bubble. In Great
Britain, a considerable number of people were ruined by the share collapse, and
the national economy greatly reduced as a result. The founders of the scheme
engaged in insider trading, using their advance knowledge of when national debt
was to be consolidated to make large profits from purchasing debt in advance.
Huge bribes were given to politicians to support the Acts of Parliament
necessary for the scheme. Company money was used to deal in its own shares, and
selected individuals purchasing shares were given loans backed by those same
shares to spend on purchasing more shares. The expectation of profits from
trade with South America was used to encourage the public to purchase shares,
but the bubble prices reached far beyond the profits of the slave trade.
In France, the fiasco prompted by John
Law, ruined their credit for a century.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
South Sea Bubble, the
speculation mania in early 18th-century England which ended in the financial
ruin of many of its investors.
1722
The Norfolk Squire and Whig politician, Sir
Robert (“Robin”) Walpole, was First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of
the Exchequer and considered to be the first Prime Minister from 1722 to 1742.
Walpole was on a path to self enrichment,
from which wealth he built Houghton Hall in Norfolk.
His novelty came from his practice of
parliamentary management. He spent time in the Commons. He cultivated MPs. He
explained policy. He had private meetings. He patronised supporters with
favours and office.
Purist Whig policies including
toleration of religious dissent and a significant role in European politics,
leading to high taxation, were unpopular, reinforced by the South Sea Bubble
fiasco.
Walpole steered toward a more coalition
approach, with restraint on taxation and public spending and a period of
peaceful interlude from the European wars.
The role of opposition against Walpole
was adopted by Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who himself took a less
extreme approach and returned to England in 1723. He represented the Country
Party resentment of taxation, promoted ideas of a patriotic king ruling in the
national interest, and was an early proponent of empire, focused on seapower. He suggested a new synthesis of the separation of
powers, which would in time feed into the bedrock of the US constitution.
There was satire against Walpole:
·
Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) mocked his selfishness and political manoeuvring
·
Alexander
Pope described the dullness of his government in The
Dunciad (1728)
·
John
Gay authored the first stage musical, The Beggar’s
Opera, portraying politicians as criminals
·
William
Hogarth portrayed decadence and corruption in Gin Lane
and The
Rake’s Progress (a series of paintings which tell the story of Tom Rakewell (the Rake), who inherits a fortune from his city
merchant father only to fritter it away on an extravagant lifestyle which
ultimately leads to his downfall).
Walpole fought back. He raised the
Jacobite spectre to threaten the Tories. He used public money to bribe and to
buy newspapers and to pay for his propogandists.
1723
The Black
Act added 50 capital offences to the penal code including some forms of
poaching. Commonly known as the Black Act, or the Waltham Black Act, it was
passed in 1723 in response to a series of raids against landowners by two
groups of poachers, known as the Blacks from their habit of blacking their
faces when they undertook the raids. The Act was expanded over the years and
greatly strengthened the criminal code by specifying over 200 capital crimes,
many with intensified punishment. Arson, for example, had its definition
expanded to include the new crime of burning (or threatening to burn)
haystacks.
Knatchbull’s Act enabled workhouses in parishes.
1724
Daniel Defoe’s A
Tour through the whole island of Great Britain.
1727
George II, 1727-1760
George II was born in Hanover the son of
George I and Sophia of Celle. He married Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach in
1705.
Handel’s Zadok the Priest was
sung at the Coronation of George II and at every Coronation since then.
1728
Vitus Johanssen Bering reached Alaska.
1729
The first parliamentary acts to curb the
consumption of gin.
Charles Wesley founded the Methodists at
Lincoln College Oxford.
1730
The first seaside towns appeared in
Brighton and Margate.
Charles ‘Turnip’ Townsend promoted crop
rotation.
1732
Unmarried mothers were expected to name
the father of their child under oath during a Bastardy Examination.
1733
Latin was replaced by English in public
records.
The invention of the flying shuttle
revolutionised weaving.
1734
Jethro Tull published essays on
improving farming including the use of the seed drill. Jethro Tull (1674 – 21
February 1741, New Style) was an English agricultural pioneer from Berkshire
who helped bring about the British Agricultural Revolution. He perfected a
horse-drawn seed drill in 1701 that economically sowed the seeds in neat rows.
He later developed a horse-drawn hoe. Tull's methods were adopted by many great
land owners and helped to provide the basis for modern
agriculture. This revolutionized the future of agricultural success.
1735
The Hawkhurst smugglers were active
across south east England.
1739
The Great Frost in Britain
The War of
Jenkins' Ear, with Spain, 1739 to 1740. Britain went to war with Spain over
Captain Jenkins’ ear, claimed to have been cut off in a skirmish at sea.
Formation of Methodist Societies around
London.
Dick Turpin,
highwayman, hanged at York.
The downfall of Robert Walpole started
in 1739 as the War of Jenkins Ear drew Britain into the War of Austrian
Succession (1740 to 1748)
1740
The death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles
VI in 1740 led to the European War
of Austrian Succession in which the British and Dutch supported Marie
Theresa’s claim to the Austrian throne against the Prussians and French.
However early patriotic excitement waned
after naval failures and Walpole became unpopular for a perceived corrupt
system.
1741
New charities and reform organisations
were emerging. The Foundling Hospital opened in London, with outposts elsewhere
across the country.
1742
Dr William’s Library recorded a general
register of births of Protestant Dissenters of the Three Denominations of
Baptists, Presbyterians and Independents.
Walpole was pressed to leave office in
February 1742. However the Whigs continued in power.
1743
George II personally led his troops at
the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, becoming the last British monarch to
lead his troops into battle.
1745
In 1745 the French were victorious over
the British at Fontenoy in Flanders.
The ongoing wars had caused Britain’s
worst economic recession for a century.
The Hanoverians became a target of
unpopularity.
The Jacobite
Rebellion of Forty Five.
Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince
Charlie’) landed in the Western Isles of Scotland on 23 July 1745 and with a
few dozen supporters marched to Glenfinnan to raise the Stuart standard on 19
August 1745. He had left behind him a letter to Louis XV pleading for his help.
He planned to march into England,
relying on the French to invade. At first his surprise seemed to favour the Jacobites and they beat a smaller British and Irish force at
Prestonpans on 21
September 1745. Nost of the British Forces were deployed in the Low Countries
as the Scots crossed into England. However the English
Jacobites, apart from some diehard Yorkshire Catholics, were fearful of the
consequences of failure. The Scottish army reached Derby but lacked any
significant English support and they turned back north on 5 December 1745 to
focus the fight in the Highlands. The French had
embarrassing difficulties which led to a lack of support from them.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
Jacobite Rebellion, the
Stuart dynasty's final attempt to reclaim the throne
of England.
1746
On 16 April 1946, at the Battle of Culloden,
1746, the Scottish army was defeated at the Battle of Culloden by the British
forces under the Duke of Cumberland, the King's second son, who ruthlessly
repressed the rebels and Scottish traditions.
Both sides alleged atrocities by the
other.
Romantic tales followed, of Bonnie
Prince Charlies’ rescue by Flora MacDonald and the rescue of a Scottish peer
from the tower.
However a grim fate awaited the rank and file
of the Jacobites.
The end of the ’45 marked the final
ending of the Civil War.
1747
A tax was imposed on all horse drawn
carriages.
1748
The end of the War of Austrian
Succession left Britain and France in a cold war.
1750
The population of Great Britain reached
6.5 million.
1751
The Army introduced Regimental numbers
instead of being named after the colonel in command and were soon given
official titles such as the “King’s Own”.
1752
Estates forfeited by the Jacobites were
bestowed to the Crown.
14 September 1752, England and Wales
adopted the Gregorian calendar.
1753
The Bow Street Runners were appointed to
patrol London’s streets.
The Licensing Act required the recording
of full registers of victuallers, to be kept by the Clerk of the Peace as
Quarter Sessions.
1754
Hardwicke’s Marriage Act required
marriages to take place in the parish where either bride or groom had been
born. Parties to a marriage were required to be 21 years old or have parental
consent and marry in a licensed church.
The first printed Army Lists.
The French were interested in expanding
in north America, and claims into the Great Plains.
They pushed south along the Ohio river. The first direct clash was in May 1754
in the Ohio valley. Major George Washington, son of a Voirginia
planter, with 100 Virginia militiamen and native allies, attacked a small
French patrol.
1755
The Seven
Years War 1755 to 1763.
The old enemies Austria and France
allied against their new enemies, Prussia and Britain.
The war also involved Sweden and Spain and later Russia and has been called the
real First World War.
A large British expedition was ambushed
and killed in the Ohio valley on 9 July 1755 by the French.
1756
The French took the offensive on three
continents.
The French raided into New York and
Pennsylvania and captured Fort William Henry in New York.
The French captured the British naval
base in Minorca and invaded Hanover.
The French ally, the nawab of Bengal
captured Calcutta from the British in 1756. Prisoners were crammed into a small
cell, the Black
Hole of Calcutta, where many died.
The start of privateering from Alderney.
This was a time of the worst harvest
failure for generations and the most significant food riots of the century in August
1756. The governing class was accused of failing the nation. Admiral Byng was
accused of cowardice at Minorca, court martialled and shot. Patriotic
organisations were founded such as the Laudable Society.
William
Pitt the Elder represented these new patriotic demands. He was a ruthless,
ambitious, intelligent politician, if unstable and unpredictable. He became
Secretary of State in 1756 (and again from 1757 to 1761).He
advocated the commitment of large sums and resources to winning.
1757
The Militia Act revived county militias.
30,000 men were raised between 1757 and 1763.
The company clerk who became a soldier,
Robert Clive secured Bengal at the Battle of Plassey,
India, 1757. He defeated the nawab of Bengal.
1759
1759 was a year of British victories:
·
The
Capture of Quebec by
General James Wolfe
·
The
Battle
of Minden in Hanover when a small force of 6 British battalions routed the
French after a mistaken order to advance
·
An
audacious naval action by Admiral Sir Edward Hawke at Quiberon Bay,
Brittany which led to the destruction of the core of the French navy.
1760
The industrial revolution began about
here.
Robert Bakewell began pioneering
innovative agricultural practices including the selective breeding of sheep.
George III, 1760 – 1820
1761
In a mood of victories, George III’s
first act, with ambitions as a patriotic king, was to sack his Whig ministers.
Traditional Tory families took new roles as JPs and militia officers. Whig
grandees were humiliated.
Some Whigs accepted the changed
political landscape, but others resisted, particularly:
·
The
Old Whigs and the Revolution Whigs who sought to restrain George
·
The
Rockingham Whigs, who followed Charles Watson-Wentworth, Second Marquess of
Rockingham who owned significant land in Yorkshire.
·
The
actions of John Wilkes to undermine the Earl of Bute and the King himself.
The Parliamentary Enclosure Acts between
1750 and 1845 legalised the enclosure of landowners’ property, transforming the
countryside.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the 18th and 19th century enclosure
movement which divided
the British countryside both literally and figuratively.
The Bridgewater Canal opened, followed
by a period of canal building.
John Harrison’s chronometer allowed the
determination of longitude at sea.
1762
Records were required to be kept in
metropolitan parishes of parish poor infants.
1763
Mortimer’s Universal Directory listed
retail shops in London.
William Dade, a Yorkshire clergyman,
started the practice to keep detailed parish registers, which practice spread.
The Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years
War. France gave up all its territories in mainland North America, effectively
ending any foreign military threat to the British colonies there. It left
Britain dominant in North America and eastern India.
At first this was welcomed euphorically
by the American colonialists. The journalist Benjamin Franklin spoke proudly as
a Briton, and saw the future of the British Empire in
America. James Otis, who would later be a rebel leader rejoiced “We love,
esteem and reverence our mother country, and adore our King”.
However the King and his ministers saw things
differently – they wanted to reduced the financial
burden of the colonies, whilst stabilising and rationalising the growing empire
in preparation for further war with France.
·
They
intended to increase the power of governors to enforce trade regulations and
induce greater contribution to defence (the Americans were the most lightly
taxed anywhere in the world)
·
They
sought to limit encroachment onto native land in fear that it would provoke a
bloody an costly conflict – the Royal
Proclamation of 1763 recognised indigenous land ownership and there were
treaties between the Crown and the American nations.
The American colonial citizens were
resistant to these changes:
·
They
felt they had been the real heroes in the prior wars – they stressed loyalty to
the Crown whilst resisting the Westminster Parliament.
·
Colonial
assemblies sought to set their own taxes and decide their contribution to
defence.
·
They
wanted to buy cheap land, including the former French territories, but were
prevented from doing so.
·
They
were encouraged by the campaign for greater liberty by John Wilkes in the 1760s
and felt they were subject to a systematic assault on their liberties as free
born Englishmen.
The Whigs in opposition in England felt
they were facing an absolutist plot led by the king to undermine the
constitution. They complained at bureaucracy in the growing army and navy and
abuses of power by the East India Company.
1764
James Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny.
Lloyds Register of Shipping.
1765
The first attempt to levy direct
taxation on the American colonies was the
Stamp Act 1765, which was violently resisted. The British needed to station
a large army in North America and on 22 March 1765 the British Parliament
passed the Stamp Act, which sought to raise money to pay for this army through
a tax on all legal and official papers and publications circulating in the
colonies. When a colonial congress called for a boycott of British goods, the
Act was repealed.
1766
Hanway’s Act required all pauper
children under 6 from metropolitan parishes to be sent to school in the
countryside, separating the children from their parents.
The Declaratory
Act 1766 stated that Parliament had a right in principle to legislate in
America, even if it prudently refrained to do so.
1769
Captain James Cook claimed New Zealand for
Britain.
Richard Arkwright patented his water
frame.
Bengal was the victim of famine from
1769 to 1770. It was widely blamed on oppression by the East India Company.
John Wesley anticipated divine vengeance. However
despite concerns. It was felt that there could be no turning back – the loss of
Indian trade would cause British bankruptcy and dominance of absolutist France.
1770
Lord Frederick North became the new Tory
Prime Minister.
Captain James Cook landed in Botany Bay.
A rise in grain prices saw the potato
surpassing bread as the staple of the working man’s diet.
First water powered mills begin the age
of mass production in factories.
Exports and imports had shifted away
from the Continent so that by the 1770s over half were from further afar and
new commodities such as tea, cotton and sugar were being consumed. The merchant
navy protected by Navigations Acts, expanded. Government revenues from trade
grew. The Caribbean was particularly important, as the source of sugar.
America
The British colonists could not work
with the heat and disease, and so over 3 M people were shipped from Africa as
slaves between 1660 and 1807. At its peak in the 1780s, 120 Africans were
transported each day.
The triangular trade was established by
Britain and France:
·
Manufactured
good to Africa to buy slaves;
·
Slaves
sold in the Caribbean to buy sugar.
The mainland colonies were swelling in population, but were more modest providers of wealth.
However up to this stage, there was no sign of these colonies growing apart
from their mother country.
Lord North had the idea of abolishing
existing duties, leaving only a light duty on tea from India, following the
principle of the Declaratory Act to demonstrate Parliament’s power to
legislate. This had the effect to make tea cheaper, so the Patriots would find
it difficult to oppose.
India
Asia was the focus for luxury goods,
spices, fine textiles and significantly, tea.
The Europeans built fortified trading
posts at Calcutta (founded in 1690 and with 120,0009 people by 1760), Bombay
and Madras.
War with France transformed the European
approach in India.
The Mughal Empire had been established
in the 1520s by Muslim invaders from central Asia. There was a Golden Age
marked by the Taj Mahal (1650) and Great Mosque of Delhi (1656). Then there was
a period of fragmentation – defeats by the Hindu Marathas and the Persian sack
of Delhi in 1739. By the late eighteenth century, there had been fragmentation
into regional power centres, often ruled by Mughal nawabs, governors.
The French and the British both raised
local military forces. By 1761, the East India Company had 2,000 European and
23,000 Indian soldiers.
There
is an In Our Time podcast on the East India
Company.
1772
The first Navy Lists were published.
Publication of the first Morning Post.
1773
The Boston
Tea Party, December 1773. A group of patriots threw a shipload of tea into
the sea bringing to the fore the question of who would govern America.
Captain Cook reached Antarctica.
The East Indies Regulating Act 1773
tried to bring some control over the East India Company.
1774
The Quebec Act in 1774 placed Quebec
into the hands of a royal governor, without an elected assembly.
The Madhouse Act required all
‘madhouses’ to be licensed, and aimed to counter
abuses including imprisonment of rejected spouses. The Act remained in force
until 1959.
By 1774 there were patriots in England
and America who felt they were fighting to protect a threat to fundamental
British liberties. This was encapsulated in calls for no taxation without
representation. Samuel Johnson’s pamphlet, The Patriot in 1774
provided the contrary argument that He that accepts protection stipulates
obedience.
A continental Congress of patriot
committees met in Philadelphia in September 1774.
·
The
North government offered compromise.
·
Leading
colonial politicians were reluctant to break from the mother country.
1775
Watt’s steam engine was patented.
See the Industrial Revolution.
A Second Continental Congress in 1775
still denied any intention to break with Britain or seek independence.
However patriot hotbeds, especially in New
England, were growing restless.
Shooting began at Lexington
in April 1775 followed by a pitched battle at Bunker
Hill, outside Boston, in June 1775.
The American
War of Independence, 1775-1783
1776
The Declaration
of Independence, 4 July 1776:
We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Loyalties were split in both America and
Britain.
About a third of those in Britain
supported the American Patriots including Whigs, dissenters
and those with American business interests, particularly focused on Bristol at
the heart of American trade. The use of force in America was deplored.
However there was also public resentment at the
rebellion and support for the use of force against the rebels came from most
Anglicans and the Methodists (a Whig peer pointed out that Methodism was
becoming popular by forcing the country into a destructive war).
There was a reemergence of the religious
divides of the Civil War – the colonial Patriots were equated to the Roundheads
and supported by Dissenters and Ulster Presbyterians. Unitarians were the avant garde of
dissent.
Thomas
Paine wrote Common Sense in 1776 and was the intellectual leader of
the revolution. 100,000 copies were sold. He saw American independence as
inevitable and that it would allow prosperous and peaceful isolation from
quarrels in Europe. England to Europe, America to itself!.
There was nevertheless strong loyalist
support in America. German and Scottish settlers had little kinship with the
patriot roundheads. Volunteers for new British Regiments came readily from
Jacobite clans. Flora MacDonald, thirty years after her saving of Bonnie Prince
Charlie, was a prominent Tory in North Carolina. The established nations,
including Mohawks, Creeks, Delaware, Iroquois and
Cherokees, feared invasion by the colonists and worried about the risk that the
Royal Proclamation of 1763 would be overturned. When freedom was declared to
any enslaved African who joined the Crown forces, up to 100,000 slaves joined
the army, many who had belonged to George Washington.
The War went relatively well for the
Crown in America initially. New York was occupied and defended in 1776. George
Washington’s weak Continental
Army withdrew to Pennsylvania. The British aimed to isolate them there, and sought a defeat by 1777. The British sent a force
of 5,000 men under General Burgoyne south to link up with General Howe at New
York.
An Act which allowed decommissioned
ships to be used as prison hulks.
1777
Washington’s army was defeated on 11
September 1777 at Brandywine
by General How and Philadelphia was taken.
However Burgoyne’s force was then cut
off at Saratoga
(19 September to 7 October 1777) and, with dwindling supplies, forced to
surrender on 17 October 1777.
A tax was imposed on male servants.
1778
The French became interested in the
opportunities of the American Civil War, especially after Saratoga, the French
foreign ministry declaring that 1778 will decide the fate of England, and
the predominance of France.
·
There
was a minor action in June 1778 between British and French frigates off
Brittany.
·
The
American Civil War thus became another world war.
·
Spain
joined in 1779 and besieged Gibraltar and Holland.
·
The
French planned its coup de grace by landing a force of 20,000 on the
Ilsa of Wight.
·
Militia
camps were set up around London
·
Defiant
anthems were composed: Tho’ Monsieur and Don should combine, What have true British heroes to fear? What are Frogs, and
soup-meagre and wine, To beef, and plum pudding, and beer?
James
Cook and George Vancouver were the first Europeans to reach British
Columbia.
Louis XVI of France declared war on
Britain.
1779
The French and Spanish fleet of 104
ships gathered in Normandy, but was hit by plague and
the threat petered out without a fight.
In India, new threats were faced, by a
strong alliance of Indian states, the Maratha Confederation and Haider Ali, the
ruler of Mysore, Southern India. The Bombay force of the East India Company
surrendered Marathas in 1779 and the Madras army was defeated by Hailder Ali in 1780. Company troops in Bengal were
massacred by their former ally, the rules of Benares. Warren Hastings, the
governor general, fled for his life.
Increased reliance on Ireland for
support to its armed forces, led to concessions to Irish demands:
·
The
Irish Relief Act 1778 and the Catholic Relief Act 1778 reduced legal
disabilities of Catholics in Ireland.
·
There
was a greater assertion of autonomy by the Irish “Grattan’s Parliament.
1780
Britain started its largest ever
mobilisation in its struggle to survive. The navy was increased from 16,000
sailors to 100,000 by 1782 and the army expanded to 250,000 soldiers. Irish and
Scots were recruited into the military forces. These were not released
criminals as has been suggested but included skilled craftsman and a strong
officer corps.
Political discontent inevitably
accompanied these new times. A Whig Association Movement pressed for
parliamentary reform. John Wesley asked why Catholics basked in the sun while
Dissenters were stigmatised as the enemy.
The famous Commons motion was tabled in
April 1780: “The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and
ought to be diminished.”
However the Loyalists across Great Britain and
Ireland felt their Britishness.
On 6 June 1780 a petition was presented
to Parliament demanding the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act.
There followed five days of riots, known
as the
Gordon Riots in London in protest against the Catholic Relief Act. The
Gordon Riots of 1780 were several days of rioting in London motivated by
anti-Catholic sentiment. They began with a large and orderly protest
against the Papists Act 1778, which was intended to reduce official
discrimination against British Catholics enacted by the Popery Act 1698. Lord
George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, argued that the law would
enable Catholics to join the British Army and plot treason. The protest led to
widespread rioting and looting, including attacks on Newgate Prison and the
Bank of England and was the most destructive in the history of London. They
were dramatized by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge. The rioters were mainly
respectable apprentices and labourers and included the radical William Blake.
They were well informed. Noone was killed by the crowds. The city authorities
refused to act, perhaps out of fear or from sympathy. After five days the
troops were given reassurances about the lawfulness of preventing further
disturbance and the King ordered them to fire on those who refused to disperse
after the reading of the Riot Act. 160 rioters were tried and 26 (mainly young)
were hanged.
The crowd that 9 years later stormed the
Bastille in France was only a fraction of the size of the rioters mustered by
Gordon. They have largely been forgotten as the anti
catholic basis for the riots has been seen with retrospective distaste
by later radical movements.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
Gordon Riots of 1780,
and why a Westminster protest against 'Popery' in June 1780 led to widespread
rioting across London, lethally suppressed
Methodist registers began.
Notwithstanding the Gordon Riots, there
was some stabilisation politically and militarily during 1780. The Spanish were
occupied in the Siege of Gibraltar. Washington’s army was having problems with
mutiny and desertion.
1781
Washington begged for more help from the
French. In March 1781 the French sent its Atlantic fleet to the West Indies,
and after failing to capture Jamaica, it sailed to Virginia in July 1781. A
small British force was trapped at Yorktown
and the British surrendered.
1782
Lord North resigned as rime Minister and
the Whig Rockingham returned to office in March 1782. He began to withdraw
troops from America.
The French sailed again for Jamaica. The
British fleet confronted them in the only great battle fought by the Royal Navy
outside European waters until the twentieth century. The Battle of
the Saints in the Caribbean on 9 to 10 April 1782 ended in a British
victory which was their greatest success over the French during the American
War. The action tilted the advantage to Britain against the French.
Gilbert’s Act allowed parishes to form
unions to maintain workhouses for the elderly and infirm.
1783
The Stamp Duty Act introduced tax on
baptisms, marriage and burials (not paupers).
The volcano Laki erupted in Iceland
which had catastrophic effects on European weather and caused many deaths.
Rockingham and his successor, Lord
Shelburne, were eager to end the war in America. Several significant
constitutional changes occurred at this time:
·
An
opposition party came to power despite its opposition to the king and sacked
previous office holders before taking measures to diminish the power of the Crown
·
The
Civil List came under parliamentary scrutiny.
·
A
new post of Foreign Secretary was created.
Shelburn led peace negotiations. The
Treaty of Paris created the United States. Full independence was given to all
13 colonies involved in the rebellion. Little concern was given to the fete of
the loyalists and the freed slaves. The native American allies were abandoned
in a sentence of death for their civilisation.
If the intent had been there the half hearted patriots could have been defeated, but Britain
was fighting a world war, and so had wider interests to defend. An idealised
version of the American Revolution prevailed in the ‘Whig Histories’.
England was written off as a second rate power.
However, and paradoxically, Britain
became more politically and economically stable after the war. She retained the
Westy Indies, Canada, Gibraltar and its position in
India. Trade with the United States would in time become a significant bulwark
of Britain’s economy. A long trade boom began in 1783. By 1821, the US took 44%
of its imports from Britain.
A new model of Britain emerged, more
paternalistic and progressive.
American independence had relieved
Britain of significant burdens on its economy, particular in the cost of
defence in America.
In December 1783, the king orchestrated
a defeat to the Whig ministry in the House of Lords. George II then appointed William
Pitt the Younger as prime minister to rally patriot forces around the
patriot king. Pitt then won an early general election. There was a rally to
Pitt’s patriotic policies. The king became popular and nicknamed Farmer
George, in part due to his agricultural interests.
The loss of America placed greater focus
on India. There were growing concerns about the East India Company which was
seen as utterly incorrigible, and there was an attempt in 1783 to set up a
political board of control, but this was seen as a political move to control
the wealth from India.
Warren
Hastings was the first Governor General. He tried to reform Company rule,
and promoted moderation and greater reliance on Indian laws, ideas and
institutions and employment of Indian people. This seemed a move towards a more
respectful approach. However the bottom line was that
Britain was eager to extend its power through taxation and trade.
The British were now actively
interacting with the rest of the world.
·
Sir William Johnson
married into Mohawk nobility.
·
James Skinner,
born in Calcutta in 1778 to an East Indian Company officer and an Indian mother
became Colonel of Skinner’s Horse.
1784
The invention of the threshing machine.
The first mail coaches were introduced.
A Game Tax was levied on all qualified
to kill or sell game.
Taxes introduced on owners of hoses used
for transport or racing.
William Pitt was Prime Minister,
1784-1801
1785
In 1785, after 10 years of service,
during which he helped extend and regularise the nascent Raj, Warren Hastings
resigned. On return to England, Hastings was impeached in the House of Commons
for alleged crimes in India, notably embezzlement, extortion and coercion, and
an alleged judicial killing of Maharaja Nandakumar. At first thought unlikely
to succeed, the prosecution was managed by MPs including Edmund Burke,
encouraged by Sir Philip Francis, whom Hastings had wounded during a duel in
India, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley
Sheridan. When the charges of the indictment were read, the 20 counts took
Edmund Burke two full days to read. The
House sat for 148 days over a period of seven years during the investigation.
The House of Lords acquitted him of all charges on 24 April 1795. The Company
subsequently compensated him with £4,000 annually, retroactive to the date he
returned to England, but did not reimburse his legal fees, which he claimed to
have been £70,000.
The impeachment of Hastings, and the anti slavery movement showed a growing sensitivity to the
negative outcomes of the Empire, but Britain was at the same time becoming
increasingly dependent on colonial trade. The dilemma was that it was becoming
difficult to retain Britain’s status as a wealthy and prosperous nation, whilst
avoiding the darker aspects.
Prior to the 1770s, Britain had not been
vocal in its criticism of slavery. I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, For how could we do without sugar and rum? However from the 1770s, there was a campaign against
slavery. In 1785 the vice chancellor of Cambridge set his students an essay
prize on whether slavery was right and it was won by Thomas
Clarkson, an important slave campaigner.
First edition of The Times.
A tax was imposed on female servants.
1787
The Society
for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded.
1788
A penal colony was established in Botany
Bay in Australia.
After serious bouts of illness in
1788-89 and again in 1801, George III became permanently deranged in 1810. He
was mentally unfit to rule in the last decade of his reign; his eldest son -
the later George IV - acted as Prince Regent from 1811. Some medical historians
have said that George III's mental instability was caused by a hereditary
physical disorder called porphyria.
1789
William
Wilberforce, with the encouragement of William Pitt, began a long
parliamentary campaign to ban the slave trade. However
the issue was taken ff the agenda for some time, by the beginning of another
war with France.
The French Revolution began. On 14 July
1789, a few hundred Parisiens stormed
the Bastille. At first England welcomed this new development in the affairs
of their old enemy France.
·
The
House of Commons promoted a day of thanksgiving for the French Revolution.
·
William
Pitt hoped for friendly relations with the new nation
·
The
Dissenters and Whigs in opposition were particularly enthusiastic and saw it as
a blow to popery and superstition.
Before long there were differing views
on the subject:
·
The
Unitarian intellectual, Dr Richard Price, preached that most governments were
usurpations on the rights of men.
·
But
Edmund Burke replied in
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) saying the revolution had
become a spectator sport for the middle class, and a free society relied upon
respect for its institutions. The revolution caused suffering and loss. He
argued that societies grew organically and he was
appalled by the sudden destruction of institutions.
·
In
reply, Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) dismissed Burke’s ideas. The new French
constitution was the rational course of thins. For a nation to be free, it is
sufficient that it wills it to be so. In June 1792 Paine was summoned for
seditious libel.
·
Fundamental
divisions in British politics, reopened Civil War divisions.
·
Radical
Societies emerged.
·
There
was rioting, though not violent.
1790
The invention of a new surfacing
treatment for roads by John McAdam.
1791
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was
published.
The Canada Act divided Canada into Upper
and Lower Canada.
The Universal British Dictionary in 5
large volumes gave details of counties, schools and
other facilities.
1792
The first Regency Crisis
The September massacres in France of
1792 led to the butchering of women and children on the streets of Paris and
Louis XVI and Marie Antionette were executed in the escalating Terror (la Terreur). This was the context of Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities,
contrasting the Terror with peace and security in Britain. The scene was set in
the classic description of life in 1775, before the dramas of the ensuing
years:
It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was
the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we
were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in
short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest
authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the
superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a
king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England;
there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne
of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the
State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for
ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand
seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England
at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her
five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by
announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and
Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the
spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality)
rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come
to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in
America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through
any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on
the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and
trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill,
making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian
pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as
sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers,
and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do
honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a
distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the
woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was
put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn
into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it,
terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some
tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the
weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about
by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set
apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer,
though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went
about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion
that they were awake, was to be atheistical and
traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an amount
of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by
armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;
families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their
furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark
was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his
fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,” gallantly
shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers,
and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other
four, “in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail
was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was
made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled
the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols
fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses
in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond
crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went
into St. Giles’s, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the
musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of
these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the
hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition;
now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a
housebreaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in
the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and
to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like
them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven
hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer
worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain
and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with
a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five
conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this
chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.
The mood regarding the French Revolution
changed. There was hostility to the violence.
Soon there were some 2,000 Loyalist
Societies, such as the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property
against Republicans and Levellers, founded in November 1792.
There were also smaller numbers of
Radical Societies, such as the London Corresponding Society
which was founded in January 1792 by the Scottish Dissenter, Thomas Hardy. A
circle formed around the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson, including Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft and William
Wordsworth.
In April 1792, France declared war on
Austria and Prussia. Initially intending to remain neutral, William Pitt
assured the Commons on 17 February 1792 that Britain might reasonably expect
fifteen years of peace.
1793
The execution of Louis XVI in January
1793 shocked the English public. There was a new fear for the independence of
Holland, and Britain pledged to support the Dutch. The French revolutionary
leaders were buoyed by a euphioc belief in their
invincibility and strove to spread their revolutionary message across Europe.
The French Republic declared war on
Britain and Holland on 1 February 1793.
Thomas Paine was an enthusiastic
supporter of the French Revolution and was granted honorary French citizenship.
Paine was selected as one of nine deputies to be part of the convention's
Constitutional Committee, who were charged to draft a suitable constitution for
the French Republic. He drafted a call on British people to revolt.
The French Revolutionary Wars 1793 to 1802. With a short break from March 1802 to
May 1803, war with France would last for the next twenty years.
Britain adopted its usual strategy to
encourage and finance a coalition against France. The French navy was weak and
easily routed by the Royal Navy. However the Franch
Army was formidable and was able to raise vast armies through mobilisation and
terror.
The war that followed is another
candidate for the first real world war.
The Friendly Societies Act.
There were splits in the Whig party and
concerns about William Pitt’s closeness to George III. William Pitt was
reserved and often irritating and not ideal as a war leader. However he had
strong willpower and a sound knowledge of finance, which was helpful in the
critical strategic concern of war finances.
In France there were initially
expectations of quick victory. France’s unruly army swarmed into Savoy,
Germany, Belgium and Holland. A revolutionary
dictatorship took power, in which the dominant figure was the yo0ung lawyer,
Maximilien Robespierre. There was counter revolutionary resistance focused on
peasants and Catholics.
France was soon in the grip of civil war
and terror, with 16,000 executed on the guillotine and thousands more
slaughtered. Refugees streamed into England.
Despite gruesome events in France, there
remained support for the revolution in England and Thomas Paine continued to
promote an invasion of England. The Dissenters still saw the revolution as a
struggle against popery.
Britain’s economic situation was
precarious:
·
A
booming population, but imports becoming more difficult due to the war.
·
Local
workforce mobilised for war.
·
Climatic
conditions, partly caused by south east Asian volcanic
activity causing poor harvest in 1791, 1792, 1794, 1795, (with serious
shortages 1795 to 1796) 1800 (with serious shortages 1800 to 1801), 1811 and
1812 (with serious shortages 1809 to 1810).
The Royal Navy sailed into the French
base at Toulon
in August 1793 to support French Royalist rebels. They were forced to withdraw
under canon fire commanded by the young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The siege was the first
involvement of the British Royal Navy with the French Revolution.
1795
Now General Bonaparte put down a
royalist rising in Paris in October 1795.
Corsican patriots threw out the French
and tried to join the British Empire, but were unable
to hold out.
Britain’s main war aim was the
independence of Holland, but Holland fell in early 1795 and became a French
satellite. British troops in the Low Countries under George III’s second son, Frederick,
the Grand Old Duke of York soon had to march down again.
The government took a carrot and stick
approach to the hardships arising from war.
·
Corn
exports stopped and grain was imported from US, Canada
and India.
·
However “Pitt’s reign of terror” began in May
1794, which led to a restriction on civil liberties and suspension of habeas corpus,
focused on the “Two Acts” in the wake of the stoning of King George III on his
way to open Parliament in 1795:
o
The
Treason Act 1795 (sometimes also known as the Treasonable and Seditious
Practices Act) made it high treason to "within the realm or without
compass, imagine, invent, devise or intend death or destruction, or any bodily
harm tending to death or destruction, maim or wounding, imprisonment or
restraint, of the person of ... the King". The Act became a permanent
Act in 1817.
o
The
Seditious Meetings and Assemblies Act 1795 restricted the size of public
meetings to fifty persons.
The Speenhamland system for poor relief
was introduced offering financial assistance linked to the price of bread, but
this effected the south of England.
The Quota Acts forced counties to
supplement recruitment to the Royal Navy.
Food riots and widespread famine in
England following poor harvests and high prices caused by the war with France.
1796
Napoleon marched into Italy. He defeated
an Austrian army and the French were soon in
possession of northern Italy, the Austrian Netherlands and the Rhineland.
Chaplains’ Returns recorded baptisms, marriages and burials overseas.
Edward Jenner’s first vaccination
against smallpox.
The Retreat near York opened, offering a
more humane approach to the treatment of persons with mental illness.
The Supplementary Militia Act raised an
additional 64,000 men, by ballot, to serve in the war against France.
The Army began to record deaths of
serving personnel.
1797
In February
1797 a small force of 1,400 French landed
accidentally in Fishguard,
Pembrokeshire in an effort to burn Bristol. They quickly surrendered after
seeing a group of Welsh women dressed in red cloaks, who they thought to be a Ridgment of soldiers. Perhaps thousands of
local Welsh women dressed in their traditional scarlet tunics and tall black
felt hats had come to witness any fighting between the French and the local men
of the militia. The by then inebriated invasion force mistook them for Redcoats.
Although a fiasco, the incident caused a run on the Bank of England.
There
were serious naval mutinies in 1797.
·
In
April 1797, the Channel Fleet at Spithead refused to put to sea and there was
violence until an agreement was reached for better pay, food and leave
conditions.
·
There
followed mutinies at the Nore and Yarmouth. The public turned against them. By
13 June 1797 the mutiny was over and 30 sailors were
hanged.
·
They
were in reality more like collective bargaining for
better conditions and Nelson commented that the mutinies had been the most
manly I ever heard of and does the British sailor infinite honour.
1798
Napoleon led an invasion of Egypt in a
bid to dominate the Mediterranean. However his fleet
was annihilated by Nelson at the Battle of
the Nile on 1 August 1798. 11 of 13 battleships were destroyed or captured.
Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt and returned to France.
Encouraged by Napoleon’s failure in
Egypt, a Second Coalition emerged of Britain, Austria, Russia
and Turkey. The French Revolution was under threat.
There was a United Ireland uprising in
1798, though brutally crushed. The ‘Irish Question’ had become a perennial
concern.
There is an In Our Time podcast on The
Irish Rebellion of 1798,
led by the United Irishmen, who were inspired by American and French
revolutions, and the impact this had across Ireland.
There were big increases in taxation to
fund the war. There was an introduction of the first
income tax, at 10% on incomes over £200.
The second phase of the French
Revolutionary Wars was the First War with Napoleon Bonaparte, 1798-1802.
Battle of the Nile, 1798
Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the
Principle of Population.
1799
The Russians and Austrians advanced in
Italy, Switzerland and Germany. British and Russian
troops landed in Holland and seized the Dutch fleet.
Napoleon seized dictatorial power and
became First Consul in November 1799. He offered peace terms, which were
rejected.
1800
In Summer 1800 there were attempts at
coordination of attacks on France, but the plan unravelled and the French
rallied.
The tide had turned again and now
Britian was threatened. There was rationing and starvation at home.
Napoleon defeated the Austrians in a
surprise attack after marching over the Alps, at Marengo.
Pitt's Bill for the Union of Great
Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom.
1801
United Kingdom population was 16.3
million.
In March 1801 General Abercrombie landed
in Egypt and defeated a larger French army at the Battle of
Alexandria.
On 2 April 1801, Nelson destroyed the
Danish fleet at the Battle of
Copenhagen.
In November 1801 William Pitt admitted
that the intended war aims were unattainable.
The Treaty of
Amiens was agreed in March 1802 with an enlarged France getting control
over its gains including the Low Countries.
Food prices fell and tourists streamed
abroad, even to see post Revolutionary France.
Napoleon ordered a naval building
programme and openly planned another invasion of Egypt.
1802
Frances fresh global visions meant that
before long, a relatively minor issue sparked fresh conflict. The Treaty of
Amiens required Britian to abandon Malta, but the British stayed on. An
ultimatum expired and on 12 May 1803, Britain declared war.
The Napoleonic
Wars 1803 to 1815
The ordinary folk in Britain and France
were horrified at the resumption of hostilities.
However even those who had initially supported
the revolution had become disillusioned. Frances
involvement of the neutral Switzerland turned Wordsworth against it. There
remained a hardline few, such as Ebenezer Aldred, Unitarian minister of Wakefield who thought Britain was guilty of
imperialism and decadence and was shocked at the near naked portrayal of
Britannia. He held the unpatriotic view that the Beast foreseen in the biblical
Book of Revelation was Great Britain, a wicked and degenerate nation, guilty of
imperialism, slave trading and sodomy, not to mention its regrettable habit of
stamping the image of the Whore of Babylon on its
coins.
The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act
1802 improved conditions of apprentices working in cotton mills.
1803
Napoleon turned his attention to an
invasion olf Britain. He built up a force of 2,500
gunboats and landing craft and an ‘Army of England’ of 165,000. There was a
fervour across Britian and panic in Colchester that the invasion had been
sighted.
·
The
regular army was avoided by respectable English workmen. It was always short of
men, though bolstered by Irish and Scottish recruits.
·
But
a formidable local volunteer force grew up. The Volunteer Corps was a British
voluntary part-time organization for the purpose of home defence in the event
of invasion, during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For instance the Leeds
Volunteer Corps (1794–1802, 1803–1808) was line infantry regiment of volunteers
in the West Riding of Yorkshire. They were active during the Napoleonic Wars
and were part of the British Volunteer Corps and units like the East
York Militia Regiment and the North Holderness Volunteer Infantry and the volunteer
infantry of West Yorkshire.
·
By
1805 there were 800,000 men doing some form of military service, 20% of the
active male population, comparable to the world wars of the twentieth century.
·
Recruitment
was encouraged by propaganda but also by opportunities for rape and pillage.
Defence preparations were undertaken
extensively, mainly focused south of Great Yarmouth, but extending from
Cornwall to Scotland. 168 Martello Towers were constructed. The Volunteers role
was to slow down the invaders and while non combatants
were to leave the scene of an invasion with all the food in their possession,
volunteer units would muster at rendezvous points.
This was a war for Britain’s existence.
Success by Napoleon would mean long military occupation; dividing up of the
United Kingdom; destruction of Britain’s naval power; annexation of its
colonies; diversion of its trade to France; and an end to the Industrial
Revolution.
1804
The first railway steam locomotive.
Napoleon became Emperor of France.
One sixth of British men served in the
army or navy.
1805
In 1805 Napoleon summoned his fleet on
the Channel for an invasion of Britain, but Admiral Villeneuve had cold feet
and Napoleon angrily abandoned the venture.
Napoleon marched his army to Germany and
Austria.
He defeated the Austrians and the
Russians at:
·
The
Battle of Ulm on 20
October 1805
·
The
Battle of Austerlitz
on 21 October 1805.
After Austerlitz, William Pitt retorted,
Roll up the map of Europe, it will not be
wanted these ten years.
However on 21 October 1805, at the
Battle of Trafalgar, the French and Spanish fleet was destroyed.
·
Nelson
asked that every man will do his duty.
·
It
was a one sided battle, and the Royal Navy was
dominant.
·
Two
third of the Franco Spanish fleet of 33 ships of the line were captured or
destroyed by 29 British ships, at a cost of 448 British lives.
·
French
casualties were dreadful- 571 of the 643 crew of the Redoutable
were killed.
There is an In Our Time podcast on The
Battle of Trafalgar
(1805).
See the Royal Navy in Napoleonic Times
in Farndales and the Sea.
Napoleon did not give up,
and began the construction across Europe of a fresh fleet.
Despite dominance at sea, the French
continued to dominate the Continent. Britain could have little influence there
without allies.
1806
William Pitt died in January 1806 after
being Prime Minister for 18 years. There followed a period of three years of
political instability with three Prime Ministers, including the Ministry
of All the Talents.
A military academy opened at Woolwich
for the training of officers.
Napoleon’s attempted economic blockade
of Britain.
1807
Napoleon signed the Treaty of Tilsit
with defeated Russia in 1807. Britain was alone.
Economically, Britain was faring well.
Agriculture had increased its farmed acreage. The French sought to attack
merchant shipping which damaged British trade, but the French suffered worse.
Napoleon’s
Continental System required control of the whole European coastline. Vast
organised smuggling ensued. France’s customs revenue collapsed.
Sanctions and counter sanctions
Napoleon resorted to a land blockade to wreck
British trade. London retaliated with orders in 1807 to forbid any ship from
any country to trade with Napoleonic Europe.
The Peninsular War
(1807-1814)
To close off access, Napoleon tried to
take over Portugal and Spain in 1807 to 1808. Resistance was provoked including
a 3 May 1808 uprising in Madrid (depicted by Goya’s painting).
Britain gave financial, naval and military assistance to the rebels.
Abolition of Slavery
A consequence of the trade war was the
abolition of slavery. Politicians saw its abolition as morally and politically
attractive. There were high costs associated with slavery and the British were
using freed slaves as soldiers. The French had brutally reintroduced slavery in
1803 and ant slavery became patriotic. The import and use of slaves in Britain
was outlawed by a large majority, but continued in the
colonies.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the 1807 Abolition of the
Slave Trade, and the life of William
Wilberforce.
1808
The County Asylums Act encouraged the
construction of private asylums for the mentally ill.
Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of
Wellington), dismissed by Napoleon as the sepoy general, having gained
experience in India, led the British military force in the Peninsula. The army
was British, with only 20% English, and largely Irish and Scottish. It was
initially only 30,000 strong relying heavily on Spanish and Portuguese allies.
It was initially chaotic and the British army gained a
reputation fort drunkenness, looting and rape. Wellington himself admitted that
some of his men were the scum of the earth, but they were also adventurous and
patriotic.
The Battle
of Sahagun on 21 December 1808 was a dawn attack in the snow by the British
15th Hussars, routing a French cavalry brigade and setting the standard for
British cavalry in the Peninsular War; ‘Success to the Fifteenth; and ‘God Save
the King’.
1809
The Battle
of Corunna, 16 January 1809 ensured the escape of the British army from
Spain on 16th January 1809, during the Peninsular War, with the death of Sir
John Moore at the moment of success.
The Battle of
Talavera, 27 to 28 July 1809. The British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley
combined with a Spanish army under General Cuesta to fight in operations
against French-occupied Madrid. At nightfall, the French army withdrew a short
distance after several of its attacks had been repulsed; the allies, having
suffered comparable casualties to the French, made no attempt to pursue.
The British victory south of
Madrid on 28th July 1809 over Joseph Bonaparte, the King imposed on Spain by
Napoleon, and his French army in the Peninsular War.
1811
With Spanish and Portuguese allies,
exports from the Iberian Peninsula and from South American colonies increased
to Britain.
George III’s bouts of mental illness
meant that his unpopular son, George became Prince Regent.
Population of the United Kingdom reached
18.5 million.
First Luddite activity, in Nottingham.
1812
In February 1812, a government of Pitts’
supporters against the Whigs, led by Spencer
Percival, brought some stability.
However in May 1812, Spencer Percival was
assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons.
There followed a period of political
chaos, until he was succeeded by Robert
Jenkinson, Lord Liverpool, who remained in office for the next 15 years.
The Battle
of Salamanca on 22 July 1812 saw Wellington’s victory over the French army
of Marshal Marmont, during the Peninsular War, leading to the re-capture of
Madrid; also known as the Battle of Los Arapiles or Les Arapiles
Napoleon recklessly invaded
Russia in 1812 with his Grand Armée of 220,000, which was decimated by
Russian resistance, the burning of Moscow as the French sought to winter there,
disease and the weather.
The British funded a rejuvenated
alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria who were able to field a 700,000 strong
force, funded by income tax, trade with India and taxes levied in India.
The textile industry faced continued
barriers to trade imposed by Napoleon’s Continental System. When bad weather
exacerbated hardships in 1811 and 1812, weavers, knitters and croppers in
Lancashire and Yorkshire inspired by the mythical Ned Ludd,
began to break up new machinery. There were pitched battles.
The Framebreaking Act imposed the death penalty for
Luddites.
Gas lamps became widely used to light
streets.
From 1812 to 1815, Britain was at war with the
recently independent United States. The fighting took place along America's
Canadian frontiers and Atlantic coastlines. Militarily, the conflict ended in
stalemate, but it had a lasting impact on the communities of North America. A
dispute arose with the US about its trade with Napoleonic Europe. The Americans
attacked in July 1812 and there was a period of naval skirmishing. The American
invasion of Canada was resisted, and a 3,700 British force landed in US and
burned Washington. Peace was agreed in 1815.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
War of 1812, the
conflict between America and Great Britain which is sometimes referred to as
the second American War of Independence.
1813
The Battle
of Vitoria was Wellington’s decisive defeat of Joseph Bonaparte’s French
army on 21 June 1813 in North-Eastern Spain in the Peninsular War.
Between 16 to
19 October 1813, the French lost 60,000 men at the Battle
of Leipzig, or the Battle of the Nations, the bloodiest confrontation
before the First World War.
1814
Wellington’s army crossed the Pyrenees.
He ordered his soldiers not to pillage and pay for supplies. The French
landowners were delighted.
Support for Napoleon dissolved. Napoleon
abdicated on 6 April 1814. As compensation he was given the Isle of Elba off
the Italian coast.
The Battle
of Toulouse on 10 April 1814 sealed the end for Napoleon.
There was celebration and relief in
Britain. A miniature naval battle was displayed on the Serpentine.
James Pigot published national
directories comprising information about professional people, gentry and
nobles, clergy, and coach and carrier services.
1815
Napoleon left Elba on 1 March 1815, with
600 men and regained power by May.
The British were forced to finance a
final campaign allied with Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Holland.
Napoleon marched against a British army
mustering in Belgium, when the Prussians were still on
their way to support him.
At the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June
1815, a ‘near run thing’, the British suffered 15,000 casualties, almost one in
four. The British army put up a stoical resistance, calmed by calls of Steady
lads, steady. Victor Hugo contrasted the precision and foresight of the
British against the guesswork and supernatural instinct of Napoleon. The
British disciplined volleys, controlled stillness in the face of violence,
founded a new British ideal of masculine courage. The names of soldiers are
recorded in medal rolls.
Impressment into the Royal Navy ended.
It has been estimated that British
military losses between 1793 and 1815 from combat, shipwreck and disease was
210,000, which compares to the First World War. The war effort was supported by
heavy taxation, state efficiency and political and military leadership.
Britain emerged the richest and most
powerful state on the world stage, although mass unemployment followed
demobilisation of the army. Britain would now make a permanent impact on global
affairs. It’s coal powered and mechanised economy and
worldwide network was now the bulwark for what followed.
Until the 1860s the British and Russians
would dominate the western and eastern spheres, and mass European migration
across the rest of the world, would bring global influence.
Between 1815 and 1850 Britain struggled though with its explosive population and with food
shortages. It also faced new problems with epidemic diseases.
The lavishness of the Regency and the
widely detested Beau
Brummel were quickly rejected – Beau Brummel died in penniless exile.
The weight of taxation, debt and a growing poor mean there was pressure for reform.
Mount Tambora is a volcano on the island
of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, then part of the Dutch East Indies, and
its 1815 eruption was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human
history. There were food shortages in 1816 to 1817.
During the war a booming population
meant an extension of cultivation across common land. Landlords and tenant
farmers made profits, but the poor lost customary rights by the enclosure of
the land.
In 1815, the first of the Corn Laws
helped farmers, but disastrously impacted upon the poor. It gave protection to
domestic producers by excluding imports of grain until the price reached 80s a
quarter for wheat and other measures for other cereals.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
Corn Laws, cause of one
of the most explosive political debates in the 19th century.
There were
concerns that Britain was heading for famine. These were the circumstances in
which Thomas Malthus argued that population inevitably outran food supply and
would be checked by natural forces. His ideas were influential until the 1850s
He feared that the Poor Law would encourage dependency and the breeding of too
many children.
The
population in England grew from 8.6M in 1801 to 17M in 1851, about 98%. The
urban population tripled in the same period. In the 1820s, London doubled, Bradford grew 78%.
One way to
escape this cycle was to import more food, and security of the seas through
naval supremacy remained a priority.
John Stuart Mill recognised a divide
between supporters of:
·
Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832)
and his utilitarianism, which saw the universe as self
regulating. He advocated the seeking of the greatest happiness to the
greatest number. The main driver was individual choice, ot
society. The role of Government is to regulate individuals through reward and
punishment. He advocated all seeing inspectors in prisons, which were adopted
in Millbank and Pentonville.
·
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge (1772 to 1834) promoted paternalism and interventionism.
He thought that society needed leadership and high minded
government. Coleridge with Wordsworth had by now abandoned his youthful hopes
for the French Revolution and found consoilation in
the English countryside. He disliked the market and
everything being sold for the highest price.
Lord
Liverpool’s government saw the early stages of a professional civil service and
the idea of His Majesty’s Opposition, as a government in making.
Britain began a
period of global dominance not seen until the US from the 1980s.
There was
however some reluctance to widen the imperial project.
·
There
was a strong post war pressure to reduce taxation and debt.
·
Lord
Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary thought it was not our business to
collect trophies.
·
The
navy was cut back from 713 ships in 1814 to 121 in 1818.
·
There
was an initial desire fort a friendly relaxation of the costs of empire.
·
Military
spending was about 2 to 3% of national income, but Britain’s imperial wealth
allowed for a relatively powerful military force to be sustained.
·
The
navy had about 50,000 men by mid century.
·
However the army was generally over stretched.
In 1857 at the time of the Indian Mutiny, there were only 23,000 British
soldiers in northern India. There was a massacre of British troops in
Afghanistan in 1841 and 1880 and at Isandlwana in 1879.
·
However from 1815, Britain was in practice
invulnerable to invasion and there was no calculated attack on its empire until
Japan in 1941.
·
Britain
continued to dominate the seas and in the 1880s, the Royal; Navy had 38 large
battleships. It adopted a two power standard,
to remain larger than the next two strongest naval powers combined.
The context of
this dominance was a period of global fragmentation of the Mughal Empire in the
early eighteenth century, the Chinese Empire from the mid eighteenth century,
and the Ottoman empire after defeat by Austria and Russia in the late
eighteenth century. The Spanish and Portuguese empires had been finished off by
the Napoleonic Wars. There were new and sometimes aggressive nations appearing
in Africa and Asia, such as the Asante and Zulus.
The British
started to view their empire as a duty as well as an interest, spreading
Christian civilisation, constitutional freedoms and
humanitarian rights. Cecil Rhodes quipped that this was philanthropy plus 5%
profit. However Whig policies were largely driven by support for civil and
religious liberties.
The Treaties of
1814 and 1815 left Britain and Russia as the dominant European powers. Alexander I promoted a distinct policy of his Holy Alliance
to establish permanent international organisation based on religious mystic
principles.
The Portuguese
government repeatedly asked Britain for assistance; the Swedes asked for
patrols in the Baltic; Britain discouraged Russia and Prussia from intervening
in France; and helped to bring Greek independence. It promoted Italian
independence from the 1850s and defended the Ottoman empire from France, Egypt,
Austria and Russia. It sent a fleet to counter moves
by Prussia and Austria in Denmark.
Britain’s soft
power spread the adoption of British styles of clothing, the English language
and its system of government, the mother of all Parliaments. British
style democracies were established in Belgium (1832), the Netherlands (1848),
Denmark (1848), Italy (1860), Sweden (1867) and Spain (1874). British economic
structures became a global model along with its technology (railways and steam
power) and institutions.
During the
Napoleonic Wars, Britain‘s overseas possessions had
increased from 26 to 43. During the nineteenth century, its expansion averaged
100,000 square miles each year.
Yet Britain had
little appetite for expansion. Parts of Indonesia were returned to Holland in
1824. The Ionian islands were ceded to Greece. There was no attempt to regain
Corsica who had asked to join the Empire and it turned down request from
Ethiopia, Mexico, Uruguay, Sarawak, Katanga and
Morocco. Britain was not at all sure she wanted an empire. She preferred to see
it as a free association. Disraeli’s famous phrase in full went: There never
was a jewel in the crown of England that was so truly costly.
British presence in India had initially been commercial, through the
Chartered Honourable East India Company (“HEIC”). Over the second half
of the eighteenth century it was increasingly government
under a nominal Mughal sovereignty as an agent of the British government. It
was of huge economic and strategic importance to Britain. It was governed for a
mix of motives of improvement, destiny (a ‘new Rome’), and fortune. In 1835 the
Utilitarians James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay drafted an education
policy for India focused on the teaching of English and European science, philosophy and history.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 534
to 541).
1816
A Whig-Radical Alliance in 1816
abandoned income tax, though this meant the government became more dependent on
regressive indirect taxes.
·
The
opposition Whigs were led by Earl Grey.
·
The
Radicals were small in size and divided.
·
The
Whigs and Radicals combined had about 150 seats in 1815.
The ‘Year without a Summer’ led to dire
harvests.
1817
Maps of most English counties published
by the Greenwood Brothers.
1818
Spending on poor relief grew from £5.4M
in 1814 to £8M in 1818.
1819
The Peterloo Massacre on
16 August 1819 – 15 dead and several hundred injured.
1820
There were violent plots and riots. The
Cato Street Conspiracy was an attempt to murder all the British cabinet
ministers and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in 1820. The name comes from the
meeting place near Edgware Road in London. The police had an informer and the
plotters fell into a police trap and 13 were arrested, while one policeman was
killed. Five conspirators were executed, and five others were transported to
Australia. How widespread the Cato Street conspiracy was is uncertain. It was a
time of unrest; rumours abounded. Malcolm Chase noted that, "the London-Irish
community and a number of trade societies, notably shoemakers, were prepared to
lend support, while unrest and awareness of a planned rising were widespread in
the industrial north and on Clydeside."
First Europeans settled in New Zealand.
George IV, 1820-1830
1821
Population of the United Kingdom was
20.9 million.
Michael Faraday invented the electric
motor.
The Greek War of Independence attracted
people from Britain including Lord Byron.
During the 1820s there was a vision to
transform the world through free trade. Its prophet was Richard Cobden, co founder of the Anti Corn Law
League. It probably made Britain overall poorer, but its benefits were cheaper
food, a stimulation of world trade and cheaper Brish manufactured goods. It
came to be felt that it was so beneficial that no government, such as China and
Japan, had a right to deny its benefits to their own people. In part this might
explain a contradictory approach to stop the African slave trade whilst
exporting opium to China.
There is an In Our Time podcast on David
Ricardo and his argument
for free trade after the Napoleonic Wars. He argued that Britain's economy was
being held back by the interests of landlords and protectionism, and his call
for free trade.
1823
The requirement that either bride or
groom were to have been resident in a parish for 4 weeks was reduced to 15
days.
1824
The Ashanti War.
Act to repeal the law allowing
magistrates to fix wages of workmen.
Act repealing law preventing workmen
seeking work from travelling to different parts of the country.
Repeal of the Combination Laws
(preventing fixing of wages by 'combinations' or masters and workers) enabled
workers to establish trade unions.
1825
The opening of the Stockton and
Darlington Railway – the first public steam railway.
1826
White’s first commercial directory
published for Hull and listing names and addresses.
1827
Greenwood’s Map of London.
The Shepherd’s Calendar, a poetic
account of the cotemporary farming year by John Clare, was published.
Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh.
In 1827 Lord Liverpool resigned as Prime
Minister after a stroke.
1828
Perry’s Bankrupt and Insolvent Gazette
published monthly.
An Act to Regulate the Carrying of
Passengers in Merchant Vessels regulated the safety of emigrants to the
colonies.
1829
The first Bobbies appointed by Sir
Robert Peel.
Stephenson’s steam locomotive won the
Rainhill Trials.
The Catholic Relief
Act 1829 allowed Irish and British Catholics to sit in the House of
Commons.
1830
Wellington and Robert Peel became convinced
that Catholic emancipation was politically necessary to avoid Ireland becoming
ungovernable. Many Tories did not accept this. It was some of the opponents of
Catholic emancipation who demanded a more representative House of Commons.
Wellington resigned in November 1830,
partly in exasperation at the rebel opposition to emancipation and calls for
constitutional reform.
Economic recession was made worse by
taxes and Church tithes and there was some disorder and riot (the Swing
Riots) in November to December 1830. There were protests
against low wages and poor law overseers.
Lord
Charles Grey, the Whig Leader, took office as Prime Minister, with a
manifesto to reform the constitution.
There were European revolutions
in Belgium and France in 1830.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway
opened.
A significant rise in those emigrating
from Britain following the agricultural depression.
The Plymouth Brethren established in
Plymouth.
Rural Rides by William Cobbett published
a detailed account of the English countryside.
1830-1837 - William IV
1831
Opening of the first great railway
between Liverpool and Manchester
The Parish Register Abstract collated
all parish records before 1813.
The Royal Geographical Society was
formed in London.
Population of the United Kingdom was
24.1 million.
Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary
of England provided details on towns and villages in England.
A cholera epidemic spread by infected
drinking water killed about 7,000 in London. But the same disease killed 18,000
in centrally administered Paris.
New Social problems gave rise to new
ideas in the 1830s:
·
Owenism.
Robert Owen (1771) to
1858) was a Welsh businessman who owned a textile mill at New Lanark with
Jeremy Bentham. He adopted a new enlightened model providing schools and houses
for his workers with ambitions to change human society. He campaigned for
cooperative societies in England, for factory regulation and trade unions.
·
Young
Englandism was a romantic gothic revival aspiring
to a more humane and fraternal society. It drew on a romantic view of
paternalism in medieval aristocracy and was a prototype to one nation Toryism.
It was the political starting place for a clever young novelist, Benjamin
Disraeli, whose novels Coningsby
and Sybil
or the Two Nations expressed its ideas. He promoted the idea that
legitimate rule involved social responsibility. Paternalistic Toryism
campaigned in the 1830s to limit hours and improve factory conditiopns,
and to protect women and child workers.
Young England ideas were taken forward
by Richard Oastler and Michael
Sadler, both Leeds linen merchants.
Industrialists retorted that the new
Tory paternalists cared less about farm labourers on large estates.
The new ideas were not necessarily
supported by those affected by social change. Factory work could given women greater independence. The rural poor found
escape from over populated villages to towns and
factories, escaping dependency. The work was risky, but provided more regular
work and there were opportunities for adventure and new social;
and cultural opportunities.
Problems arose from the lack of good
governance, outwith the traditional control of church
and parish in rural communities.
1831
The constitution was archaic and unjust.
However it was not a significant issue among ordinary
folk. The system worked ok. Rotton boroughs such as Old Sarum which allowed 7
burgesses to elect two MPs had some benefit in allowing unrepresented talent to
find a way into politics. Potwalloper boroughs bizarrely allowed everyone with
a hearth to boil a pot to vote, but brought wide
representation such as 50,000 mostly working class voters in Preston. Those
without the vote used petitions to have some voice. Antiquated, not ideal, but
not seen to be a big issue.
The Great Reform Bill of 1832, the
"Great Charter of 1832" aimed to bring significant change to the
electoral system including the abolition of ‘rotton boroughs’. It passed by a single vote. However
it was defeated in committee. William IV, convinced of the need for Reform,
dissolved Parliament. The elections of October 1831 returned a pro Reform majority.
·
Supporters
of constitutional reform gravitated to the Whigs, who before long started to
call themselves Liberals.
·
Opposition
came from the Tories, led by Sir Robert Peel, wanted to preserve the 1688 constitution and started to call themselves Conservatives.
A second Bill was defeated in the Lords
in October 1831.
1832
A third Bill was amended and delayed in
the Lords and Grey resigned in May 1832. Wellington failed to form a Tory
government and Grey returned to office. The Lords surrendered and the Reform
Act passed in June 1832.
The
Representation of the People Act 1832 was not however democratic.
·
It
abolished potwalloper boroughs which had provided some working
class representation.
·
It
disenfranchised all in receipt of poor law relief.
·
It
expressly excluded women.
·
It
introduced forty shilling freeholders in the counties,
providing a new category of voters who were substantial tenants, more likely to
vote with their landlords.
The total electorate nonetheless
increased by 45% from 497,000 to 811,000, 18% of adult males.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
Great Reform Act of 1832,
a landmark in British political history.
Electoral registers compiled.
The Whigs benefitted by winning a large
majority at an early election. They slashed public spending to 10%.
The Anatomy Act 1832 allowed unclaimed
corpses to be used for medical purposes. This partly explained the fear and
hatred of the workhouse.
1833
Parliament enacted a watered down Factory Act 1833
which attempted to regulate factory hours in the textile industry.
Slavery was abolished in the British
Colonies in 1833 and 780,993 slaves were freed. Canada (as part of the British
Empire) became a destination for American slaves to escape on the “Underground
Railroad”.
The death penalty was ended for all but
murder.
1834
There was a trend towards a more
mechanistic approach based on Utilitarianism and political economy, focused on
science, method, discipline and economy. There were a new breed of inspectors, such as Edwinb
Chadwick who became Secretary of the new Poor Law Commission and control of the
General Board of Health, which introduced for instance the self
flushing narrow diameter sewer.
The Poor Law was reformed in 1834. The
New Poor
Law Act 1834 led to the construction of over 300 workhouses over the next
five years. Outdoor relief forced all paupers into workhouses. There was
considerable opposition particularly in northern England.
See Poverty.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the Poor Laws, the 19th century legislation intended
to discourage poor people from seeking relief instead of work, with handouts
replaced by the workhouse.
The palace of
Westminster caught fire and burned down in 1834.
In the 1830s,
life for farm workers was hard and they could not bear more cuts to their pay.
In Dorset they organised a union to fight back but this brought harsh
punishments. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were six agricultural labourers from
the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, England, who, in
1834, were convicted of swearing a secret oath as members of the Friendly
Society of Agricultural Labourers. They were arrested on charges under an
obscure act during a labour dispute over cut wages before being convicted in R
v Loveless and Others and sentenced to penal transportation to Australia.
People around the country campaigned and won the freedom of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. They were pardoned in 1836 after mass
protests by sympathisers and support from Lord John Russell and returned to
England between 1837 and 1839.
Slavery
In 1814
Castlereagh had pressed the French to agree to abolish the slave trade, during
Napoleon’s brief internment on Elba. Wellington put similar pressure on Spain
and Portugal. The Treaty of Vienna in 1815 included a condemnation of the slave
trade.
Anti
slavery campaigning
peaked in 1833, with 5,000 petitions and about 1.5M signatures.
Parliament
emaciated 800,000 slaves across the empire in 1834 and paid £20M in
compensation to the owners in order to achieve this.
In 1843 British
subjects were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the world. The Boers
responded by trekking out of British territory.
From 1808 to
1870, the Royal Navy had a permanent squadron, sometimes a sixth of its ships,
patrolling from Freetown to intercept slave traders from West Africa. This was
thankless and gruelling. There was exposure to yellow fever. France and US
refused to allow the navy to search their ships. When the trade continued, the
navy adopted more aggressive tactics, including the blockading of rivers. In
1861 it occupied Lagos. Over 60 years it captured hundreds of slave ships and
freed 160,000 slaves.
Britain signed
45 treaties with African rulers to stop the traffic at source. Its campaign
against the aggressive slaving kingdom of Asante, was at the request of
Africans on the coast. Central Africa was devastated by Muslim slavers who took
25,000 to 30,000 people each year during the 1860s. The consul General in Cairo
in the 1860s, Thomas Reade, spied out Egyptian slave markets in disguise.
Palmerstone
ordered seizure of Portuguese slave ships in 1839 and declared Brazilian slave
ships as pirates.
The American
Civil War reversed US policy n 1862.
Whilst not in its
economic interests, British was sufficiently wealthy to allow its humanitarian
and religious lobby to prevail.
In 1885,
Britain pressed for the insertion of an anti slavery
agreement in the Berlin Act on the partition of Africa.
There was no
panacea. There was a huge multiplication of indentured labour and unsaleable
slaves were held cruelly by slavers.
There
was a difficult relationship with settlers. Māoris
from New Zealand first visited London in the 1820s. They encouraged white
settlers in the 1820s and 1830s. Many settlers were innocuous, even benevolent.
However others were less scrupulous. Captain William
Hobson
signed the Treaty
of Waitangi
in 1840 with Māori rulers, intended to control white settlement and
regulate land sale. British troops ended up fighting the Māori in the
1860s to defend the settlers whose aggressive behaviour the British government
deplored.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History,
2023, 543 to 547).
1835
The Merchant Shipping Act led to the
listing of all crews.
1836
The Tithe Commutation Act ended the
ancient system of paying tythes in goods. Fixed charges were introduced. Tithe
maps were prepared across the country.
The Prisoners’ Counsel Act 1836
regularised the adversarial system in court.
1837
Queen Victoria, 1837-1901
An image of Victorian England conveys
convention, ugliness, humourlessness, hypocrisy, harshness
and snobbery. The reality was more complex. There was propriety and convention,
but also emotion and an enthusiasm for modernity.
This was not a time of chaos, but of
growth of new cities, roads and sewers, viaducts, telegraph wires, gas, water,
schooling.
There was a Victorian energy and
confidence.
There was a degree of cultural unity
overlapping the new class structure through a taste for similar things such as
horse racing, cricket, nooks, poetry and paintings.
Victoria was not snobbish, nor racist,
nor insular. She was not typically English and embodied an international idea
of traditional monarchy, becoming in time the matriarch of a European royal
clan. Albert, the Prince Consort was intelligent and earnest. She suirvived six assassination attempts.
London’s first railway station (Euston)
opened.
Beginning of civil registration of
Births, Marriages and Deaths (“BMD”).
Burke’s Commoners of Great Britain and
Ireland published details of land owners and holders
of high rank outside the nobility.
1838
There was a growing conviction, in the
aftermath of the New Poor Law, that the government, elected by the propertied
class, was unfair and hostile to ordinary people.
Chartism
started in 1838. The
People’s Charter was drafted by William Lovett,
an Owenite activist, with its ‘six points’: universal male suffrage; the
removal of the property qualification for MPs; annual elections; equal
constituency sizes; payment for MPs; and secret ballots in elections. It soon
bore 1.2M signatures.
Chartism brought together a range of
causes – Owenism, trade unionism, factory reformers, temperance promoters, land
reformers. They adopted Methodist like approaches with lectures, dances,
sports, sermons etc.
There is an In Our Time podcast on Chartism
Outbreaks of smallpox.
Samuel Morse demonstrated the telegraph.
The Public Record Office established in
Chancery Lane.
1839
The Anti-Corn
Law League, formed in Manchester in 1839, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright.
It condemned trade barriers and aristocratic oppression. It was supported by a
new business class, and by Evangelicals and Dissenters.
The corn laws were heavy duties levied on
imported corn. The landowners and agriculturalists wished to keep foreign corn
out of the country, by imposing duties on imported corn, so that the price of home grown corn would be kept up. The Corn Laws however
caused suffering among the poor and crippled trade.
Farmers led a counter campaign.
The new Postage Scheme
1839-1841 - First War with China (the
“Opium Wars”).
1839-1842 - First Afghan War
The County Police Act allowed voluntary
rural forces.
1840
Railways were
constructed at enormous speed in the 1840s and 1850s. Thackeray in 1860
recognised a new era of the railroad replacing an age of stage coaches, pack horses,
highwaymen, druids and ancient Britons.
With
these changes came a growth in ideas of freedom. Science was the embodiment of
progress. The universe was seen as perpetually developing. The British
considered themselves to be naturally free and became enthralled with free
trade and libertarian language.
Yet Victorian Britain could be intrusive
and authoritarian:
·
The
Factory Acts including the Factory Act 1833 instituted inspection and
enforcement.
·
The
New Poor Law was unparallelled for its social
intervention.
·
The
payment of income tax abolished in 1815 but reintroduced in 1842 required
detailed declaration and inspection of matters long felt to be private matters.
·
A
series of Public Health and Sanitary Acts from 1848 allowed sanitary inspectors to enter private dwellings, order
cleansing, stop nuisances and remove the sick to hospital.
·
The
Contagious Diseases Acts 1864 saw state intervention in vice.
·
The
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824 to curb rowdy
blood sports such as bull baiting. It became Royal from 1840 and transformed
perceptions from national toughness instilled by blood sports.
Local authorities tended to be less
oppressive, but managed local issues financed by local rates including Poor Law
guardians, elected school boards under the Education Act 1870 and watch
committees supervising the police.
Introduction of the Penny Stamp.
Henry Mayhew described the condition of
the poor in London in articles for the Morning Chronicle.
The 1840s were an era of emergencies –
The First Opium War, the New Zealand wars, the First Anglo Aghan War, the First
Sikh War and a dispute with France over influence in
Spain.
It was also a time of economic boom
across Europe as railways were built across Europe using British capital,
entrepreneurs, workmen and equipment, which lasted until 1846.
Britain’s proactive pursuit of global
free trade marked a tension in Anglo Chinese relations. Chinese consumers were
eager to buy opium grown in India, and opium was a valuable
asset to the East India Company including merchants such as Jardine
& Matheson. The authorities in Peking insisted that this was stopped. For
the Quing Empire much was at stake and contact with the outside world was seen
as destabilising on the Chinese empire.
When Canton authorities destroyed opium
stocks, the First
Opium War stated (1840 to 1842). The British governments had other
priorities, but felt it had to uphold its credibility.
The Chinese were alarmed by Royal Navy
frigates sailing up the Pearl River to bombard and occupy Canton. The British
were alarmed by Chinese resistance; some Manchu soldiers killed their families
and committed suicide rather than surrender. Both were shocked by the cruelty
of the other.
1841
The rural counter campaign against the
corn laws gave the Tories a sweeping victory in 1841. The Tories now dominated
the English counties. The Whigs dominated the larger towns, especially in the
north, and Scotland and Ireland. He aimed to steer Britain into safer waters.
Sir
Robert Peel (a Staffordshire landowner) became Prime Minister. He
popularised the name Conservative. However Peel,
though elected to support agriculture, recognised that Britian was becoming an
industrial nation. He was supported by the Duke of Wellington.
In 1841, life expectancy was 41.7 years.
The first national census to record more
detailed information.
The first excursion by rail organised by
Thomas Cook. Launched by cabinet-maker Thomas Cook in Leicestershire in 1841,
the business originally focused on one-day rail excursions.
Richard Beard opened the first
photographic studio in Regent Street, London.
Population of the United Kingdom was
26.8 million.
The new Royal Fine Arts Commission was
appointed in November 1841 to consider the decoration of the newly rebuilt
Houses of Parliament, with a view to 'promoting and encouraging the Fine Arts'
in England. The president was Prince Albert and it was
not his finest hour. It was intended to shape the national memory with a school
of mocumentary historical painting. There was disagreement between the
traditional Whig aspirations with Albert’s aspirations to emphasise the royal.
1842
There were Chartist strikes and riots.
Peel slashed corn and other tariffs and
reintroduced income tax for incomes over £150.
First Edition of the Illustrated London
News.
The Treaty
of Nanking 1842 ceded to Britain the sparsely inhabited island of Hong
Kong, which had excellent anchorage, and opened five ‘treaty ports’, including
Shanghai.
The aftermath was rebellion across
China, the bloody Taiping rebellion (1850 to 1864), civil war in China between
the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The
conflict lasted for 14 years, from its outbreak in 1850 until the fall of
Nanjing, renamed "Tianjing", in 1864.
However, the last rebel forces were not defeated until August 1871. Estimates
of the conflict's death toll range between 20 and 30 million people,
representing 5–10% of China's population. While the Qing ultimately defeated
the rebellion, the victory came at a great cost to the state's economic and
political viability.
The retreat from Kabul during the First
Anglo-Afghan War.
The Mines Act 1842 outlawed the
employment of women and children under 10 in mines.
There was a shift from indirect taxes to
Peel’s income tax.
The Mining
and Collieries Act 1842
prohibited all underground work for women and girls, and for boys under 10.
1843
The New Zealand Wars
The Elizabeth Tower, originally named the
Clock Tower, and popularly known as "Big Ben", was built as a part of
Charles Barry's design for a new Palace of Westminster after the old palace was
largely destroyed by fire on 16 October 1834. Although Barry was the chief
architect of the neo-gothic palace, he turned to Augustus Pugin for the design
of the Clock Tower, which resembles earlier Pugin designs, including one for
Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire. Construction of the tower began on 28 September
1843.
1844
The Companies Act 1844 required the
registration of all companies.
The Factories Act 1844 restricted hours
of work for women and children and required registers to be kept listing child
employees.
Friedrich Engels published The Condition
of the Working Classes in England, based on his work in Manchester.
The Railways Act 1844 extended rail
travel. 200,000 ‘navvies’ were employed to construct new lines across the
country.
The Bank Charter Act 1844 allowed only
the Bank of England to issue banknotes in England.
The First Sikh War 1844.
1845
Failure of the potato crop in Ireland,
leading to the famine. Ireland lose 16% of its
population between 1845 and 1852.
The General Inclosure Act. An Act to
facilitate the Inclosure and Improvement of Commons and Lands held in common.
Enclosure, or the process that ended traditional rights on common land formerly
held in the open field system and restricted the use of land to the owner, is
one of the causes of the Agricultural Revolution and a key factor behind the
labour migration from rural areas to gradually industrializing cities.
Kelly’s Directories began.
The Lunacy and County Asylum Acts
described those with mental illness as patients and provided for inspection by
Masters in Chancery of asylums. Mentally ill persons in workhouses were moved
to asylums.
The first Medical Directory published
with names, addresses ad qualifications of medical practitioners.
There
was a very hot summer. This was the start of a period of economic crisis across
Europe.
The
Hungry
Forties
was a period of economic slump across Europe which began in 1846. A speculative
bubble of railway building burst. There was a dread of mass hunger and a
revolutionary feel across Europe. This was a period of self
examination in Britain.
An
unknown plant disease arrived from America and started to cause an ecological
catastrophe. Potatoes provided a staple cheap diet but
harvests failed across Europe. Ireland, whose population had risen to 8M
(England’s population was 15M) suffered worst. The famine left a dark stain on
English history and bred hatred in years to come.
·
In fact in September 1845, Peel imported American maize for
Ireland to feed 500,000 for three months.
·
In
January 1846 a suspension of the Corn Laws allowed untaxed imports.
·
The
Public Works (Ireland) Bill provided employment.
·
Irish
nationalists tended to minimise the issue to avoid begging to England.
After
the temporary suspension of the Corn Laws, they were formally abolished in
January 1846.
There
was angry debate and a split in the Conservative party. Two thirds of the party
agreed with Pitt that the agricultural sector needed support, as the provider
of church revenue, justice and provision for the poor.
Liberals and Radicals had overwhelmingly (95%) voted for repeal. Peel’s
followers, including William Ewart Gladstone, gravitated to the Liberals. The
repeal had little immediate economic effect, but it split the Conservative party.
Peel’s
government fell after repealing the Corn Laws in June 1846.
A
Whig Government under Lord John Russell came to power.
The
end of the Corn Laws was the end of a political idea which saw Britain as
primarily an agricultural country, feeding itself, with a paternalistic landed
elite, the vision of Burke, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
By
1846 over half the population lived in towns.
The
Whigs continued the public works programme in Ireland which employed over
700,000 at its peak.
1847
In January 1847, direct food distribution
in Ireland through soup kitchens fed 3M people a day. Voluntary contributions
reached £435,000 (about £100M today).
However the assistance to Ireland was not
enough in the face of the famine. It was immense in scale and duration and
could not have been prevented. The Whig government might have lacked foresight,
but it wasn’t guilty of deliberate heartlessness. Public opinion blamed the
Irish landlords and prosperous tenant farmers for failing to meet their
obligation to feed the poor.
A typhus epidemic killed more the 30,000
people.
The Factories Act 1847, also known as the
Ten Hours Act restricted the working hours of women and young persons
(13–18) in textile mills to 10 hours per day. The practicalities of running a
textile mill were such that the Act should have effectively set the same limit
on the working hours of adult male mill-workers.
The Consolidated General Order regulated
life in workhouses across the country.
1848
Chartism continued to campaign for
parliamentary suffrage. The climax in April 1848 was a mass meeting at
Kennington Common. Revolution was in the air. 85,000 special constables were recruited and Quen Victoria retired to the Isle of Wight.
There were rousing speeches, but the meeting broke up peacefully. The petition
was taken to Westminster, but again rejected.
Chartism then faded from public
consciousness. In Britain, fundamental liberties had already been won in 1688.
Britain had developed a tradition for peaceful protest. Extremism within
Chartism was seen as alien. There was a feeling that the undemocratic government
nevertheless responded to public demands.
The California
gold rush (1848–1855) was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when
gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The
news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest
of the United States and abroad. The sudden influx of gold into the money
supply reinvigorated the American economy; the sudden population increase
allowed California to go rapidly to statehood in the Compromise of 1850. The
Gold Rush had severe effects on Native Californians and accelerated the Native
American population's decline from disease, starvation, and the California
genocide.
Year of Revolutions across Europe. First
stirrings of rebellion arose in Switzerland and Naples. On 24 February 1848
there was an uprising in Paris, which installed a democratic republic. Revolution
spread across Germany, the Habsburg Empire and Italy.
The springtime of revolution started to
turn more ugly. There was a workers’ uprising in Paris
in June 1848. Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected President
of the French Republic in December 1848.
Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels’ The Communist Manifesto.
Cholera epidemic claimed 52,000 lives.
Public Health Act 1848.
1849
The first edition of Who’s Who.
First edition of quarterly Notes and
Queries.
1850
The first emigrants arrived in New
Zealand.
The first census in the United States to
name all household members.
1851
After the California Gold Rush began in
1848, many people went there from Australia, so the New South Wales government
sought approval from the British Colonial Office for the exploitation of
mineral resources, and offered rewards for finding
gold. The Australian
gold rushes began in 1851. Significant numbers of workers moved from
elsewhere in Australia and overseas to where gold had been discovered. Gold had
been found several times before, but the colonial government of New South Wales
(Victoria did not become a separate colony until 1 July 1851) had suppressed
the news out of the fear that it would reduce the workforce and destabilise the
economy.
Population of the United Kingdom was
27.5 million.
The Great
Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Great
Exhibition or the Crystal Palace Exhibition, was an international exhibition
that took place in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October 1851. It was the
first in a series of World's Fairs, exhibitions of culture and industry that
became popular in the 19th century. The event was organised by Henry Cole and
Prince Albert. It was housed in the astonishing Crystal Palace designed by
Joseph Paxton. Victoria declared its opening the
greatest day in our history. It was a source of national pride. Over the
six months during which it was open, an average of 43,000 people attended each
day, the largest indoor crowd ever.
Britain congratulated herself as the
greatest and most highly civilised people.
Not everyone was so congratulatory of
progress. John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold were scathing of materialism.
There is an In Our Time podcast on the
1851 Great Exhibition,
housed in the magnificent Crystal Palace, the exhibition showcased Victorian
Britain's technical ingenuity and industrial might.
The first Canadian census.
The first Religious
census was held on 30 March 1851 recording all places of worship across
England, Scotland and Wales.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed
himself Napoleon III in a coup. Britain reacted with relief that she had
escaped the revolutionary violence of the last few years and with sympathy for
the victims of oppression, and suspicion of the new French regime.
Britain was supportive of emerging
nationalist leaders including the Hungarian leader and opponent of Habsburg
domination in Hungary, Lajos Kossuth; and the Italian leaders Guiseppe Mazzini
and Guiseppe Garibaldi.
1852
To Britain’s alarm Napoleon III revived Frances
empirical ambitions, forbidden by the Treaty of Paris 1815. This was a blow to Cobdenite internationalists and the peace lobby.
Threatened by a new danger, Britain
started to increase its naval expenditure.
At the start of two decades of global
crisis: China was still in turmoil and there was unrest in British colonies.
This sparked off a move towards
increased taxation for defence and consolidation of the empire.
The Burials Act allowed local
authorities to open cemeteries to relieve the over crowding
of churchyards.
Serious floods in Holmfirth in West
Yorkshire.
1853-1856
Gladstone was chancellor in 1853 to
1854.
Gladstone’s budget of 1853 set some
financial rules for the new era including a consensus on the need for curbing
the spending of taxpayer’s money and avoiding redistribution.
Gladstone
commissioned the Tory, Sir Stafford Northcote
and the Whig Sir Charles Trevelyan to eliminate patronage in the civil service.
·
The
civil service was e3fficient and relatively accountable.
·
However
there was no clear line between politics and administration.
·
The
Civil Service Commission 1855 oversaw recruitment.
·
The
Order in Council 1870 required recruitment by competitive examination.,
·
These
reforms did not make the civil service democratic, but provided a barrier to corruption,.
·
The
new civil service was still small – In the 1860s, the Foreign Office had 85 and
the whole UK civil service had 1,173 professional grade civil servants; 1801 superior grade and 10,000 general clerks.
·
In
time it became the domain of public school Oxbridge
graduates. Balliol College Oxford grew a reputation for training a national
elite.
The aim was to create a neutral state
which was non political.
Alongside this the Crown took an
increasingly apolitical role. It was a symbol and the apex of power. Walter Bagehot in
his English Constitution (1867) referred to the dignified part in
contrast to the efficient part. The Crown had a role to be consulted,
to encourage and to warn. Vicvtoria continued to
influence foreign policy, and Church and military appointments. The Crown
generally benefitted from a growing legitimacy of state institutions which saw
a decline in Republicanism.
The Crimean War, told in the story
of John Farndale (FAR00337).
This was the first war which was borught directly to public
knowledge by the press led by the pioneering Times correspondent, William
Howard Russell, early photography and the work of Alfred Tennyson.
Britain’s military weakness and inadequate leadership was
exposed:
·
The stoical
suffering and courage of the troops.
·
Florence Nightuingale’s
purge of care of the woundd and sick, alongside Mary Seacole who sold food and
drink.
Britain became an ally to France, which
gave Napoleon III an opportunity to remodel Europe.
A London cholera epidemic killed more then 10,000 people.
Records for naval ratings began to give
details of birth, physical appearance, occupation and
ships where served.
Vaccination against smallpox,
administered through workhouses, became compulsory and registers of those
vaccinated were kept from 1862.
1854
Large urban populations and dropping
life expectancy corresponded to Dickens’ images of Coketown
(1854). A French visitor to Birmingham commented, if the people go to hell,
they won’t find anything new.
Yet these views
missed as much as they say. There were horrible slums, but most people didn’t
live in slums. Those in England were probably better off than elsewhere in the
world.
The Battle of Balaclava.
The Great Fire of Newcastle and
Gateshead.
1856
The Second
War with China, the Arrow War, began when Chinese authorities
arrested the crew of the British registered Arrow. The governor of Hiong
Kong, Sir John Bowring tried to acquire greater commercial access by China in
November 1856. The Chinese governor of Canton offered a reward for British
heads. The Earl of Elgin was sent to negotiate. He disliked the Hong Kong merchants, but allowed a bombardment of Canton in December
1857 and an expedition to Peking in 1860.
There was a minor conflict with Persia
in 1856 to 1857.
The County and Borough Police Act 1856
required the compulsory establishment of county forces.
1857-1859
The Indian Mutiny
The Bengal army mutinied in February, April and May 1857. This spread across north central India
and involved peasants and princes.
Its causes were perhaps a combination
of:
·
British
military exposure from the Crimean War.
·
A
prophesy of British defeat a hundred years after Clive’s victory in 1757.
·
Political,
economic and religious grievances.
·
Deteriorating
conditions of service in what had one been an attractive employment.
·
Princely
dislike of British takeovers of ‘lapsed’ states.
·
The
abolition of sati, the burning of widows to legalise remarriage, a
historical practice in India in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting
atop her deceased husband's funeral pyre.
·
Anonymous
papers circulating declaring that Britain sought to overthrow all religions.
·
The
introduction of new rifle cartridges believed to be greased with pork and cow
fat, polluting for Muslims and Hindus.
The British were horrified by the savage
violence. At Cawnpore,
after a three week siege from, June to July 1857, only a few men escaped and
the 200 captured women and children were butchered and thrown into a well.
The British, particularly those whose
families had been killed, took the lead in response. Villages suspected of
harbouring rebels were burned. The governor general, Lord Canning (“Clemency Canning”),
tried to reign in the response.
The revolt did not spread beyond the
north central provinces. The Madras and Bombay armies stayed loyal to the
Crown, as did the Sikhs and Gurkhas of the Bengal army.
The Siege of Delhi was one of the
decisive conflicts of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Seeking a symbol around
which to rally, the first sepoys to rebel sought to reinstate the power of the
Mughal Empire, which had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent in the previous
centuries. Lacking overall direction, many who subsequently rebelled also
flocked to Delhi. Large numbers of rebels were committed to the defence of a
single fixed point, perhaps to the detriment of their prospects elsewhere, and
their defeat at Delhi was thus a very major military setback. The British
recapture of Delhi and the refusal of the aged Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah II
to continue the struggle deprived the rebellion of much of its national
character. Although the rebels still held large areas, there was little
co-ordination between them, and the British were able to overcome them
separately.
3,000 British and 8,000 Indian troops
stormed the city on 14 September 1857. There was bloody stalemate in the narrow
streets. Eventually the rebels fled. Soldiers looted the city, especially the
Red Fort.
Fighting continued for about two years.
The East India Company was abolished and the Indian possessions transferred to the
Crown. 600 princely states continued as semi autonomous
dependencies.
There followed a pardon to rebels not
involved in murder, and a State of Peace was finally declared in 1859.
Following the mutiny, India became de industrialised,
but from the 1850s, mechanised cotton mills were built. Famous names appeared
such as J N Tata who visited Lancashire in 1872 and his son Sir Dorabji Tata, who established a huge
steelworks in 1911. Traditional subsistence farming went into decline.
There were famines in 1876-9, 1889-91 and 1896-1902. There was a growth in
export orientated commercial agriculture and railway building.
1857
The East India Company passed control of
India to the British government (“the Raj”), which lasted from 1858 to 1947.
The Matrimonial Causes Act allowed
divorce on grounds of adultery.
1858
The Great Stink in London accelerated
the construction of sewers.
There is an In Our Time podcast on The
Great Stink of 1858 and
the work of Joseph Bazalgette to fix it.
On 14 January
1858, Italian nationalists threw bombs at Napoleon III. It emerged that some of
the bombers were from England. To placate the furious reaction from France, the
government introduced a Conspiracy to Murder Bill, but there was public outcry.
Palmerstone resigned but returned to office the following year.
The rapprochement
with France over Crimea, turned to a French invasion scare. Napoleon didn’t
want war however and he pointedly invited Victoria and Albert to a gala at Cherbourg,
an ambiguous invitation, since Cherbourg would be the invasion point for an
attack on England.
1859
Napoleon went to war with Austria to
destroy its power over the Italian states. In 1859 he defeated the Austrians in
northern Italy. Victorian liberals were supportive of Italians in their
struggle for liberty.
Disraeli's Reform Bill.
Diphtheria epidemic.
Charles Darwin’s On
the Origin of Species was published.
Medical registers began to record
medical practitioners.
1860
In January 1860, Napoleon agreed to a
commercial treaty with Britain, negotiated between Richard Cobden and the
French free trade economist, Michel Chevalier.
This open up
the French market to British goods. It was the first, but short lived European
economic community, extended across western and central Europe and
including free movement of peoples, rights of citizenship and a form of single
currency, the Latin Currency Union. It was exactly what the free traders were looking
for.
However later in 1860, Napoleon annexed
Nice and Savoy, which were Sardinian territories. She then launched the world’s
most powerful warship.
Enormous fortifications, Palmerstone’s
follies, were quickly built in Portsmouth, Plymouth and elsewhere. An even
bigger warship, HMS Warrior, was built. Men flocked to join the volunteers
around cricket clubs, free masons, and the London Scottish.
The Royal Navy supported Garibaldi in
his landing of a tiny army in Sicily, and then on to invade Naples. The small
Italian states collapsed and a Sardinian government, encouraged by the British
was established under King Victor Emmanuel and his pro
British minister, Cavour. The peninsula was united as the Kingdom of
Italy. Garibaldi was enthusiastic in his praise of Britain and adopted the
English way. He visited England in 1864. Thomas Cook began tourist trips to
Italy.
The Māori War in New Zealand.
An Anglo French
force landed in China to march to Peking in August
1860. Private Moyse of the Buffs was taken prisoner and beheaded for
refusing to know tow to a Chinese officer, And
thus with eyes that would not shrink, With knee to man unbent, Unfaltering on
its dreadful brink, To his red grave he went. Elgin ordered the destruction
of the Summer Palace.
The Convention of Peking 1860 extended
concessions to foreigners, ceded Kowloon and allowed British diplomats at
Peking.
Not wanting a collapse, Britian treated China
as an informal protectorate. In 1860 Major Charles (“Chinese”) Gordon volunteered for the 'Arrow' war against
the Chinese. In May 1862 Gordon's corps of engineers was assigned to strengthen
the European trading centre of Shanghai, which was threatened by the insurgents
of the Taiping Rebellion. A year later he became commander of the 3,500-man
peasant force raised to defend the city. During the next 18 months Gordon's
troops played an important role in suppressing the Taiping uprising and took
command of the force at Songjiang, which had received the name of "Ever
Victorious Army". Gordon led them at once to the relief of Changsu, a town 40 miles northwest of Shanghai.
1861
Population of UK was 29 million.
1861 to 1865
The American Civil War
began in 1861. At first, the southern
Confederate armies were successful, better led and motivated.
There was strong anti
slavery feeling in Britian, with a strong impact from Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852). The novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward
African Americans and slavery in the US, and is said
to have "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War".
However President Abraham Lincoln repeatedly
indicated that the north was not fighting for an end to slavery, but for
preservation of the Union and the British saw expansion threatening Canada. The
southern states were the main suppliers of raw materials to Britain.
Opinion was divided. The government were
cautious; Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary warned They who in
quarrels interpose, Will often get a bloody nose.
The American Civil War led to a blockade
of cotton exports which had a devastating effect on the English textile
industry. This led to riots in 1863.
In Russia, Alexander II emancipated
serfs.
1862
In Summer 1862, Napoleon III suggested
mediation in the American Civil War led by France, Britain
and Russia. Gladstone formed the view that secession of the south was
inevitable. However Abolishonists
disagreed. Many textile workers, especially in Lancashire, suffering from the
war in the south, also disagreed.
The Land Registry Act 1862 led to
recording of the conveyance of land. The system was improved in further Acts in
1875, 1897 and 1925.
The last recorded slaving voyage left
from Liverpool.
Prince Albert died of Typhus.
1863
The first urban underground railway
opened from Paddington to Farringdon.
The Confederates were defeated at the bloody
Battle
of Gettysburg.
Japan was ruled by the feudal shogun
government, with a puppet emperor, which forbade foreign access. After 1853
foreign diplomats were reluctantly admitted, but were
often threatened and attacked. Foreign ships were fired on in 1863 and as
British squadron bombarded the port of Kagoshima, which sparked a restoration
of the emperor in 1867 followed by a period of economic westernisation.
1864
A flood in Sheffield left 270 dead.
In 1864, Prussia and Austria annexed the
mostly German speaking Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark.
1865
The Morant Bay
rebellion in October 1865 began
with a protest march to the courthouse by hundreds of people led by preacher
Paul Bogle in Morant Bay, Jamaica. Some were armed with sticks and stones.
After seven men were shot and killed by the volunteer militia, the protesters
attacked and burned the courthouse and nearby buildings. Twenty-five people
died. Over the next two days, poor freedmen rose in rebellion across most of
St. Thomas-in-the-East parish. The governor, Edward Eyre, declared martial law.
Houses were burned amd nearly 500 were killed. There
was an outcry in Britain and Eyre was removed.
1866
A cholera epidemic killed 5,500 people
in London’s East End.
In 1866 Prussia declared war on Austria.
It had swift military success and declared the North German Confedxeration.
1867
Voting was not seen widely as an
individual human right. Democracy was about representation of interests and
there was an acceptance that landowners and businessmen could represent
employees. Electoral reform was therefore a matter of tidying up after the 1832
Act. Often it was part of the political scheming. Gladstone saw an opportunity
in franchising a select proportion of the working class as buttressing his
policy for cutting expenditure and maintaining peace. Disraeli under a slogan
of Household Suffrage looked to have an Act past that would keep the Tories in
power.
The Second
Reform Act 1867 gave householders the vote in borough constituencies, but
not in the counties. New voters in towns voted Liberal anyway and there was
little effect on Tory voters. About 30% of adult men could now vote.
There were some indications of future
support for women’s suffrage.
The general election in 1868 was barely
affected by the reforms.
The larger
electorate was harder to manage. Widening the franchise began years of
electoral corruption and a gilded age of bribery. A common practice was to hire
‘committee’ rooms’
in public houses with free refreshments and cash for expenses. Electoral
turnout could be encouraged up to 90%. The Liberal candidate for Bradford in 1868 hired rooms in 158 pubs and
spent £7,000 (well over £1M today).
The
MP for Windsor was so popular that he would have retained his seat for as long
as he liked and was a personal; friend to every
inhabitant of the borough.
There
was also a development of more elaborate political organisation, such as the
Conservative Primrose
League,
which by 1900 included half a million women.
New
professional politicians emerged, such as ‘Radical Joe’ Chamberlain and Lord
Randolph Churchill, who adopted calculated publicity seeking by taking on
controversial issues to attract a national following and force themselves to
the front of British politics.
The Second Great Reform Act enfranchised
male town dwellers and widened eligibility for men in rural areas.
The British North America Act 1867 was passed
for the Confederation of North American Colonies, united under the name, the
Dominion of Canada. This was the start of a period of consolidation of empire. In due course Australia, New Zealand and South
Africa followed.
The Abyssinian Expedition.
The Agricultural Gangs Act 1867
regulated the employment of women and children and required licences for gang
masters.
The new Palace of Westminster was
completed in 1867.
1868
Disraeli became prime minister in 1868
(on the resignation of the Earl of Derby due to gout).
The abolition of public executions.
The transportation pf convicts to
Australia ended.
1869
The Debtor’s Act 1869 ended imprisonment
for debt.
The completion of the Suez Canal. This led
to a strong presence by Britain in Egypt, Sudan and
East Africa.
1870
The Married Women‘s
Property Act 1870 gave married women the right to keep their own earnings and
property inherited after marriage.
Women now admitted to Oxford and
Cambridge Universities.
The Agricultural Depression – land
values dropped and extensive bankruptcies amongst farmers.
Teachers were required to keep
attendance lists and log books of events on a weekly
basis.
1870-1871
The Franco-Prussian War 1870 to 1871. In
July 1870 Prussia’s Otto von Bismark went to war with Napoleon III’s armies of
France. In September 1870 Paris was besieged.
In January 1871 a German Empire was
proclaimed at Versailles, consuming all the German states except Austria and
the annexation of a large slice of north eastern
France.
A new era in European history had begun.
Britain was generally sympathetic to
German unification and was friendly with the new Italian state. In 1870, most
Britons felt France was the main aggressor. Victoria’s eldest daughter was heir
to the Prussian throne. Britain was most concerned by the independence of
Belgium.
1871
Population of UK was 31.6 million
Bank holidays were introduced for bank workers and soon were practised more
widely.
The Great Gale hit the north east coast of England.
The Trades Union Act
The Regulation of the Forces Act 1871
(“the Cardwell Reforms”) created a regimental structure for the army.
The Paris Commune insurrection in May
1971.
There was though a burgeoning of concern
about the new power of Germany. The Battle of Dorking by G T Chesney imagined a
German invasion of Britain.
1872
The Ballot Act (secret ballot) made
voting private but had little effect on corruption except possibly to help
voters take bribes from both sides.
1873
The Second Ashanti War
The Panic of 1873 was the start of an
economic depression from 1873 to 1877.
The Returns of Owners of Land listed
those with more then one acre in England and Wales.
1874
Disraeli was Prime Minister in 1874
after an election victory.
The Public Worship Regulation Act
The Factory Act 1874 introduced a 56 hour week.
The Births and Deaths registration Act
made registration compulsory, within 42 days.
Massive storms hit the Yorkshire coast.
1875
The Employers and Workmen Act
1875 recognised a right to collective bargaining and soon led to
unionisation being seen as a right.
·
“Combination”
by workers became legal in the 1820s.However the Master and Servants Acts 1823
and 1867 continued to punish workers for breaking contracts.
·
After
1875 the British workforce became more unionised. This was a contrast to the
position in France, Germany and US.
·
Unions
tended to be peaceful but adversarial with employers.
A Christian
uprising in Turkish ruled Bosnia and Bulgaria was denounced as the Bulgarian
Horrors. A Russian army invaded Bulgaria and marched on Constantinople.
Disraeli took
the traditional approach to defend the Ottoman Empire against Russia.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell patented the
telephone.
The Battle of Little Big Horn in USA.
Disraeli warned the Russians off
Constantinople. The chant, We don’t want to
fight, but by jingo if we do gave rise to a new notion of jingoism.
1877-1878
Disraeli and the Queen agreed to
Victoria’s proclamation as Empress of India.
The Russo-Turkish War.
1877
Britain annexed the Transvaal.
1878-1879
The Second War with Afghanistan.
A Congress in Berlin in 1878 shored up
the core of the Ottoman Empire and ceded Cyprus to Britain.
1878
The Factory and Workshop Act 1878 consolidated
previous legislation and applied it to all trades. The m,inim working age was raised to 10 years old and
children under 10 were to attend school. The age was later raised to 11 in 1891
and 12 in 1901.
1879
The Cape had been taken as a naval base
during the Napoleonic Wars. There followed a familiar pattern of reluctant
imperial expansion led by settlers, mostly Dutch Boers, who were difficult to
control.
The British were thus drawn in to the
Zulu wars who saw early triumph against the British at Isandlwana
in 1879.
A public telephone service was
introduced in Britain.
1880
Disraeli was defeated in 1880 and died
in April 1881.
The First Anglo-Boer War.
The Elementary Education Act 1880 made
schooling compulsory for 5 to 10 year olds and
children under 13 in work had to demonstrate a certain standard.
Greenwich Meantime (“GMT”) was
introduced across Great Britain.
The first British telephone directory.
1881
The Boers decimated a small British
force at Majuba
in February 1881.
The UK population was 35 million.
The agricultural depression across Europe
struck Ireland hard. Tensions were inflamed between largely Protestant
landlords and largely Catholic tenants. London’s first reaction was coercion,
detention without trial and mayhem followed with disruptive Irish
representation at Westminster.
A Home Rule Party emerged led by the fox
hunting, cricket playing nationalist squire, Charles
Stuart Parnell.
The Land Act 1881 created a land court
to arbitrate land rents and increase tenant rights.
1882
In Ireland hardline nationalists stabbed
the Chief Secretary for Ireland and his deputy in Phoenix Park Dublin.
The Married Women’s Property Act 1882
gave married women in England, Wales and Ireland the
same rights as single women to control their financial affairs, including
ownership of property, running a business, being liable for debts and making
wills.
1883
The Corrupt Practices Act 1883 limited
the amount of money that could be spent and started to have an impact on
corruption. By the 1900s people gradually become less tolerant of corruption.
1884
The Scramble for Africa
The scramble for Africa began in the
southern Mediterranean.
In 1881 the French claimed a
protectorate over Morocco.
Britain’s main interest was driven by
events in Egypt. The Suez Canal was built by French engineers in the 1860s.
Disraeli had bought the near bankrupt Khedive’s shares in the canal in 1874. To
ensure the honouring of Egyptian debt, a prototype IMF was formed as an
international commission to manage state finances. In June 1882 British troops
occupied Egypt after anti western riots. Gladstone
was Prime Minister. A nationalist coup under Arabi Pasha was defeated by a
British military force in September 1882. Gladstone was sympathetic to Egypptian independence, but Evelyn Baring was appointed
agent and Consul General and remained, effectively as governor, for the next 24
years. Had this episode not occurred there would probably have been no scramble.
Another Berlin Conference divided Africa
among the European colonial powers. Proponents of the approach saw it as
progressive, taking responsibility for exploitation and victimisation across
Africa. Britain pressed for agreement to abolish slavery in states taken over
by European states.
·
France
laid claim to vast areas in western and central Africa.
·
Italy
joined in and sought Libya and Ethiopia.
·
Germany
entered the race.
·
Semi
independent African states including Ethiopia, Egypt ,
Liberia, Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the Muslim Sokoto Caliphate also
expanded their territories.
·
Individuals
also became involved including King Leopold of the Belgians’ interest in Congo
and Cecil Rhodes who set up the British South African Trading Company.
Whitehall was unenthusiastic,
but went along with the momentum. In 1885 Lord Salisbury, the Prime
Minister dismissed the drawing of lines on maps where no white man’s foot
ever trod.
However the British claimed and occupied:
·
West
African coastal outposts in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and the vast colony Nigeria
to keep the French out.
·
In
East Africa, it saw no particular economic motive, but
was driven to suppress the slave trade. The former slaving island of Zanzibar
became a Protectorate and the mainland territories
further north became British East Africa, later Kenya.
Britain’s involvement in Egypt enmeshed her
in a struggle with Egypt’s southern colony, the Sudan.
In 1883 the new leader, the Mahdi annihilated
an Egyptian army of 10,000 men commanded by the British officer, Hicks Pasha. The
Gladstone government were unwilling to get involved, but sent General Charles “Chinese”
Gordon, an eccentric, unpredictable, dangerous commander, who was as fatalistic
about death as his opponents. He refused to evacuate Khartoum, obliging
Gladstone to send a force to fight to Mahdists in 1884. British troops arrived
in Khartoum two days after it had fallen and the romanticised
death of Gordon caused a backlash against Gladstone at home.
The Third
Reform Act 1884 gave the vote to most male householders in the countryside.
After the 1884
reform gave near male democracy, there was a trend away from moralism towards
economics and sociology, with a focus on concepts like unemployment. People
turned to Darwin to explain social conditions as a cause of deterioration.
The Fabian Society was
formed in 1884, a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance
the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and
reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. The
Fabian Society was also historically related to radicalism, a left-wing liberal
tradition.
1885
In March 1885,
the Penjdeh incident, a Russian threat in
Afghanistan, was another crisis, leading to Asian rivalry with Russia.
1886
Gladstone's Home Rule Bill for Ireland. Gladstone
was converted to Home Rule and felt that a self governing Ireland would curb extremism and
‘outgrow popery’. The issue opened a political rift and split the Liberal
Party. Gladstone’s Bill was defeated in 1884 by a Unionist Alliance with Tories
and Liberal Unionists.
1887
Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee
1888
The first Kodak camera.
Jack the Ripper murders began in
Whitechapel.
The start of professional football.
1889
First moving pictures recorded on
celluloid.
The Prevention of Cruelty to and
Protection of, Children Act 1889.
Charles Booth began a detailed survey of
the London Poor including a map (The Life and Labour of the People).
1891
The population of the United Kingdon was
37.8 million.
200 lost their lives in the Great
Blizzard.
1892
Despite splits over the Irish Question,
the Liberals emerged as the largest party in the 1892 elections.
Gladstone’s
second Irish Home Rule Bill unlike the first attempt, which was defeated in the
House of Commons, the second Bill was passed by the Commons but vetoed by the
House of Lords.
The
Conservative and Unionist Party became the predominant political force for more
than a century.
The
Elementary Education (School Attendance) Act 1893 raised the school leaving age
to 11 (and in 1899, to 12) years.
The
Independent
Labour Party
was founded in Bradford, a non Marxists Socialist party. It
attracted future politicians including James Keir Hardie and James Ramsay
MacDonald.
1894
Gladstone finally resigned in 1894.
The Parish Councils Bill
The Royal Mail started to deliver
picture postcards.
The Local Government Act 1894
established Urban and Rural District Councils and Parish Councils elected by
rate payers.
1895
In the 1895 elections, all the
candidates of the new Independent Labour Party came bottom of the poll. Most
unions and workers remained Liberal.
The Factories and Workshops Bill
The notification of infectious diseases
became compulsory.
The first Dictionary of National
Biography.
In South Africa, the Boers, patriarchal
and racists colonial farmers, had established a turbulent South African Republic.
The discovery of gold and diamond turned the lands into a wild west and income
from mining allowed the Boers to build up supplies of arms and ammunition to
shoot down all the armies of Europe.
The New Colonial Secretary, Joseph
Chamberlain, supported by Cecil Rhodes, a diamond millionaire felt that
security required a reunification of the empire.
A plan was hatched to ferment an
uprising in South Africa by secret encouragement of the Jameson Raid
into the Transvaal in December 1895. However the
raiders were rounded up by the Boers and it became a fiasco.
1896-1899
The Sudan War
1896
The invention of the wireless telegraph
invented by Marconi was first used in England.
Eleven years after the death of Gordon,
General Kitchener led an Anglo Egyptian force against the Mahdists.
1897
The Diamond Jubilee.
The Spithead review.
1898
The Battle of Omdurman in September 1848
was fought during the
Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan between a British–Egyptian expeditionary force
commanded by British Commander-in-Chief (sirdar) Major General Horatio
Herbert Kitchener and a Sudanese army of the Mahdist State, led by Abdallahi
ibn Muhammad (the Khalifa), the successor to the self-proclaimed Mahdi,
Muhammad Ahmad. The battle took place on 2 September 1898, at Kerreri, north of Omdurman. The battle was romanticised for
the last full scale cavalry charge, in which the 23 year old
Winton Churchill took part.
The value of total estate was shown in
probate indexes in England and Wales.
There was concern at US threats against
British Guiana in 1895 and then an attack on Spain in 1898 to seize the
Philippines and make Cuba a satellite.
1899
The Victoria County History provided detailed
commentaries on each county including details of buildings of historical note.
See also British History on line.
1899-1902
The Second Anglo-Boer War
Britain had built up forces in the Cape
after the fiasco of the Jameson Raid. The Boers declared war on Britain in
October 1899. Britain’s garrisons at Ladysmith
and Mafeking
were besieged and relief forces were badly mauled in December 1899.
Opinion at home was divided. Liberals
felt that further intervention was immoral and expensive. Others, including the
Fabian Society, supported further intervention.
The majority view was for continued
intervention and led to a Conservative victory at the khaki election in October
1900.
The war became more onerous than had
been imagined. British soldiers were icked off by concealed snipers armed with
Mauser rifles. The defeat at Spion Kop became renown.
A third of army recruits were rejected
for their physical unfitness. This was taken as a sign of biological
deterioration, although in reality it was because the
fit young folk found better paid jobs.
Volunteers from across Europe and from
Ireland joined the Boers. The British were reinforced by Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The British force built up to
250,000 strong commanded by Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Sir Herbert Kitchener
of Omdurman.
Kitchener embarked on a scorched earth
policy, setting up barbed wire fences across the country protected by
blockhouses and armoured trains and civilians were evacuated to overcrowded concentration
camps.
The Boers surrendered in 1902 and
accepted British sovereignty and a federation was formed with the British colonies
of the Cape and Natal.
However the Boers largely won the peace and self government was gradually conceded. The losers were the
Africans who were left to a racist government, with Swaziland, Bechuanaland and
Basutoland continuing to remain outwith the new
government’s regime.
This was a period of experiments with
eugenics, and ‘national efficiency’, exhorting the middle classes to reproduce
more, but it didn’t go to the horrendous more radical ideas of the 1940s in
Germany.
1900
Higher elementary schools provided
education from 10 to 15 years old.
1901
The House of Saxe
Coburg Gotha and House of Windsor