The Great Turning Points of British History (19 page)

Foreign challenge contributed directly to domestic crisis in Britain. A sense of state and society as tottering were captured by the Gordon Riots in 1780, which brought violent crowds to the centre of London, and by the collapse of the long-serving ministry of Lord North in 1782. This collapse led George III to threaten to abdicate and to go to Hanover, a threat that captured a sense of political and personal breakdown.

The long term, however, is the crucial perspective for 1776. American independence permanently transformed the nature of the British Empire. Prior to then, the bulk of the subjects of the British crown were of British, or at least European, descent, spoke English, were Christian, and were governed – albeit not to the satisfaction of many in North America – through local legislatures. American independence, however, revealed important deficiencies in the incorporating character of British Empire, deficiencies that shattered this empire and that were to be tested thereafter in relations with Ireland.

The loss of America was followed, as a result of repeated British successes in war between 1790 and 1815, particularly in India and at the expense of France and its allies, by the creation of a very different British Empire. In this, the bulk of the subjects were not of European descent, did not speak English, were not Christian, and were not governed through local legislatures. This very different imperialism had a major impact, not only on conquered areas, but also in Britain itself.

Furthermore, the American Declaration of Independence led to an important division in the British political tradition, one of great importance at the global level. The Declaration asserted a set of principles that suggested a radically different political system, one in which inherited privilege and power were replaced by a fairer society that was open to talent. In time, these values were to influence Britain powerfully, in part as a result of the American success. The example of liberty and freedom in North America was a potent one elsewhere, and not only for radicals like Tom Paine.

Moreover, the creation of an independent state in North America was to ensure the combination of dynamic expansion on the most promising open frontier of the western world with a political society that owed much to the eighteenth-century British Whig tradition. Whig freedoms, not least of self-government and self-expression, and a limitation on the power of the Church, were enshrined in the American constitution and, thereafter, remained key to American exceptionalism. Many people, of course, were excluded from the initial span of American liberty, most prominently slaves and Native Americans, but the prospectus of freedom proved one that was extendable to embrace the immigrant groups that entered North America in large numbers, many from the British Isles.

The hold of Whig freedoms on the American psyche has proved long-lived, so the events of 1776 helped ensure that British political culture remained crucial at the world scale in the early twenty-first century, even after Britain had been subsumed into an inflexible European superstate with individual freedoms shadowed by collectivist solutions.

Moreover, many of the liberal ideas that played a central role in British assumptions in the nineteenth century were taken up by American writers and policy makers from the 1940s, in part, initially, in criticism of the protectionism then shown by the British Empire. Drawing on Adam Smith and others, there was a focus on free trade, and the unfettered movement of money, as political and economic goods, and thus as central goals for government. There was also the notion of a benign and mutually beneficial world order: a goal that proved very difficult in practice, as is very much shown today in the Middle East, but that was an alternative to an empire simply of control, constraint and coercion.

The year 1776 also saw the publication of two very significant books. Adam Smith, a Glasgow professor, published
The Wealth of Nations
, which provided the basis for modern economic theory (an achievement marked by his appearance on the £20 note in 2007). Smith argued the case for the free trade that was to become the ideology of the nineteenth-century British state and economy. This was the cause of much prosperity, in Britain and around the world, as well as of some hardship on the part of those who suffered from the greater international trade and economic specialization that resulted.

Also published were the first volumes of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon, an enlightened MP. In place of a cyclical theory of history, Gibbon’s work suggested that progress was possible, and claimed that it was not inevitable that a fresh wave of barbarians would destroy Britain as had happened in Rome. He also argued that even if new barbarians brought down European civilization, it had already been reborn on the other side of the Atlantic.

1756
Start of the Seven Years War
. Britain suffered a national crisis as France was victorious in North America and the Mediterranean. Britain’s humiliating failure to relieve a besieged garrison in Minorca led eventually to the court martial and execution of Admiral Byng. The government of the duke of Newcastle fell. William Pitt the Elder became the secretary of state.

1759
Year of Victories
. The navy defeated French invasion fleets at Lagos and in Quiberon Bay, gaining naval mastery. British forces achieved several other major successes, including, crucially, James Wolfe’s capture of Quebec. In Europe, British troops defeated the French at the battle of Minden and the ‘bells of victory’ rang out across Britain.

1763
Peace of Paris
. This marked the end of the Seven Years War – with Britain victorious, winning major territorial gains from France and Spain, including New France (Canada) and Florida. Britain was now seen as the leading oceanic power and the anxieties of a few years earlier about the risks of French invasion were over.

1769
Watt’s patent for an improved steam engine
. James Watt’s design was a major improvement on the earlier Newcomen steam engines. The first to perfect the separate condenser for the steam engine, Watt produced a machine that was more energy efficient and therefore less expensive to run. In the 1780s, he patented further innovations that gave a comparative uniformity of rotary motion, and thus increased the capacity of steam engines to drive industrial machinery.

1784
William Pitt the Younger wins in a crucial general election
. Chosen as prime minister in 1783 by King George III, against the wishes of the Whig majority in the House of Commons, Pitt’s success ended the political crisis. It ushered in a period of calmer parliamentary and ministerial politics that was to be reaffirmed by his electoral victories in 1790 and 1797. Pitt understood the need for sound finances. His prudent fiscal management and a growth in overseas trade stabilized government finances.

1788–9
Regency Crisis
. The recovery of George III ended the crisis caused by his attack of porphyria, which had been thought to betoken the onset of insanity. This prevented the creation of a regency and a Whig ministry. Pitt and his system were thus preserved, and stability was reaffirmed.

1793
Britain and the French Revolutionary War
. Anxious about French moves in the Low Countries, Britain joined a coalition against France. This, however, was to be unsuccessful, and also increased domestic discontent. Meanwhile, the opening of the Monkland Canal stimulated the development of the Lanarkshire coalfield in order to serve the rapidly growing Glasgow market.

The late eighteenth century saw the loss of American colonies, new ideas about forms of government associated with the American Revolution and European Enlightenment, and economic and social changes associated with industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth.

It was a period of change on many fronts; the 1790s was a decade of both radicalism and reaction. New divisions of labour and the spread of industrial capitalism meant that discontent was widespread. Many artisans and labourers sought better working conditions and understood that parliamentary representation might be one way to secure them. Merchants, manufacturers and professional men, many of them Dissenters, faced with civil disabilities, wanted more say in political processes. First reactions to the revolution in France in 1789 were enthusiastic.

Tom Paine’s
The Rights of Man
(1791–2), with its argument for universal manhood suffrage as the only legitimate basis for government, had been greeted with huge enthusiasm. Societies of working men had been established across England and Scotland seeking constitutional reform. But the execution of the French king and queen and the onset of the Terror shifted opinions dramatically, while war with France made criticism an unpatriotic action. Middle-class reformers retreated and the government embarked on a programme of repression, designed to crush radicalism at home.

It was only after the defeat of France in 1815 that popular radicalism re-emerged, led by figures such as the orator Henry Hunt and brilliant journalist and publicist William Cobbett, whose bitter critique of ‘Old Corruption’ – a metaphor for the systematic political oppression associated with heavy taxation, fiscal abuse, sinecures and monopolies – combined with his defence of ‘Old England’ made him one of the most powerful voices of the period. The Tory government, alarmed at the mobilization of the ‘industrious classes’ (artisans, cotton spinners, handloom weavers, small masters and tradesmen) cracked down again and the Peterloo massacre in 1819, when an unarmed crowd was fired upon, shocked middle-class reformers.

During the 1820s working men and women in the areas of the new factory system, whether in Yorkshire, Lancashire or Lanarkshire, struggled to come to terms with different forms of exploitation while in other urban centres such as London or Birmingham it was the decline of old patterns of skill and the spread of semi-skilled work done by women and children that disrupted established ways of living and working. As E.P. Thompson argued in his book
The Making of the English Working Class
, a sense of identity and shared consciousness gradually emerged, rooted in the experience of industrialization and urbanization, expressed through trade unions, the radical press, reading rooms and a culture of autodidacticism, all increasingly focused on the struggle for the vote for men. Women were expected to support the claims of their husbands, fathers and brothers.

Class, signifying new relations between masters and men that operated in a market economy, was the key axis of politics in this period. Middle-class men had also been articulating their claims as propertied men, denizens of the new commercial and manufacturing order, to be represented in Parliament. James Mill sang his paean of praise in his influential
Essay on Government
(1819) to the rational and responsible middle-class men who would secure the right kind of polity for a modern world.

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On 7 June 1832 King William IV reluctantly gave his assent to the Reform Act that extended the parliamentary franchise in England and Wales, marking the end of a period of high political tension across the country. Three years previously, in 1829, the Tory party had been split by the decision of Prime Minister Wellington and Home Secretary Robert Peel to grant Catholic Emancipation. Faced with the danger of civil war in Ireland, they chose to bow to popular pressure. The sanctity of ‘the Protestant constitution’ had been breached and Catholics could now sit at Westminster.

In July 1830 a revolution in France raised the spectre once again of disorder at home while violent disturbances among agricultural labourers in the south-east of England between August 1830 and December 1831 – the so-called Captain Swing riots when machines were smashed and burnt – terrified landed society. In Birmingham the banker Thomas Attwood had formed the Birmingham Political Union, an organization that mobilized middle- and working-class support, demanding parliamentary reform. The townspeople of places such as Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds sought representation, an end to corrupt patronage and a wider electorate, though there was little agreement as to who should be included.

Attwood wanted ‘an army not less formidable than that legally exhibited in Ireland, before which ministers were compelled to bend’. Wellington, however, a firm believer in aristocratic power and privilege, was convinced, despite much evidence to the contrary, that Britain ‘possessed at the present moment a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever’, and that ‘it possessed the full and entire confidence of the country.’ His confidence was misplaced and the Whigs came into power knowing that some measure of reform was essential.

In March 1832 the Whig proposals for reform were presented to the House of Commons and were met with uproar: they were far more radical than had been expected. A £10 household franchise in the boroughs would secure the representation of many middle-class men while excluding working men. This was the kind of ‘safe and practical reform’ envisaged by the leading Whig reformer, Lord John Russell. It was clear to some of the more prescient radicals such as Henry Hetherington that the bill would not meet working-class demands.

His assessment was sharp. The Whigs, he argued, knew

that the old system could not last and desiring to establish another as like it as possible, and also to keep their places, they framed a Bill, in the hope of drawing to the feudal aristocracy and the yeomen in the counties a large reinforcement of the middle class. The Bill was, in effect, an invitation to the shopocrats of the enfranchised towns to join the Whigocrats of the country, and make common cause with them in keeping down the people, and thereby quell the rising spirit of democracy in England.