The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (68 page)

Nevertheless, it had not been until mid-afternoon that Wellington got sight of tiny flickering troop movements in the woods in the far distance to the east. These were the first signs of the Prussians whose horses and guns he had been anxiously watching for since daybreak. At six o’clock in the evening La Haye Sainte, the farmhouse holding the centre, fell to the French. It was then that Napoleon tried to drive in Wellington’s line between the farmhouse and Hougoumont. But the French were held off by the 52nd Regiment, whose attack on the left flank of the French ended in the use of bayonets. Just before sundown Napoleon sent in his elite Imperial Guard. But even they were beaten off by the allied infantry. For the first time ever the most legendary warriors in Europe broke ranks and abandoned the battlefield.

And then, just before eight o’clock with only about half an hour of daylight remaining, the Prussians at last arrived. Blücher was more dead than alive, but he had not failed his allies. Here he was, his long white moustache black with dust, but as energetic as ever, able to deploy his army to chase the French back into France. From beneath his tree, mounted on his chestnut mare Copenhagen, veteran of so many battles, Wellington waved his hat three times towards the French. The British could go forward at last. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound!’ he shouted. Up to the ridge came line after line of scarlet-clad infantrymen, charging on to pursue the terrified French. It was the end. Napoleon fled for Paris, where he immediately abdicated in favour of his son, the King of Rome, hoping that the child could become King of France in his stead. A short time later he was safely isolated in mid-Atlantic on the island of St Helena, borne there by the Royal Navy frigate HMS
Bellerophon
. He had thrown himself on the mercy of the prince regent and the English, who, he said, were the most generous of the allies. He died on St Helena six years later.

Radical Agitation (1815–1820)

The Battle of Waterloo rid the world of the menace to peace that Napoleon represented so long as he was free. But the widespread support his Hundred Days had received in France ensured that the peace settlement made in 1815 was far more punitive than had been first envisaged. Although France’s borders reverted to those of the pre-revolutionary period, a humiliating army of occupation was put into northern France for five years, paid for by the French and commanded by Wellington, who also became Britain’s ambassador to Paris. To underline the fact that Napoleon was no longer the master of Europe, all the treasures he and his soldiers had looted from round the world, such as the four horses of St Mark’s in Venice and sumptuous paintings from the Vatican, were returned to their rightful owners. So furious were the Parisians at this, for they now considered that the loot belonged to them, that the works of art were taken away at dead of night to avoid rioting.

All round France, which had terrorized Europe for a generation, her neighbours were strengthened to prevent her breaking out again. The former Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) were joined to Holland under a prince of the House of Orange to give France a more formidable presence on her north-east frontier. Further south her eastern border was more strongly defined by consolidating the 300 pre-war principalities into a German Confederation of thirty-nine states. Within the Confederation Prussia was reinforced by the addition of two-fifths of the former kingdom of Saxony and territory in the Rhineland. Such an entity would make the French think twice before they tried to expand their borders again.

For similar reasons the mountain kingdom of Piedmont was also enlarged. Norway was taken away from the Danes, who had been allies of Napoleon until very recently, and combined in one kingdom with Sweden. South of the Alps, though most of her princes were restored to the
status quo ante
, Italy was back firmly under the protection of Austria. Russia, the new player in European power politics whose giant armies overshadowed the Congress, used the peace settlement to expand westward. The conference agreed to her demand to include the so-called independent kingdom of Poland in her empire; it was the price to be paid for Russian aid in the war.

The political thrust of the post-1815 settlement was thus strongly conservative, and where it did not interfere with the imperial ambitions of the great powers, it was legitimist–that is, it restored the ruling families who had been in power before the French Revolutionary Wars. As Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary in charge of the peace negotiations put it, ‘We want disciplined force under sovereigns we can trust.’ The problem was that the conservative statesmen running the Congress, particularly the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich, were so determined to bury the dangerous ideas which the French Revolution had set free in the world that they completely ignored the wishes of the native populations.

For all the conservative aims of the peace, the history of the next hundred years was to be the working out of the effects of the French Revolution as the Poles, the Italians and the Germans revolted against the settlement. The French Revolutionary ideals resurfaced in powerful offspring, liberalism and nationalism, that were not confined to Europe. Further wars and revolutionary convulsions produced a unified Italy, a unified Germany and conflagration in the decaying Ottoman Empire. England herself, whose Parliament already had a version of democracy in place, by expanding the suffrage over the next hundred years did just enough to prevent her own revolutions. There were sufficient far-sighted members of both Houses to see what had to be changed to fit the post-revolutionary age. Parliament itself could provide the safety valve so lacking on the continent. Nevertheless it was a bumpy ride.

Though Britain’s conference negotiators were the Ultra or extreme Tory Anglo-Irish aristocrats Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington, their sense of what a Parliamentary democracy would not tolerate made Britain a leavening liberal presence among the repressive eastern European powers. Britain refused to join a new international organization to police Europe, an anti-democratic straitjacket called the Holy Alliance and proposed by the excitable Tsar Alexander I. It would permit the great powers to intervene in one another’s affairs if they thought that Christianity, peace or justice were threatened, or, more bluntly, if the government became too liberal for their liking. Given her representative system of government Castlereagh and Wellington knew that Britain would never countenance the powers interfering by force in a country’s internal affairs. On Holy Alliance principles, one of the first places to be invaded might be Britain.

What Britain could agree to was practical and pragmatic. In order to keep the peace in Europe and prevent another Napoleon ever arising, the victorious great powers, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia, formed a Quadruple Alliance to stop by armed intervention any aggression by France which would alter the Congress of Vienna settlement. Castlereagh had been sufficiently impressed by the recent co-operation between the powers to believe that a permanent system of conferences, like the Congress of Vienna, which he called the Concert of Europe, was a good way of hammering out issues before anyone resorted to war. By the second Congress in 1818, France had finished paying her war indemnity early, so Castlereagh got her occupying army withdrawn and France herself welcomed back into the fold of great powers. He believed that this would ensure Europe’s future stability, for if France continued to be a European pariah it would make her disruptive and dangerous.

However, the Congress system which Castlereagh had such hopes for was hijacked by the Holy Alliance and Britain pretty well withdrew from it. The next few years were dogged by uprisings and demands for more liberal rule in Spain, Portugal, Naples and Piedmont. By 1820 the Congresses were issuing claims that they had the right to put down revolutions in foreign countries as well as clamping down on the press and on liberal teachers in the German universities. As a result Britain no longer attended in an official capacity, sending observers to Congress meetings rather than ambassadors. Britain, said Castlereagh, whose own king was the product of a revolution, could not logically ‘deny to other countries the same right of changing their government’ by similar revolutions. Thus by the 1820s Britain was once more the friend of constitutional change abroad, as she had been before the French Revolution.

As befitted the nation over which shone the glory of Waterloo and the honour of removing the menace of Napoleon, and which had financed a great deal of the war, Britain did extremely well out of the peace. After Trafalgar she had seized the opportunity to rid herself of any rivals at sea, and she remained the dominant country in the carrying trade. She now usefully expanded her trading bases throughout the world, adding Malta, the Ionian Islands, the small island of Heligoland off the coast of Hanover and some important former French West Indian islands–St Lucia, Tobago and Mauritius–to her colonial possessions. The route to India was safeguarded by her continuing to hold the Cape of Good Hope, which she had captured from the Dutch, as well as Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), at the foot of India. Britain’s naval and commercial supremacy was confirmed.

Thanks to the British delegation the 1815 Peace Treaty contained within it a clause condemning slavery, in the face of Spanish and Portuguese protests. The efficient mobilization of British public opinion by the Anti-Slavery Society made it impossible for Castlereagh to draw up a treaty determining the shape of post-war Europe without registering a protest at the continued reliance of European economies on slave labour. By 1817, in return for £70,000, Portugal and Spain had both abolished their slave trade. The Netherlands had outlawed it the year before, and it continued to be outlawed in all French territories, as it had been by the French revolutionary government in 1793.

What has been called Britain’s second Hundred Years War ended with France most conclusively beaten. In the new century Russia was the power whose activities Britain regarded with the most suspicion. But now that peace was established the government’s most pressing problem was the domestic situation. The severe hardship and dislocation caused by twenty years of war combined with the industrial revolution was tearing the country apart. What was happening at home needed urgent attention and bold surgery. But surgery in the shape of Parliamentary reform, which the starving working class and the disfranchised middle classes were united in calling for, the Tories were most reluctant to grant.

The British government’s sympathy for liberal movements abroad did not extend to democratic campaigns at home. The end of the war had given these campaigns new impetus for it exacerbated the already miserable living conditions of the working classes. Even during the war the Radical and democratic electoral movements had grown hugely because the galloping pace of increased mechanization had caused a steady stream of people to be laid off from their jobs. Social distress convinced them they required a voice in Parliament to make the government more responsive to their needs. In Parliament reform was called for by Radical MPs such as Henry Brougham the legal reformer and Sir Francis Burdett and their allies, the greatly reduced Whigs, including Lord John Russell and Lord Grey.

From 1811, the year the Prince of Wales became regent, there was rioting among labourers in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Nottingham in protest against the use of improved textile machinery in place of hand labour. At times hardship had been so acute that the poor had to sell their household furniture for food. Many of them, like the Luddites, skilled stocking-makers in Nottingham under the leadership of Ned Ludd, smashed the machinery that was making them redundant, for Pitt’s Combination Acts had prevented any bargaining with their masters. In 1813 seventeen of them had been executed for their protests.

In 1815 their situation was made worse by 200,000 ex-soldiers flooding home to seek jobs, as well as the abrupt closing of the factories that during the war had produced uniforms, tents and armaments. British textile industries were badly affected by the swift post-war revival of manufacturing on the continent. As for farming, agricultural wages were still being kept low by the impact of the Speenhamland system of support from the rates. Even outside agriculture wages had remained unchanged since the war began. Prices, however, had risen 200 per cent, more in the case of bread due to a recent run of poor harvests and the high cost of cultivating moorland during the war. In the days before enclosures when factory workers had been subsistence farmers, the price of bread would never have affected them, but now they were no longer in a position to grow their own food. What was needed was cheaper food.

For manufacturers the solution was simple. They imported cheap foreign wheat to feed their workers. But the landowners believed that was ruining British farmers. Without thought for interests other than their own, and with astonishing insensitivity, in 1815 their Tory representatives in the Commons and Lords passed a new Corn Law. Henceforth foreign corn could be imported only if the price of wheat rose to a certain level, eighty shillings a bushel. In 1815 when the Corn Law Bill was passing through Parliament there were furious riots round the Houses of Parliament as starving workers tried to use physical force to get MPs to vote against the bill, which they had no other means of resisting.

Lord Liverpool’s government, in particular the alarmist home secretary Addington (the former prime minister, who was now Lord Sidmouth), didn’t see that the hungry people smashing machinery or taking to the streets had no other means of redress. They believed that these outbreaks marked the beginning of Britain’s own long-deferred revolution. The period between 1815 and 1822 was unprecedented for protests against the government and the savagery of official reaction. One of the chief hindrances to dealing intelligently with the post-war social and economic dislocation was the government’s identification of any demands by the working man with the Jacobinism which had destroyed the property-owning classes in France.