The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (73 page)

After this disastrous episode, Aberdeen and Peel were opposed to further expansion on the Indian subcontinent. They did not share Palmerston’s fear of Russia and were alarmed at the way Ellenborough in 1843 rushed into annexing for security reasons the province of Sind, which bordered the Bombay Presidency. Nevertheless the territory ruled by the British continued to grow. In 1845 the British humiliation at the hands of the Afghans encouraged the Sikhs of the independent Punjab to the north to launch their own attack, only for the Punjab to be reduced to a protectorate under the Maharajah Dhulip Singh.

Unlike Palmerston, who was distrustful of French ambitions, Aberdeen desired friendly relations with France. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were twice guests of Louis-Philippe at his court at Eu. There the royal pair were introduced to the French court painter Franz Winterhalter, who would execute a series of charming portraits memorializing them and their large family. Louis-Philippe returned the compliment and visited them at Windsor. Friendly relations developed into an
entente
, a diplomatic understanding between two powers. Lord Aberdeen’s mild manner resolved by diplomacy boundary problems for Canada created by the movement west of the growing population of the United States. At issue were the north-west coast where Vancouver is situated on the Pacific and the boundary between Canada and Maine.

President Polk had just been elected in America on the ticket of ‘fifty-four fifty or fight’, a policy to extend the state of Oregon to the line of latitude of 54.50 degrees, right up to the boundary of the Russian territory of Alaska. Peel and Aberdeen were determined that the American border should begin lower down at the 49th parallel, otherwise Canada would have no outlet on to the Pacific. Polk did not fight, and the 49th parallel was established as the boundary between America and Canada, except for a small dip south to include Vancouver Island. A treaty negotiated by Castlereagh which had abolished navies and military establishments on the Great Lakes remained in place, symbolizing trustful relations between the two powers.

Despite the fundamental surgery of Peel’s first budget the unrest continued, and the Anti-Corn Law League continued to lobby for total repeal. Peel was disgusted at how far the League was prepared to go in its irresponsible use of orators to inflame opinion, but secretly–like many of his more liberal colleagues–he had been converted. Cheap foreign corn seemed the only way to solve the problem of feeding the starving unemployed in textile towns. Overseas powers were simply not producing enough to be able to threaten British farmers with exporting enormous amounts of cheap wheat.

Since the effect of lowering corn duties in 1842 had not been to reduce agricultural workers’ wages, by 1843 Peel had real anxieties about whether he could continue to be in favour of the corn laws. He believed that successful farming would ultimately depend on better ways of farming, not on protection. The unending, increasing and organized level of anger against the corn laws might come to threaten the landed classes and indeed the whole country. Peel was perpetually frightened of a revolution. That year his private secretary Edward Drummond was mistaken for Peel himself and assassinated by a madman named Daniel Macnaghten while riding in a royal procession in the prime minister’s carriage (Peel was with the queen).

In all probability Peel would have reformed the corn laws sooner rather than later. All his budgets were nudging towards free trade. But in response a violent and irresponsible pressure group dedicated to protection, popularly known as the anti-Anti-Corn Law League, was set up by the Ultra wing of the Tory party, whose members had been opposed to Peel ever since he betrayed them with Catholic Emancipation and feared that the days of protecting estates based on wheat farming were numbered. In the 1830s they had created the nostalgic Young England movement within the Tory party centred around a mystical and probably mythical idea of the aristocracy. The anti-Anti-Corn Law League was headed by the gifted young speaker Benjamin Disraeli, a cultivated, flamboyant novelist and the first British MP of Jewish extraction, and by the horse-mad Lord George Bentinck, son of the Duke of Portland.

As the traditional supporters of the Church of England, the Ultra Tories were alarmed by Peel’s determination to lessen the grievances of the Catholics in Ireland by increasing the state grant to the Catholic Maynooth College. This was a time when the Tories’ worst fears about the dangers of Catholic Emancipation were being realized. For in 1845 John Newman, the influential leader of the Anglican High Church or Oxford movement, which emphasized the Church’s links to the ancient pre-Reformation Church, caused absolute consternation when he became a Roman Catholic. Disestablishmentarianism, the ending of the Church of England’s official position, seemed to be in the air. Only the year before 500 ministers and many of their congregations had broken away from the Church of Scotland to form the more democratic Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, known as the Wee Frees after their opening prayer ‘We the Free Church of Scotland’.

Bentinck and Disraeli forgot Peel’s resurrection of the Tory party. They remembered only what they considered to be his numerous betrayals of it. Night after night Disraeli, who wore weird and wonderful clothing in the House of Commons, strange cloaks in yellow, black and orange, disloyally directed exquisitely turned jibes at his party’s leader. In one of his best taunts, he said that Peel had found the Whigs bathing and run away with their clothes.

But Peel was not only having to deal with enmity in his own party in Parliament and outside it, where he was burned in effigy by the Anti-Corn Law League. In Ireland in 1843 Daniel O’Connell, backed by an organization which looked back to 1798 and called itself Young Ireland, announced that this was to be Repeal Year. To crowded meetings held at some of the most historic places in Ireland, including Tara, home of the old High Kings of Ireland, O’Connell said he was aiming for three million members, a repeal warden in each parish and a national convention to rid Ireland of what he called the ‘Saxon’.

Alarmed by the possibility of a fresh Irish triumph after O’Connell’s adroit tactics during the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, Peel banned the meetings. O’Connell had to choose between obeying the law and creating an armed insurrection for which he had neither the temperament nor the inclination. When his followers found that he had no intention of fighting, the enthusiasm which had propelled the movement forward shrivelled and died. The English government nonetheless foolishly decided to prosecute O’Connell for high treason, on the ground that it had to make an example of him. But the House of Lords set the conviction aside and three years later, on a pilgrimage to Rome, O’Connell died, a broken man.

Perturbed by the level of anti-Union feeling, the exceptionally high murder rate and the general dissatisfaction in Ireland, Peel sought help from education. Despite Catholic Emancipation all the most influential jobs continued to go to the Protestants, as they were far better educated than the Catholics. In 1845 Peel founded the Queen’s College at Belfast, Cork and Galway in order that Catholics and Protestants might receive a secular university education side by side. He hoped to remove any rational grounds for discrimination against the Catholics. But like most things which the far-sighted Peel did that were just and constructive, it earned him tremendous unpopularity. Many Catholics as well as Protestants thought that the new colleges would be godless institutions.

But a terrible catastrophe was about to take place in Ireland which ensured that, despite Peel’s best intentions, hatred and resentment were to be the chief emotions felt by the Irish towards England for a century and a half. For in 1846 a disease of the potato destroyed what had become the Irish peasantry’s only food crop. Thanks to the historical evil of a large number of English absentee landlords, almost no Irish peasant owned his own land. The scientific farming that had transformed England in the eighteenth century had never existed in Ireland, where anyone who attempted to make improvements in their methods of farming would have their rents raised by the agents. The only way for the Irish peasant to make money–and the peasantry comprised three-quarters of the population–was to sublet part of their land to another family and get a cash rent. As a result they had to feed themselves off a very small amount of soil.

The Irish had discovered that the crop which required the least soil for cultivation was the potato. Out of a population of eight million, four million people were by 1845 living on potatoes alone. It was not a balanced diet, but it was adequate if the crop was good. That summer an American fungal disease known as the potato blight appeared in Europe. It turned every potato to slime in the ground. The wet weather that summer was especially conducive to the spread of the disease. In August Peel, nervous of the implications, demanded weekly reports from the constabulary on the state of the crop and sent scientists over to investigate. By October the report from the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was clear. The potato crop had been pretty well destroyed throughout the country. Half the population of Ireland were faced with complete starvation, four million people who rushed from potato plant to potato plant hoping that the stench rising from the fields did not mean all of the potatoes were rotten. But there was not much chance of beating a disease carried on the wind and worsened by the rain.

At a Cabinet meeting on 6 November Peel declared that on the evidence he already had it was necessary to open the ports to cheap grain from abroad at a reduced emergency tariff and put a new Corn Bill through Parliament. But only three of his ministers would back him. The others did not believe in the emergency and preferred to wait for the end of the month when the two scientists Lyon Playfair and Professor Lindley would have finished their report. Even when the report came in, the Tory party would not back the repeal of the bread tax. Peel resigned, but when the Whig Lord John Russell attempted and failed to form a ministry to repeal the corn laws, Peel nobly took back his resignation and formed a government again solely for that purpose. The repeal of the corn laws in May 1846 was finally carried by the Free Traders, who were Peel’s supporters in the party (they became known as the Peelites), together with Russell’s Whigs. But Peel himself was forced out as Tory leader and the party split into Peelites and Protectionists. Headed by Disraeli, the Protectionists attacked Peel in the most wounding manner as a traitor to his party. But in his last speech as prime minister Peel insisted that he had not betrayed any conservative principles. He had simply done what he came into Parliament to do, which was to show that ‘the legislature was animated with a sincere desire to frame its legislation upon the principles of equity and justice’.

But the Irish did not see the Westminster government that way. Though the Archbishop of Dublin asked prayers to be said in every Catholic church for God’s mercy, there was to be no mercy. The devastating figure of one million Irish people died in one year alone, between 1846 and 1847, and another million would die over the next three years; those who did not die of starvation were carried off by mortal illnesses brought on by malnutrition. For the sacred nineteenth-century laws of political economy decreed that corn could not be delivered free to the population. It could only be put into government depots and paid out in return for labour. This bureaucratic approach was useless during an emergency. It took months, hundreds of thousands of deaths and the example of private charities physically taking provisions to the people for the British government to see that in an emergency there was no room for economic laws. The only way to get food to the starving was to deliver it to the people directly in a vast relief effort.

The Irish famine was the greatest social disaster to befall any European state in the nineteenth century. But the new Whig government that took over from Peel, led by Lord John Russell, proved inadequate to the task. By the Soup Kitchen Act of 1847 Parliament finally voted £10 million to help Ireland. Thus more than three million men, women and children received food from the soup kitchens. But the humanitarian aid ceased long before it should have done. At the end of 1847 the British government decided that the Irish should thenceforth be supported by their local parish unions. Yet, with the economy destroyed, there were no rates to pay for that support. The official British view was that if any further help was given to the Irish it would make them too dependent on government aid. It was the same mindset which had turned workhouses into forbidding places to keep the poor out of them.

Most landlords behaved with astonishing callousness. Far from being appalled by the sight of men, women and children dying around them, their agents only registered missing rents. What was of concern to themselves and their employers was that the cottar system of farming–the smallholder with a couple of fields–was proving unprofitable. A ruthless series of evictions began. At mid-century it was averaging almost 20,000 families per year, as landlords incorporated many smallholdings into larger ones on English lines. A constant kind of guerrilla warfare against landlords was the response of those who remained. In 1848 there was another failed attempt at rebellion under the Young Ireland movement, which had been resurrected under a man named Smith O’Brien. But the most frequent reaction of the Irish to their homeland’s ills was to abandon her.

Sure that things would never get better in their lifetime, during the course of the next fifty years one million Irishmen and women bitterly made their way to the friendlier shores of the United States of America. They settled predominantly on the eastern seaboard, particularly around Boston. As important as their pitifully scant belongings was the loathing they carried in their hearts for the English. It was sealed in blood by the famine, and persists among their descendants even today. The treatment of the Irish during the famine by the English is taught in some American schools as an act of genocide, the deliberate murder of a people.