The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (78 page)

But Palmerston was not there to see this astonishing manifestation of Prussian military aggression which turned the world upside down. Lord Cupid had died after a good breakfast of mutton chops a day short of his eighty-first birthday in October 1865. Despite recent mistakes he remained beloved of the Victorian public, his robust tendency to refuse to toe the diplomatic line when natural justice was at stake always sure to stir British emotions. Lord John Russell briefly became prime minister again. His thoughts continued to revolve round broadening the franchise. The reformers among the Liberals were now in the ascendant, but there were still enough of Palmerston’s supporters to join the Tories and bring down a new Reform Bill and Russell’s ministry in 1866. Derby became prime minister and Russell retired as leader of the Liberals, his place being taken by Gladstone.

In the event, by a strange turnaround, thanks to the canny Disraeli it was the Tory government which brought in the Second Reform Bill of 1867. Disraeli had been exasperated by his party’s exclusion from power for twenty years. A new clamour for franchise reform had started up, and by the autumn of 1866 there were riots in Hyde Park, with crowds shouting ‘For Gladstone and liberty’. Disraeli had persuaded the Conservatives that unless something was done to gratify working men’s desires for a democratic Parliament they faced the possibility of real disorder. It was clear that the Tories did not appeal to middle-class opinion, but they might achieve an upsurge in support if the potentially vast working-class constituency was given the vote.

Although some of the Tory grandees like Lord Cranborne (the future prime minister Lord Salisbury) handed in their resignations in 1867, the age of middle-class democracy begun by the Great Reform Bill now came to an end. Disraeli ‘dished the Whigs’, as he put it, by introducing household suffrage in the towns. Even lodgers got the vote as long as they paid £10 a year in rent and lived in the same rooms for a year (it was £12 a year in the counties). Lord Derby called it ‘a leap in the dark’: who knew what government would be voted for by a new kind of voter, whose lack of education made educational reforms more pressing than ever? Accompanying the bill extending the suffrage was a Distribution of Seats Bill–eleven obsolete boroughs were disenfranchised, and thirty-five others having fewer than 10,000 inhabitants gave up one member, freeing up MPs for towns whose populations had grown and counties whose populations were also increasing.

By the Reform Act of 1867 Disraeli brought in an innovative dimension of working-class support for the Tories which he would foster by a striking foreign policy, his ‘forward’ attitude to the empire and important social reforms. His tough stance as a negotiator where Britain’s interests were at stake was sharply defined against the approach of the Gladstonian Liberal party, which was committed to an ethical foreign policy, international standards of morality and the rights of small nations.

In the late 1860s Britain got her first taste of the Irish militancy that would bedevil British politics for the next fifty-five years. The previous decade had seen the founding in the United States of the Fenians, an Irish secret society devoted to establishing a republic in Ireland, and with the end of the American Civil War many Irishmen took their military experience to their native land. In 1867 they tried an uprising. When that failed they moved on to mainland Britain, where a series of outrages culminated in the blowing up of a wall of Clerkenwell Prison. Gladstone believed that that was what he called the chapel bell, ringing to declare that his mission was to pacify Ireland.

Solving the Irish question would be the consuming ambition of the second half of Gladstone’s career. Appropriately it was Ireland that in 1868 brought down the Tory government (now led by Disraeli owing to Derby’s ill-health). The Tories traditionally were the party of the established Church. Even Disraeli could not change that. So when Gladstone took up the cause of disestablishing the Protestant Church in Ireland as a way of pleasing the Irish population, the Conservatives had to oppose it. Disraeli’s government fell as the Commons, by a huge majority, voted for Gladstone’s proposals. At the 1868 election the newly enfranchised electorate ungratefully gave Disraeli only 265 seats and 393 to Gladstone, who thus formed the first Liberal ministry.

The sixty-four-year-old Disraeli retreated to lick his party’s wounds and reorganize it by creating the Conservative Central Office. His poetic, elegant and slender person, with its thin, witty face surrounded still by long, lustrous black lovelocks, was replaced at the government despatch box by the frequently anguished, almost superhumanly strong Gladstone.

Gladstone and Disraeli (1868–1886)

William Ewart Gladstone’s vigorous first ministry began in 1868. For the first time the aristocratic Whigs were no longer in a majority in the Liberal party and the Radicals and Nonconformists were to the fore. Gladstone presided over the sort of reforming government which had not been seen since Grey and Peel and which produced the beginnings of the modern Britain we take for granted today, committed to a meritocratic democracy. Both the civil service and the army were thrown open to competition. In 1870 an exam system was instituted for the civil service, while in the army from 1871 commanding rank was no longer to be achieved by purchasing a commission.

Ever since the Crimean War the disgraceful performance of the army had convinced many that it should be reformed from top to toe and purged of its aristocratic commanding officers. But it was extremely hard to persuade the army itself of this, particularly as the Duke of Wellington continued to be held up as a vindication of the system. Edward Cardwell, the new secretary for war, believed that this was not only unfair, but in the light of the behaviour of Lords Lucan and Cardigan in the Crimea positively dangerous. Moreover the menace of Prussian arms had now reached France, just across the Channel, where the destruction of the French army in a matter of days had given the question of army reforms additional urgency.

There was furious opposition to Cardwell. The House of Lords threw out the bill to protect its own. But Gladstone was not going to be thwarted. He ingeniously made Queen Victoria cancel the royal warrant which authorized the purchase of commissions. The system of buying promotion was at an end. Short service was introduced, and the militia and volunteers were integrated with the commissioned forces. Cardwell also destroyed the division of command which had plagued both the Napoleonic and the Crimean Wars–between Horse Guards, where the commander-in-chief’s department was based, and the War Office. The commander-in-chief, a post which had usually been held by a royal duke not necessarily on the side of the elected government, was made subordinate to the secretary for war, who had to be a member of the ruling party.

The legalization of trade unions in 1871 accompanied the broadening of the franchise, the Trade Union Act recognizing their status as friendly societies. From 1872 the Secret Ballot Act ensured that voters could no longer be intimidated–perhaps by an aggressive candidate–as they spoke their votes to the teller. From now on the vote was an anonymous piece of paper placed in the ballot box. Women still did not have the vote, but the old pseudo-scientific prejudices about women’s brains being inferior to men’s, and the debates about women’s capabilities which had occupied so much newspaper print for the previous forty years, were dying down. Though they could not take degrees, by 1872 women started being accepted at Cambridge, with two female halls of residence, Girton and Newnham. The London Medical School for Women was established in 1875, and Oxford followed in 1878 with Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville.

At Oxbridge women no longer met only members of the Church of England. For by at last abolishing the University Test Act in 1871 under pressure from the Nonconformists the Liberals opened the ancient universities to all the intellectual talent in the kingdom, even if they were Jews, Roman Catholics or Nonconformists. Until that date non-Anglicans had been prevented from studying at Oxford or Cambridge, if they could not take an oath of allegiance to the monarch as head of the Church of England.

And as part of these changing mores the position of women continued to improve throughout the rest of the century. Though they were hardly a minority in the country, women had begun the nineteenth century not only socially but legally inferior to men. Married women could not be represented separately from their husbands in the law courts until 1857. The influential philosopher John Stuart Mill’s 1869 publication
The Subjection of Women
both reflected advanced thought and did much to raise the consciousness of his era about how women were oppressed. Enlarging the franchise on such a wide scale brought up the question of female suffrage. In 1865 Mill, who was the Radical MP for Westminster, proposed the vote for women, eloquently advocating the equality of women to men in an amendment to the Second Reform Bill. Though it was defeated, female suffrage societies began to spring up in the major cities.

In 1869 the Liberal government gave women the right to vote in municipal elections; from 1870 women could vote in school board elections and be elected to the boards, while by 1894 women played a more visible role in local government, as they were allowed to serve on urban and district councils. In 1873 the humane Custody of Infants Acts ensured that all women could have access to their children in the event of divorce or separation, a right previously denied them and the cause of much anguish.

From the 1870s to the end of the century a mass of case law was built up to support women as independent beings with separate and equal rights. In 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act at last put an end to the husband’s legal right to all his wife’s earnings. Although in practice suspicious fathers and brothers, or clever women like Charlotte Brontë, had always found ways round this by creating trusts to which only they had access, it was a significant development.

Education was also fundamentally reformed. In 1870 the Cabinet minister W. E. Forster, a former Quaker married to the daughter of Dr Arnold who had revitalized Rugby School with an ethos of public service, carried an Elementary Education Act through the Commons. This created the first national system, making education available to all children from the age of five to thirteen. Any local district could elect a school board which would have the power to levy a rate and then spend it either on schools already existing in their area or on building new schools. Although the boards were given powers to enforce attendance up to the age of thirteen, it was not until 1880 that elementary education was made legally compulsory, and it was not until 1891 that this became meaningful when a new Education Act made it free.

The period after the Second Reform Bill is often seen as marking the transition from the rule of the middle classes to a wider democracy. But the universal feature of late-Victorian Britain was the proliferation of a self-improving middle-class high culture. It is glimpsed in the imposing civic buildings of Liverpool and Manchester–the concert halls, the orchestras, the art galleries, the public parks and the free public libraries begun by the American millionaire philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1880. The Victorians loved joining things and they loved building things.

Since 1845 there had been the university boat race between Oxford and Cambridge, since 1863 a Football Association. In 1864 the first county cricket match had been held. The youthful cricketer W. G. Grace had played for the MCC and was soon to have the sort of following that top sports stars have today. The railways and the introduction of three national Bank Holidays in 1871 contributed to increasing the British fascination with competitive sports–in the same year the Rugby Football Union was founded. In 1873 the first lawn tennis club was established, and the neo-Gothic Natural History Museum finished. Easily mistaken for a cathedral, the museum towered over South Kensington and provided a home for the curious specimens being sent back to Britain by her explorers.

For those with literary tastes, by the 1870s there was a different spirit abroad. Charles Dickens, whose skewering of social wrongs had epitomized the early Victorians, died in 1870 with his last novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
unfinished. Now that the state had been mobilized to address social problems, and organizations like the Salvation Army set up, the novel could concentrate on the emotions and moral dilemmas, as in George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
and Thomas Hardy’s first novel
Under the Greenwood Tree
, both published in 1872. Hardy’s background as the son of a stonemason signified that the novel was beginning to encompass a hitherto unrepresented section of society. The king of poetic enchantment continued to be Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate. The first generation of children had been thrilled by an Oxford mathematics don Charles Dodgson who under the pen name Lewis Carroll wrote
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
in 1865. He followed it up in 1871 with
Through the Looking Glass
. Though still in deepest mourning Queen Victoria had become an author herself, publishing the bestselling
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands
in 1868, the same year that Wilkie Collins published
The Moonstone
.

As modernizers, the Liberals approached with some impatience the way justice was dispensed. Its obscure and dusty traditions drastically needed reorganizing and rationalizing. The complex of law courts in the Strand, known as the Royal Courts of Justice, between Lincoln’s Inn and the Temple was built in the 1870s to house all the civil courts. Henceforth they were to be administered together under one roof. The very gradual development of English law over the centuries from the old Curia Regis of the various courts–Exchequer, Common Pleas, King’s Bench and Chancery–had resulted in overlaps and unhelpful demarcations. All the courts were now brought together to form divisions of one Supreme Court of Judicature.