The Challenge of Democracy

Britain 1832-1918

Hugh Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317883272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This authoritative and thought-provoking history takes a fresh view of what was a period of unprecedented and rapid change. Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, Hugh Cunningham provides a clear narrative of political events, and an analysis of change and continuity in ideas and in economic and social structure. Britain is set firmly in the context of world power and the possession of empire. An overarching theme is the challenge presented by democracy in a period framed by the First and Fourth Reform Acts. 'Democracy' had no stable meaning, and its opponents were just as vocal as its advocates. The book explores its implications for the role of the state, for the governance of empire, and for the relationship between the different nations within the United Kingdom.

CHAPTER ONE

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Britain in the 1830s

The United Kingdom and its governance

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into existence in 1801. In that year Ireland was added to what had been, since the abolition of the Scottish Parliament in 1707, the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Wales had been linked to England since the sixteenth century. The key characteristic of the political formation of the United Kingdom was that each of the four nations of which it consisted had representation in the Parliament which met at Westminster – and that none retained its own distinctive representative institutions, for, like the Scottish Parliament before it, the Irish Parliament was abolished with the Act of Union. But Ireland, although now part of the United Kingdom, was not included within Great Britain, a term reserved for England, Scotland, Wales and a scattering of small offshore islands. British history, the theme of this book, is therefore the history of England, Scotland and Wales. Ireland, however, cannot be ignored in British history, for the course of British political history was frequently affected and sometimes determined by Irish events, just as British society was affected by the presence of large numbers of Irish people. The term ‘United Kingdom’, moreover, must even from the beginning of our period have a question mark attached to it, for, already in the 1830s, there were powerful voices in Ireland demanding repeal of the Act of Union. And if Ireland demands a place in a ‘British’ history, so also does the ‘British empire’, whose expansion was a crucial ingredient of the British experience between 1832 and 1918.

England was in every respect the dominant element within the United Kingdom, and became increasingly so. As the table below shows, compared to its population, England was over-represented in terms of number of MPs in the immediate post-reform period, and Ireland was under-represented. In the course of the nineteenth century this imbalance between population and number of MPs was to be rectified, at least as far as England was concerned: by 1901 its share of the UK population had risen considerably, while that of Ireland, hard hit by the potato famine of the 1840s, had dropped; within Great Britain, too, England’s share of population had risen from 80.6 per cent in 1832 to 82.5 per cent in 1901. It is not surprising, in view of this increasing concentration of population in England – and with population went power and wealth – that many English people tended to equate ‘England’ with ‘Britain’. Lord Palmerston, who was Anglo-Irish (and Prime Minister), could not understand why Scots should object to being called English.¹ ‘England’ and ‘the English’ were, as we shall see, frequently used by contemporaries when they meant to refer to Britain and the British. On the whole the Scots and the Welsh offered few protests, though in 1914 the following notice appeared in the personal column of The Times: ‘Englishmen!’ it read, ‘Please use “Britain”, “British”, and “Briton”, when the United Kingdom or the Empire is in question – at least during the war.’²

	% of UK population			MPs in 1832
	1832	1901		No.	%
England	54	73		471	72
Scotland	10	11		53	8
Wales	4	5		29	4
Ireland	32	11		105	16
Total	100	100		658	100

The Parliament at Westminster, the legislature, had three components: the king, the Lords and the Commons. These three were often equated with, respectively, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The United Kingdom was thought, in contrast to other countries, to have the benefit of a balanced constitution, with no one component dominant. Thus legislation could not be enacted without the royal assent after it had been passed by both Commons and Lords. There was a similar balance in the executive power. The monarch had certain clear roles and distinct powers or prerogatives, including asking a politician to form a government and, if he or she so chose, dismissing it. Governments themselves were composed of members both of the unelected House of Lords and of the House of Commons, and a prime minister was as likely to be chosen from the former as the latter. In practice there were severe restraints on what a monarch could do, because a government without support in the Commons would simply be unable to govern. The United Kingdom was thus, in the language of the time, ‘a constitutional monarchy’, rather than an absolutist one, for although there was no written constitution, it was universally accepted that the monarch must act within the established conventions, even if, at the margin, there was debate about what those conventions were. The Lords, too, although they might frequently – and sometimes controversially – reject legislation passed by the Commons, accepted that it was from the Commons that government essentially derived its mandate – there was, therefore, a convention that the Lords would not reject a money bill which would make the continuance of government impossible. For if the United Kingdom was in one phrase a ‘constitutional monarchy’, it also enjoyed, in another phrase with even more resonance, a ‘representative government’, one in which the Commons represented the interests of the people as a whole. Only a small minority of those people were entitled to vote, but it was argued that the interests of non-voters could nevertheless be represented by Members of Parliament.

The chief function of central government was the conduct of diplomacy and, where necessary, the fighting of wars. The pressures of regular and lengthy wars with France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ending with victory at Waterloo in 1815, had given them added weight. These wars, like all wars, had been expensive, and had been financed partly by loans and partly by taxation. The loans had left behind a substantial national debt, and in the 1830s and 1840s over half of government expenditure was devoted to servicing its own borrowings. The army and navy absorbed a further one-quarter of all expenditure. The taxes to pay for this came primarily from customs and excise, the former levied on imports and exports, the latter on consumption of goods within Britain. There was, not surprisingly, complaint about the levels of taxation, but what is more remarkable is the ability of the British government to raise taxes without calling into question its own legitimacy: between the late seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century the yield of taxes rose in real terms by a factor of 16.³

In the 1820s government was responding to the criticism that it was expensive, corrupt and inefficient by a drive for ‘retrenchment’, a word much used in the nineteenth century to refer to a reduction in the expense of government. Critics of government argued that the executive maintained support in the House of Commons only by ensuring that a proportion of MPs were beholden to it through jobs or pensions given to them by government itself. Some of these jobs were sinecures, salaried jobs which had few if any duties attached to them. They also argued that government was influenced in an unhealthy way by those who had lent it money for the financing of the wars. In this radical perspective government did not exist to serve the people so much as to make its own supporters rich. It was, as the radical journalist William Cobbett called it, ‘Old Corruption’. There is no doubt that government ministers had considerable powers of patronage, that is they could, if they so willed, place their supporters or relatives in jobs within the sphere of government. Positions in the civil service, for example, were filled not by competitive examinations but by recommendation, and a minister’s post bag would be full of letters from plausible supplicants for jobs. But the extent to which government was dependent for its own survival on the judicious use of the patronage at its disposal was greatly exaggerated by its critics. By 1830 most of the sinecures and pensions had been done away with.⁴ Moreover government expenditure almost halved between its peak in 1811–15 and 1831–5. This was primarily due to a reduction in the expense of the armed forces after Waterloo, but there was also a series of enquiries into government offices, and enterprises, such as the royal dockyards, for which government had responsibility. The outcome was that ‘between 1815 and 1835 the civil service was cut by 14 per cent in size and 26 per cent in cost’.⁵ Governments themselves now accepted that their continuance and legitimacy was dependent on ‘public opinion’, a force much invoked in the 1820s and beyond, and one demanding cheap government.

Most people experienced government at local level. Many of the Acts passed by Parliament were local Acts, giving powers to local authorities to embark on improvements in paving, lighting and so on. Scotland and Ireland (but not Wales) frequently had their own distinctive laws, and were not subject to those covering England and Wales. The famous Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, for example, did not apply to Scotland. For the implementation of Acts of Parliament, new and old, central government depended not on paid agents of its own, but on the established authorities in the localities. In rural areas, where the majority of the population lived, the structure of local government was headed by the lords lieutenant of counties, normally members of the aristocracy. But real power lay with the magistrates who not only sat in judgment on those charged with minor offences, but also, in the meetings of quarter sessions, had a considerable administrative role in discharging responsibilities for the management of the Poor Law and of prisons, for the maintenance of law and order, and for oversight of the conduct of affairs at the level of the parish, which in the early 1830s was still the basic unit of local government. Magistrates were normally gentry, that is, substantial landowners, or, in about one-quarter of cases, clergymen of the Church of England; in 1836 the Duke of Buckingham boasted that he had kept out of the magistracy in his county ‘all persons actually engaged in trade’.⁶ Magistrates had considerable discretion in whether and how they enforced the laws passed by Parliament, and there was, before the 1830s, little that central government could do to ensure uniformity of practice had it wished to do so; towns in particular often had their own specific laws, and enforced them or not entirely at their own will.

By comparison to most European countries the reach of government, especially central government, was limited. The British counted this a virtue, arguing that functions which had to be performed by government elsewhere were carried out in Britain by voluntary associations. Hospitals, for example, were built and maintained at local level by public subscriptions and charitable bequests. Many day schools for the poor in England and Wales were organised under the aegis of either the British and Foreign School Society (founded 1807) or the Church of England National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church (founded 1811); government had no role. There was in addition a vast network of voluntary organisations designed to do everything from the prevention of begging to the rescue of prostitutes, from the provision of adult education to the enforcement of the proper observance of Sunday. Civil society, it was claimed, could do in Britain what governments did elsewhere.

The structure both of government and of civil society put a major emphasis on local initiative and responsibility, and this had as one consequence that people were likely to feel a sense of belonging to their parish, county, town or region. This, however, was entirely consonant with a sense of national identity. Considered as a nation, Britain, though to a lesser extent the United Kingdom, had already by 1832, compared to its potential rivals, a considerable degree of coherence. We can measure this according to a number of criteria.

First, language. English was overwhelmingly the dominant language, though it was not the only one. In Wales, Welsh, and in Scotland, though less prominently, Gaelic, provided rivals. In Wales in 1840 one-third of the population spoke English only, one-third was bilingual and the remaining third spoke Welsh only. It was possible that Welsh and Gaelic might become the foci for Welsh and Scottish nationalism, and to some extent they did, but the trend was undoubtedly towards a reduction in the percentage of the populations of those countries who spoke Welsh or Gaelic; in Wales by 1911 only 44 per cent of the population spoke Welsh, compared, as we have seen, to two-thirds in 1840. Many, if with reluctance, accepted the inevitability of such a decline.

Second, the experience of war with France, in what came to be called ‘The Second Hundred Years War’, had played and continued to play a large role in forging a sense of Britishness. Particularly important for our purposes were the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars which lasted, but for a brief break, from 1793 to 1815. The memory of them lasted deep into the nineteenth century, prompted by anniversaries of military and naval success. More permanently, at the heart of the empire, in London, Trafalgar Square, so-named in 1830, was embellished in the 1840s by Nelson’s column. Waterloo, the other most famous victory, was commemorated with a railway station. The wars had established the British as the most powerful nation in the world, triumphant over their ancient rivals, France, and although the reign of Victoria was punctuated with fears of a resurgent France poised to invade, no one could doubt that Britain’s position in the world had been enhanced by successful warfare.

Third, national coherence was fostered by the existence of a single market within the United Kingdom. There were no tariff barriers of any kind within the United Kingdom, and trade and financial movements within its borders were substantial. It is difficult, for example, to see how Britain could have fed itself without imports of food from Ireland, the source in the mid-1830s of 85 per cent of imports of grain, meat and butter.⁷ Population also moved freely through the kingdom – the Irish into England and Scotland, the Scots and the Welsh into England, and eventually, in the later nineteenth century, the English into Wales.

Fourth, monarchy provided a potent symbol and embodiment of the nation. It was by no means certain that this would be the case for there were serious impediments to such an outcome in the persons of the monarchs. George III, on the throne from 1760 to 1820, was thought to be mad (he in fact suffered from the disease porphyria), and there was a regency from 1811. The regent, the future George IV (1820–30), was a dissolute rake, and his coronation in 1821 was the occasion for an outburst of radical and hostile opinion provoked by the exclusion from the ceremony of his estranged queen, Caroline. But there had been, on the positive side, an elaboration of royal ritual which brought forth many expressions of loyalty, and there were some carefully stage-managed events, such as the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, an occasion masterminded by the novelist Walter Scott to strengthen the ties between the monarchy and Scotland. William IV’s image in his reign (1830–7) was that of the sailor king, playing on the popularity of the navy in British folklore.

Finally, Great Britain, though not Ireland where the majority of the population were Roman Catholic, was held together by a common Protestantism. It is true that there were sharp divisions among Protestants. Even at the level of the established churches, the Presbyterianism of the Church of Scotland was at odds with the Episcopalianism of the Church of England and Wales, the one deriving its theology from the predestination doctrines of John Calvin, the other being closer to the Catholicism from which it had broken at the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Within the Church of England, evangelicals, seen as Low Church, with an emphasis on the divine inspiration of the Bible and on the necessity for personal salvation, were in the 1830s the rising group, but they were soon to provoke a reaction from the High Church Oxford movement where the emphasis was very much more on the ritua...