Britain before the Reform Act

Politics and Society 1815-1832

Eric. J Evans, Eric J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138432161
• eBook ISBN: 9781317885467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In the years1815-1832, Britain came close to revolution. Fewer than twenty years separate the Battle of Waterloo from the passing of the 'Great' Reform Act but during this period Britain's political elite was challenged as never before. In rising to that challenge, the political elite attempted, with considerable success, to ensure that Britain engineered that most perilous of transitions, from a less complex and more deferential society into a modern urban and industrial one, while avoding political revolution.

In this extensively revised 2nd edition Evans engages with a welter of new material and fresh interpretations. The book sheds light both on the challenges to existing political and social authority and why those challenges were seen off.

Evans examines:

· The composition of Britain's political elite and how this elite coped with the problems thrown up by a society urbanising and modernising at an unprecedented rate.

· How Britain reacted to the longer-term implications of the French Revolution, including the development of a more cohesive national identity.

· How the elite attempted to maintain public order in this period – and with what success.

· The extent of change in Britain's political system brought about by political, religious and administrative reforms

Written in accessible style, with a rich collection of documents, chronology, glossary, a guide to further reading,and a 'Who's Who' which summarises the careers and contributions of the main figures, this new edition is essential for all those interested in understanding Britain at this most crucial turning point in its history.

Part 1

ANALYSIS

1

Introduction

1815 AND ALL THAT

There is no denying that 1815 is an important date in British history. On 18 June the Duke of Wellington, with vital help from the Prussian army at a late stage, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, at the battle of Waterloo, fought just south of Brussels on the road to Paris. Defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon’s phenomenal military and political career. The 67,000 troops who fought under Wellington’s command in that bloody, decisive engagement seemed to have settled the fate of Europe. They had ended the longest war in which Britain had been engaged since the fifteenth century and the most costly war yet fought. Britain’s victory over the French gave her a commanding influence in European diplomacy which would not be lost for over a century.

Wellington, 1st Duke of Soldier and Tory politician. Wellington was the hero of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and an important member of virtually every Tory government from 1819 to 1846. He was prime minister from 1828–30. He was instinctively conservative but did change his mind on Catholic Emancipation.

Britain was the only nation which had kept up the European fight against first revolutionary, then Napoleonic, France from the time it entered the war in February 1793 to its end, with only a brief truce in 1802–3. Britain, alone among the significant European powers, had not been defeated or overrun by French armies. From being commercially important, and growing in influence, but nevertheless often in the second half of the eighteenth century of relatively limited significance in European diplomatic affairs, Britain’s influence was transformed by war. In 1815 it was clearly the leading power in Europe and thus, still, in the world. Its naval power was not to be directly challenged in battle for more than a century and, the brief Crimean conflict of 1854–6 apart, its armies fought no wars on European soil until the First World War which began in 1914. If the emphasis is placed on diplomatic and military history, therefore, it remains logical to begin a study of Britain’s century of pre-eminence in 1815.

Many historians in the early twenty-first century, however, would challenge such an emphasis, deriding it as ‘drum-and-trumpet’ history. Fashions for historical study change and foreign policy, in particular, receives far less attention now than it used to do and, arguably, than it should. If the emphasis is placed more on social, cultural, industrial and domestic political developments, it is true that 1815 is an altogether less significant date. No new government took office in Britain then, and the end of the French wars marked no important change in Britain’s domestic political affairs. When Wellington won the battle of Waterloo, Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool, had been prime minister for exactly three years. He led a Tory government, most of whose important members had come to political maturity during the earlier phase of the French Wars, and whose guiding principle had become opposition to reform for fear of opening the way to a British revolution.

Liverpool, 2nd Earl of Pittite politician. He was prime minister from 1812 to 1827. He favoured modest, cautious administrative change and reducing tariffs to boost trade and enhance national prosperity. His government always opposed parliamentary reform, suppressing radicalism in the years 1815–20. A stroke ended his career.

THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

The new Tory party had effectively been created as a coalition of anti-reforming land and other property owners under the prime ministership of William Pitt the Younger in 1794, although Liverpool was the first prime minister of the period to acknowledge the description ‘Tory’. Some historians prefer to use the adjective ‘Pittite’ to describe Liverpool’s government. Whichever name is used, the prime minister held a secure majority in the House of Commons. The only non-Tory ministry to be formed between 1794 and 1830 – the so-called but hopelessly misnamed ‘Ministry of all the Talents’ headed by Pitt’s cousin William Grenville – lasted for 13 months, from February 1806 to March 1807. Two brief Pittite ministries succeeded it, headed by the Duke of Portland (1807–9) and Spencer Perceval (1809–12). Liverpool had become Prime Minister after the assassination of Perceval. Although his ministry had endured several early crises, he proved to be a great political survivor and it was ill-health in the form of a debilitating stroke, rather than political defeat, which removed him from office early in 1827. Liverpool is far from being the best-known or most distinguished of British prime ministers, but he had many modest virtues. He was both dully competent and completely trustworthy. More talented but fractious colleagues would work with him when they would not cooperate with others. By 1827, he seemed not only irremovable but irreplaceable. As we shall see (see below, pp. 69–87), the Tory party could not replace him without breaking up. Liverpool’s proved to be by some distance the longest prime ministership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Tory Political party, at this time sometimes also called Pittite. Its main policies included: support for existing authority; using the monarchy as a symbol of national unity; resistance to reform; support for the Church of England and, for many, opposition to religious toleration.

Coalition government A government in which power is shared and the ministers forming the government come from more than one party. In our period, the governments formed by Canning (1827), Goderich (1827) and Grey (1830) were all coalitions.

Pittite Literally a supporter of William Pitt the Younger, prime minister from 1783–1801 and 1804–6. It can be used almost interchangeably with the term ‘Tory’. The main features of Pittite policy were resistance to extra-parliamentary agitation, the maintenance of public order and trade liberalisation via reduced tariffs and tolls.

The monarchy, which still possessed separate and distinctive powers in Britain in the early nineteenth century, did not change hands in 1815. The King had in 1801 dismissed William Pitt the Younger (a popular, even revered, prime minister with a strong parliamentary majority) because he disagreed with him on an important issue of policy. Yet he did not create a constitutional crisis in so doing. The monarch remained the most important influence in the choice of every prime minister between the 1720s and the 1820s. The wishes of the House of Commons and the House of Lords were the only factors the monarch was wise to take into account; those of the electorate mattered not at all. Yet as the right of the King to appoint his favourites to sensitive or influential positions by a system of ‘patronage’ was whittled away at the end of the eighteenth century, so royal power began to decline (Evans, 1985).

Government The collective group responsible for devising policies at national level. Members of the government are called ‘Ministers’. However, only the more senior ones, who met regularly to discuss business, formed the Cabinet. Ministers sat in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

House of Commons Collectively, the men elected, or selected, as Members of Parliament to represent constituencies in each of the four countries of the United Kingdom. The House of Commons from 1801–32 had 658 members: 489 from England, 100 from Ireland, 45 from Scotland and 30 from Wales.

Ministry Name given to a group of ministers, who had roles in government as officers under the crown. Thus, when we refer to ‘Liverpool’s ministry’, we mean the ministers who served in the government of Lord Liverpool, whether they were in the Cabinet or not.

Grenville, William Wyndham Pittite and Whig politician. He was, in effect, leader of the Whig party from 1807–17 but opposed most parliamentary and economic reforms favoured by the Foxite Whigs who comprised the majority of the party. He resigned in 1817; most of his followers joined Liverpool’s Tory government in 1822.

King George III had been on the throne since 1760 but his dull, unimaginative, inflexible but dutiful reign ended in a long coda framed by progressive mental instability. ‘Farmer George’ began talking to the trees at Windsor Castle and, after various bouts of intellectual collapse, he was declared permanently unfit to govern in February 1811. His eldest son, also George, took on the duties of monarchy under the title of Prince Regent. The Prince, who became King as George IV in 1820, was a superficially pleasant man of some aesthetic sensibility, but he was also vain, gross, profligate and, when thwarted, spiteful. He was also politically incompetent, never understanding the distinction between a petulant outburst (of which he made many) and a firm statement (of which, though he thought differently, he made very few). While he was regent or monarch from 1811 to 1830, the remaining powers of the monarchy ebbed even more rapidly. It is probably true that George III mad had greater respect from his subjects than George IV sane. Rarely, in the chequered history of the British monarchy, has a king been so vilified.

BRITISH SOCIETY IN 1815

There is a more fundamental reason why 1815 needs to be placed in a broader context. At the time, parts of Britain were being rapidly industrialized Historians are now much more cautious than they were in the 1960s about suggesting that an ‘industrial revolution’ took place within such a narrow time frame as the half-century between 1780 and 1830 (Crafts, 1985; Mokyr, 1998). Growth in productivity is now calculated to be much slower than once thought, while many industries made relatively little use of technological change until well into the nineteenth century. Although some areas of Britain did undergo fierce and radical change as a result of mechanization in this period, the pace of technological change now seems relatively slow over the country as a whole and labour productivity and economic growth not specially remarkable. Not surprisingly, some historians doubt whether the use of the phrase ‘industrial revolution’ is appropriate. They still agree, however, on two basic points. First, the cumulative transformation associated with the process of industrialization – though it takes place over a longer time scale than once assumed – changes societies much more fundamentally than any political or diplomatic ‘revolution’. Secondly, these changes occurred first in Great Britain. Many of the crises with which this book is concerned were part of the early consequences of the discontinuity we might still call the Industrial Revolution. Any study which begins its detailed treatment in 1815 must show awareness of the transformations which affected Britain at least from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. No one date marks the beginning of the Industrial Revolution but 1815 cannot be considered important in any wider industrial and social context.

British society was under great strain between 1815 and 1832 largely because of the speed of change. At the most basic level, it was getting bigger all the time. After a period of stagnation in the early eighteenth century, the population began to grow steadily from the 1730s and with extraordinary rapidity from the 1780s. At the time of the first official census in 1801, the population of Britain was about 10.6 million, almost double its level a century earlier. Britain’s population was also growing faster than that of Western Europe as a whole. According to latest estimates, in 1680 Britain contained 7.6 per cent of Western Europe’s population. By 1840, that had increased to 10.5 per cent (Floud and Johnson, 2004: 57–8). In the mere 17 years covered by this book it increased by almost 29 per cent from an estimated 12.9 million to 16.6 million. British population never grew faster than in the 20 years after 1811.

As those who study developing countries in our own time are well aware, rapid population increase is almost invariably accompanied by social dislocation. Britain in the early nineteenth century was indebted to an efficient domestic agricultural system and a rapidly developing pattern of international trade for the simple fact that very few of her population starved. But dislocation manifested itself in other ways. Rapid fluctuations in food prices lay behind much of the unrest of the period 1815–20. The average price of wheat, and wheaten bread formed the English population’s staple diet, was never higher in the whole of the nineteenth century than in the decade 1810–19, and prices rarely fluctuated as bewilderingly.

Two other aspects of population change in this period have received less attention but are at least equally important. Britain’s was a young population and it was mobile. Birth rates were extremely high, largely because more women were marrying earlier. This they were able to do because of increased job opportunities, although not necessarily for women, in a rapidly expanding economy. On average, in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, women in England got married for the first time at the age of 26.2 years. By the 1830s, this had fallen to 23.1 years (Tranter, 1985; Floud and Johnson, 2004: 73). These raw figures mask substantial regional and social variations. Where work for women was limited but wage levels for men relatively high, as in mining communities, women married earlier. Where traditional agricultural smallholdings survived the substantial rural changes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and where living-in farm service predominated, they married later. Nevertheless, the overall trend is clear and it reflects substantial changes in the economy. Given the limited number of years in which women are highly fertile, relatively small changes in the age of first marriage can have dramatic consequences on population distribution. It has been estimated that no less than 48 per cent of the population of England and Wales in 1821 was less than 15 years of age. Such a skewed distribution towards the very young placed enormous burdens on income earners and contributed to the desperation of much of the ‘hunger politics’ of this period.

House of Lords Collectively, male members of the aristocracy, and the twenty-six bishops of the Church of England. Their duties were similar to those of members of the Commons but they either inherited their titles or were, as senior Anglican clerics, appointed. Many new peerages were created in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

George III Monarch from 1760 to 1820. Aware that the Hanoverian monarchy had never been popular, he emphasized his Britishness. He was a dutiful, conscientious monarch if lacking in imagination and insight. He opposed emancipation for Roman Catholics. He was mentally incapacitated for the last ten years of his reign.

Regent In monarchical terms, someone performing the role and duties on behalf of another. Regencies were common when the monarch was an infant or child. In our period, the ‘Prince Regent’ assumed the role of a monarch from 1811–20 because of his father’s mental incapacity.

Migration, in the early stages predominantly of the young and unmarried, to cities offering the prospect of at least casual work was also a factor in the growing instability of life. Joanna Innes has recently drawn attention to the ways in which charitable provision to meet short-term crises expanded in the war years before 1815 (Cunningham and Innes, 1998: 73–4). This development increased concerns that much charity was being given in wasteful or inefficient ways. It is also worth considering to what extent protest movements are dependent upon the active participation of teenagers and young adults for their mass appeal. A population containing an unusually large proportion of young folk is inherently less stable than one in which the distribution is more even.

The dominant picture of social change in early industrial Britain concentrates on urban growth, factory production and on working conditions dominated allegedly by William Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’. No one doubts that the Industrial Revolution involved factories and the emergence of more specialized patterns of work in which human labour might be subordinated to the arbitrary rhythms of the machine. Nor is it to be denied that most factories (though not the earliest, which were water-powered and necessarily located in rural valleys with fast-flowing streams and rivers) were found in towns. The Industrial Revolution and urban growth went hand in hand. It is important to remember four points about this development, however.

First, the Industrial Revolution took place over a much longer time than is frequently assumed. In our period, factory production was almost exclusively concentrated on the manufacture of cheap textile goods, first cottons, then woollens. This took place in three areas of Britain: south-east Lancashire and north-east Cheshire; the central valley of Scotland; and Yorkshire’s West Riding. Here grew up the great factory towns of early industrial Britain: Manchester, Bolton, Salford, Stockport, Glasgow, Paisley, Leeds, Bradford and the rest. Secondly, these factory towns were by no means dominated by monster factories employing thousands of workers in vast, impersonal surroundings. In 1841, only 3 per cent of cotton firms in Lancashire, the county of greatest factory concentration, employed more than 1,000 workers; 43 per cent employed fewer than 100 (Gatrell, 1977). The scale of industrial production before 1850 has been widely over-estimated.

George IV Prince Regent from 1811–20 (when his father was mentally incapable) and monarch from 1820–30. He frequently disagreed with his Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. He meddled in politics but was increasingly unable to influence affairs. The powers of the monarchy declined during his reign.

Industrial Revolution Name given to the development whereby the process of manufacturing was greatly accelerated by more efficient means of production, especially by mechanisation in new factories. Britain underwent such a process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Thirdly, much urban growth in the first half of the nineteenth century resulted from an expansion and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Part One Analysis
• Part Two Documents
• Further Reading
• References
• Index