EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY ( 1660-1834 )
‘The shouting and joy expressed by all’ at
King Charles II’s restoration to the throne was, so Samuel Pepys recorded in
his diary, ‘past imagination’. There were fireworks and bonfires and dancing in
the streets; church bells rang and cannon roared as the King rode into the
capital accompanied by an immense retinue of gentlemen in doublets of cloth of
silver and velvet coats, of footmen in purple liveries, and soldiers in buff
uniforms trimmed with silver lace. Not only royalists but all except the most
diehard republicans welcomed the return of the monarchy, and they were not to
be disappointed. The new King showed himself anxious to placate his former
enemies as well as to reward his friends. They were given offices at court and
in government impartially; and the protection of an Act of Indemnity and
Oblivion was extended to everyone except those who had signed Charles I’s death
warrant and a very few others.
The curtains of reopened theatres rose upon comedies by William
Wycherley, Congreve and Dryden. The King himself founded two theatre companies
in Covent Garden where Inigo Jones’s piazza and his church of St Paul’s had
been built some thirty years before; and he became, either personally or
through his friends, one of London’s greatest benefactors. He laid the
foundation stone of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea which was designed by
Christopher Wren whose first work, the Sheldonian Theatre, had recently been
completed at Oxford. He had the Queen’s
Chapel, opposite St James’s Palace
refurnished for his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza. He extended the
royal aviary, the site of the present Birdcage Walk, and he improved
Constitution Hill which is believed to have got its name from his habit of
taking walks there. He began a new palace at Greenwich which, designed by Inigo
Jones’s pupil, John Webb, is now the Royal Naval College; and at Windsor he
employed the architect, Hugh May, to rebuild the State Apartments where the
delicately painted ceilings by the Neapolitan Antonio Verrio and the richly
carved cornices and frames by Grinling Gibbons were much admired by the King,
whose taste for the exuberant and sensuous style known as Baroque had been
formed in Paris and Versailles. He granted land in the area known as Soho after
the ancient hunting cry, to his friend Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, who was
also given several acres in St James’s where a highly fashionable area was
developed including The Mall, Pall Mall, and several other streets around St
James’s Square, all named after members of the King’s family or servants.
West of this development, Hyde Park and Green Park were made into royal
parks; while André Le Notre, whose work the King had admired in France, was
commissioned to lay out afresh St James’s Park where Charles’s tall, graceful
figure could often be seen strolling about with his dogs and mistresses. Le
Notre was also employed in laying out Greenwich Park where Wren was asked to
design the Royal Observatory for the Astronomer Royal, Sir John Flamsteed.
It was the King’s interest in scientific
matters which induced the diarist and virtuoso, John Evelyn, to suggest that
the groups of scientists and philosophers who met regularly at Gresham College
to discuss the ‘Advancement of Natural Science’ should be formally instituted
as the Royal Society. Among the Society’s members, apart from Wren, Evelyn and
Flamsteed, were John Aubrey, the antiquary, Robert Boyle, the physicist and
chemist, Sir William Petty, the founder of population statistics, John Locke,
the philosopher, and Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of his age. Nothing,
indeed, could have better illustrated the transformation of English society —
the emphasis upon science and secular political philosophy at the expense of
theological disquisition and religious enthusiasm — than the King’s granting
official recognition to the Society by its royal charter and his approval of
its purposes by his attendance at the Society’s meetings. Such patronage did
not go uncensured; and when the Great Plague of 1664-5, the fearful climax of a
series of epidemics, claimed thousands of victims in London, and when, soon
afterwards, much of the City of London was destroyed by a raging fire, there
were those who claimed that these dreadful visitations were God’s angry
punishments of a people steeped in sin and preoccupied with ‘blasphemous
questionings’.
The Great Fire presented the authorities with an opportunity for
building the kind of Italianate city with wide streets and spacious piazzas
proposed by John Evelyn. The opportunity was lost; but there did emerge among
the ruins of the old city several beautiful churches, livery halls and other
buildings by Christopher Wren and his assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor, as well as
Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral.
Worship in most of these churches was now conducted in accordance with
the Anglican rites which Archbishop Laud had favoured and was accompanied by
the music to be heard in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace where the young
Henry Purcell — soon to be hailed as the finest composer his country had ever
produced — was then a chorister.
The King himself was not a devout man. He could be seen in his chapel
asleep during the sermons or gazing fondly at some wanton mistress, or, on one
occasion at least, kneeling to receive Holy Communion with three bishops on one
side of him and three illegitimate sons by three different women on the other.
Yet, while making fun of Nonconformists, and having scant sympathy with John
Milton — champion of the Puritan revolution whose later works, written at this
time, are imbued with despair — or with John Bunyan —author of The Pilgrim’s
Progress, begun in prison where he languished for refusing to accept the
new regulations against Dissenters — the King strongly advocated leniency
towards Catholics and, pending parliamentary approval, promised to use his
royal prerogative to relieve them of the restrictions under which they
laboured. In 1672, when Parliament withheld its consent, he arbitrarily
suspended the penal laws altogether. Parliament intervened, passing the Test
Act which, besides requiring office holders to receive the Anglican communion,
obliged them to repudiate the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
Religious differences came to a head when Charles II died and, leaving
no legitimate heir, was succeeded by his brother, James II, an avowed Catholic.
An enthusiastic and tirelessly energetic adulterer, James had few other vices,
apart from an impenetrable obstinacy, but his virtues were not attractive ones.
Sincere but self-righteous, a firm friend but a ‘heavy enemy’, industrious but
unimaginative and humourless, his principal objects in life were the conversion
of England to Roman Catholicism and the establishment of a monarchy on the
model of Louis XJV’s. And after the defeat of rebel forces led by one of
Charles II’s illegitimate sons, the Duke of Monmouth, and the savage punishment
of the survivors by the Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, the King set his
mind to the realization of his objectives. He admitted Catholics into his large
army and into the universities; and in 1687 he issued his Declaration of
Indulgence suspending the penal laws against them. Seven bishops who defied an
order to read this declaration in all Anglican churches the following year were
prosecuted and acquitted to tumultuous rejoicing; and after the birth of a
prince threatened a Catholic dynasty, an invitation was sent by seven leading
statesmen to William of Orange, James’s Dutch nephew, a grave, shrewd
Protestant and the husband of Mary, James’s daughter by his first wife.
William landed at Torbay on 15 November
1688 and marched upon London as James’s few supporters deserted him and he
himself fled to France. The Glorious Revolution was thus achieved without
bloodshed; and William and Mary jointly accepted the Bill of Rights which,
excluding any Roman Catholic from the succession, confirmed the principle of
parliamentary supremacy and guaranteed free speech within both the House of
Lords and the House of Commons. On their acceptance of this Bill, William and
Mary were crowned jointly in Westminster Abbey; and, in the defeat of what was
taken to be Roman Catholic despotism, the age of constitutional monarchy, of a
monarchy with powers limited by Parliament, began. The revolution which brought
about this shift in power has been, and continues to be variously interpreted.
For the nineteenth-century historian, Lord Macaulay, it was the most
important event in modern history, ensuring that England was spared the
revolutions that were to break out in other European countries. Later
historians have tended to question its credentials as a revolution at all,
either because ordinary people were only incidentally involved in it or
because it was bloodless, though it led to bloodshed in Scotland where
William III’s troops fought the Jacobites, as supporters of James II and his
heirs were known, and in Ireland where William defeated them at the battle of
the Boyne in July 1690. Yet certain it is that after 1688 Parliament had
to be summoned every year and not just when the monarch needed its help. The
Crown still had formidable rights, not least in the choice of government
ministers; but the struggle for power had taken a decisive turn in Parliament’s
favout.
For years the English had been at loggerheads
with the Dutch from whom they had seized New Amsterdam ii~ 1664,
renaming it New York. Rivals in trade as well as ir colonial expansion,
the Dutch had also been exemplars t English merchants, providing them
with models for thi English banking system and the financial operations con
ducted at the Royal Exchange which had recently been rebuilt to the designs of
Edward Jarman after the destruction of the earlier building in the Great Fire.
Now the Dutch were to be the allies of the
English in the War of the Spanish Succession, a European war vigorously
promoted by King William III in his determination to foil Louis XIV’s attempt
to place his grandson upon the Spanish throne. The War lasted for thirteen
years, and by the time it was over both William and Mary were dead;
Mary’s sister Anne had become Queen; and the Duke of Marlborough had been
rewarded for his splendid victories on the Continent by the grant of the royal
manor of Woodstock where John Vanbrugh, architect of Castle Howard and Seaton
Delaval, built Blenheim Palace. To help pay for the cost of the war the window
tax had been introduced, a tax resulting in the bricked-up windows still to be
seen in the walls of many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century houses. By
the Treaties of Utrecht which ended the war in 1714, the year of Queen Anne’s
death, France ceded to England much of her territory in North America, while
the English also obtained various islands in the West Indies and a monopoly of
the South American slave trade, as well as Gibraltar and Minorca as part of
their share of the dismantled Spanish Empire. England, or Great Britain as she
had become by the Act of Union with the Scots in 1707, had emerged from the war
as a world power. She had also emerged as a trading nation with rapidly
expanding resources and ever-growing export markets not only for textiles,
for long the staple product of English workshops, but also for raw materials
and for newer manufactures, from the output of foundries to weapons, tools and
household goods. Industrial output was soaring. The merchant marine increased
from 3300 vessels in 1702 to 9400 in 1776, and trade with the colonies created
the largest free trade area in the world. Those working hard in England to
supply this market were poorly paid, but prices were also low and remained so
until the 1 760s; the average worker in both town and country was better off,
if only slightly better, in the middle of the century than he had been at the
beginning.
At the same time the population of the country, still mainly employed in
agriculture, was growing fast. In 1600 there had been about four million people
in England and Wales. By the end of the century this number had risen to about
5,500,000, by 1780 to some 7,500,000 and by 1800 to nearly nine million. London’s
population of 375,000 in 1650 rose to some 575,000 by 1700 and to almost a
million by 1800, when it was not only the biggest town in England but the
biggest in the world.
Towards the end of September 1735, Sir
Robert Walpole moved into the house which had been granted to him as First Lord
of the Treasury, Number Ten, Downing Street. A tall, stout, good-natured,
rather coarse Norfolk squire, who never entirely lost his provincial accent
though he had been to Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, Walpole had by then
become an indispensable minister of the Crown, indeed the first Prime Minister,
a title which was not, however, officially recognized until later. He was a
Whig, that is to say a member of the ruling oligarchy of men whose authority
was based on their ascendancy in local government and whose influence had
helped to secure the succession of the German Protestant King George I,
Elector of Hanover, upon the death of Queen Anne, his distant relative, none
of whose many children had survived. The Whigs’ rivals, the Tories — whose name
like theirs was originally an obscure term of abuse and whose supporters often
described themselves as the Church party since they were warmly regarded by the
Anglican squires of the shires — had become associated with the Jacobites,
supporters of the claim of King James II’s progeny, and so were anathema to
George I, who clearly preferred Hanover to England, never troubled to learn
much English, and was content to leave the government in the capable if not
over-scrupulous hands of Sir Robert Walpole, an astute businessman and
political manipulator whose acumen restored public confidence in the government
after the bursting of the ‘South Sea Bubble’, the disastrous failure of a
joint-stock company formed to trade, mainly in slaves, with Spanish America.
The people as a whole, as well as the King,
satisfied that the law was reconciled with liberty, were content to see the
country governed in the name of the House of Hanover, by Whig ministers
supported in office by Whigs in Parliament, a Jacobite rising in 1715 being
easily suppressed. There was another Jacobite rebellion in 1745; but, although
this caused alarm for a time, when an army led by King James If’s grandson, the
Young Pretender, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, marched down into England from
Scotland, the rebels soon lost heart because of their lack of support, turned
back at Derby, and in a battle at Culloden, near Inverness — the last land
battle to be fought in Britain — were slaughtered by the King’s son, the Duke
of Cumberland.
There was discontent in these years, of course, and widespread poverty:
it was the age of Hogarth’s Gin Lane; of the warnings of Henry Fielding,
the novelist and Bow Street magistrate, that if spirit drinking continued at
its present rate there would soon be few poor people left to drink it; of the
underworld of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera; of lunatics chained and mocked in
Bedlam; of prisoners starved in Newgate; and of a savage penal code that condemned
all kinds of malefactors to death by hanging.
But it was also the world of Handel and Canaletto, of Thomas
Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, of Thomas Gray and Oliver Goldsmith, and of
Richard (‘Beau’) Nash, master of ceremonies at Bath where the architect John
Wood and his son were providing the city with such masterpieces of
neo-classicism as the Circus and the Royal Crescent. It was, in fact, a world
now inescapably associated with the term Georgian, a word not used in this
sense until the beginning of the next century but signifying an elegant style
of architecture and decoration strongly influenced by the buildings of the
ancient Romans and Greeks. The Grand Tour — that continental journey which was
an essential part of a gentleman’s education in an age when the universities
were at a low ebb — was introducing the rich to the glories of Renaissance
architecture and to the works of such Italian masters as Andrea Palladio and
Vincenzo Scamozzi, whose influence on English taste was to be so profound. Sir
Robert Walpole himself built his Norfolk country house, Houghton Hall, in the
grand Palladian style; and this was to be followed by numerous other great
country houses whose owners and architects had been inspired by Italian models
encountered on the Grand Tour, among them Colen Campbell’s Stourhead, Lord
Burlington’s Chiswick House, west of London, Holkham Hall built for Thomas
Coke, later Earl of Leicester, and Hagley Hall designed by Sanderson Miller for
the first Lord Lyttelton. Other houses were built by men of more humble birth
who had made fortunes in India, like Claremont, designed for Robert Clive by
Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown — whose landscaping transformed the parks of so
many country houses — and Sezincote, built in the Indian manner by Samuel Pepys
Cockerell for a brother who had been in the service of the East India Company.
The British Empire in India and
elsewhere was much increased by the victories of the Seven Years’ War against
France. By his triumph at Plassey in 1757 against the pro-French
Siraj-ud-Dawlah, ruler of Bengal, Robert Clive had established British
ascendancy in Bengal; by his defeat of the French at Quebec two years later,
James Wolfe had won Canada; and by the Treaty of Paris, which brought the war
to a close in 1763, Britain was seen as the world’s leading colonial power with
footholds in Africa and islands in the West Indies as well as dominions in
north America and Asia.
Robert Walpole, ill-suited to
leading a government in time of war, had long since died; and the victories
owed as much to the brilliant statesmanship of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham,
the Prime Minister, as they did to the generals in the field. George I had also
died and had been succeeded by his son, George II, who, towards the end of his
life, was content to leave the government largely in the hands of his
ministers. This was a policy not to the taste of his grandson, George Ill, an
honest and kindly man with a most obstinate sense of duty, ill-advised by his
mother and his ‘dearest friend’ and chief minister, the handsome and
unexceptional Earl of Bute, to exercise to the full such royal powers as
remained to him, particularly in the choice of ministers and in the exercise of
patronage, the right to control the appointment to various offices, above all
to offices presented to Members of Parliament, by which the Crown could
manipulate voting in both Houses.
George III’s attempts to rule through the ‘King’s friends’ rather than
through the Whig oligarchy and the Cabinet, the committee of the leading
members of the government, which the Whigs controlled, soon led the
well-meaning King into difficulties. One of his most scurrilous and effective
opponents was the demagogue, John Wilkes, the ‘most wicked and agreeable
fellow’ whom William Pitt had ever met. A profligate rake of great intelligence
who charmed even Samuel Johnson, Wilkes was both a Member of Parliament and
founder of the North Briton, a waspish periodical which the government
attempted to suppress. Expelled from Parliament, he was three times re-elected
by the defiant constituents of Middlesex; and by the time the American rebels
had challenged the authority of King George III’s government by their
Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, Wilkes, together with Charles
James Fox and Edmund Burke, had become one of the most outspoken opponents of
government policies in the House of Commons.
Provoked by the government’s persistent determination to tax their
colonies and to oblige them to accept imported tea from the surplus stocks of
the East India Company, the American rebels had first protested by tarring and
feathering royal officials; then, disguised as Mohawks, by hurling chests of
tea into Boston harbour. Eventually they demonstrated their determination to
resist the royal troops by force of arms. Although a large proportion of
Americans remained loyalist in sentiment, and although the King’s troops won
most of the battles fought in the War of Independence, the idea that the
British army could subdue a continent at such a distance from its own shores
was, as the Adjutant-General put it, as ‘wild an idea as ever controverted
common sense’. After the surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 of General Lord
Cornwallis to George Washington and his French allies, victory for the United
States was assured.
The year before London had been the terrifying
scene of the worst riots in English history when an anti-Catholic
demonstration, representing an age-old prejudice against papists as probably
traitorous adherents of a foreign religion, was exploited by political
activists, criminal gangs and workers with grudges against ‘the wage-cutting
black-legs’ of Roman Catholic Irishmen. At least 700 people lost their lives
and the damage done to property was incalculable. ‘Such a time of terror,’
Samuel Johnson told Mrs Thrale, ‘you have been fortunate in not seeing.’ After
the suppression of the riots — which George III threatened to put down in
person at the head of his Guards since the magistrates appeared to be too
frightened to do their duty —there were familiar calls for the establishment of
a professional police force, and for various measures designed to repress a
possible rebellion of an unruly working class. These calls were repeated a few
years later when it was feared that repercussions from the Revolution in France
would disturb the stability of England. It was at this time that Parliament
passed rhe Combination Acts forbidding the forming of two or more people into a
union for the purpose of obtaining a wage increase or better working
conditions. But it was from the Revolution’s heir, Napoleon Bonaparte, who
threatened the country from without, rather than from such English
working-class revolutionaries as the Luddites, who smashed the machines which
were putting men out of work, that the real danger to the country came; and,
while a series of towers — known as Martello Towers, after the tower at Cap
Mortella where British troops had fought in Corsica — were built along the
southern and western coasts, urgent efforts were made to bring the navy up to a
strength capable of resisting the French invasion forces. After Lord Nelson’s
brilliant victories over the French fleet, culminating in his triumph at
Trafalgar in 1805, there was no reason to fear a French invasion. Nor, after
his final defeat at Waterloo in Belgium in 1815 at the, hands of the Duke of
Wellington and Marshal Blucher, was there any reason to fear Napoleon himself
who died in captivity on the island of St Helena in 1821.
To tease the Duke of Wellington, it used to amuse George III’s eldest
son to extol his own prowess in leading heroic cavalry charges at Waterloo. ‘In
my life,’ the Duke complained, ‘I never heard so much nonsense and folly and
so many lies in the same space of time.’ This imaginative liar had been
appointed Regent in 1811 when his father, suffering from the rare disease
known as porphyria, displayed symptoms of insanity; and so the Regent gave his
name to that exuberant style known as Regency, a neo-classical style based on
Greek rather than Roman and on Egyptian and Chinese models. It was a style that
might, indeed, have been specifically designed for the flamboyant and
extravagant Regent himself who became King George IV on his father’s death in
1820.
Exasperating as Wellington so often found the unpredictable
‘blackguard’, George IV, the Duke was forced to conclude that he was not only
‘devilish entertaining’ but ‘a most magnificent patron of arts.’ There was,
indeed, scarcely a notable writer or artist of his time that George IV did not
encourage and support. Even Byron, who joined in the general vilification of his
selfishness, extravagance and lazy dissipation, had to admit that the King,
that ‘leviathan of the haut ton’, had an impeccable taste in literature.
He never lost an opportunity to praise the work of Sir Walter Scott and kept a
set of Jane Austen’s novels in ‘every one of his residences’. As a lavish
patron of English artists, he bought paintings by John Constable, sat for
Nathaniel Dance, Cosway and Reynolds, commissioned works from Gainsborough,
Stubbs, Hoppner, Romney and scores of other painters and sculptors, including
Thomas Lawrence —whose fine portraits of Napoleon’s enemies now hang in the
Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle — and Canova whose splendid and colossal
marble statue of Napoleon himself, presented by the King to Wellington, can now
be seen at the Wellington Museum, Apsley House. Others of George TV’s
acquisitions now hang in the National Gallery, whose foundation in Trafalgar
Square owes much to the King’s enthusiastic support and whose imposing portico
came from the Prince’s sumptuous residence, Carlton House, in Pall Mall.
The rest of this grand house was demolished in
the King’s lifetime, Carlton House Terrace being built upon its site and in its
gardens. At the same time the King’s favourite architect, John Nash, was
commissioned to build an even finer palace to take its place. This new palace,
Buckingham Palace, was not finished until long after the King was dead. But
George IV did live to see the realization of most of Nash’s marvellous designs
for Regent’s Park and Regent Street in which he took the closest interest. He
also saw to completion Nash’s gorgeous Brighton Pavilion which took the place
of an earlier Graeco-Roman style seaside house and was decorated and furnished
for him in an Oriental style of exotic grandeur. Its cost, as the Princess de
Lieven said, was ‘really incredible’; yet, even so, was meagre when compared
with the sum lavished upon the reconstruction of Windsor Castle where, year
after year from 1823 to 1830, with cavalier disregard of the sums allocated by
Parliament, armies of workmen under the direction of Jeffry Wyatville laboured
to give the Castle its present appearance of solid yet romantic grandeur that
has made it one of the most distinctive monuments in the world.
George IV concerned himself not only with the arts, In the sciences too,
his patronage was eagerly sought and gratefully welcomed. He was President of
the Royal Institution and bestowed knighthoods on both William Herschel, the
astronomer, and Humphry Davy, the chemist and inventor of the safety lamp, one
of those many English scientists who were helping to make Britain the workshop
of the world and playing their essential part in that social and economic
transformation known as the Industrial Revolution.
In 1775, when the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum,
Adam Smith, the political economist, was elected a member of The Club. On its
foundation, at the instigation of Joshua Reynolds, some ten years before, The
Club had been a predominantly literary institution with Samuel Johnson and
Oliver Goldsmith among its more distinguished frequenters. But as the years
passed, its membership began subtly to change, scientists being admitted as
well as the literary men, critics, and dramatists who had attended its meetings
in the past. England was changing, too. In the country men and women were
beginning to leave the handlooms in their cottages to sit at wooden machines in
workshops; towns were slowly growing; windmills and watermills were
disappearing and tall chimneys were pouring forth a thick black smoke over the
surrounding fields. Within twenty years of Dr Johnson’s death, William Blake
was writing of the ‘dark, satanic mills’ whose high brick walls were the
prisons of the poor. By the time of Blake’s death in 1827, James Hargreaves had
invented the spinning frame which he named after his wife, Jenny; Richard
Arkwright had set up his own spinning machines in his large factory in
Derbyshire; Henry Cort had revolutionized the manufacture of iron; Edmund
Cartwright had invented the power-loom; James Watt’s steam engines were
grinding malt in Whitbread’s Brewery; Richard Trevithick’s steam-carriage had
run between Leather Lane and Paddington, and George Stephenson was
experimenting with the locomotives which were to culminate in the Rocket, capable
of racing along at thirty miles an hour.
Pioneered by the Duke of Bridgewater, whose waterway between his
coalmines at Worsley and Manchester was opened in 1761, canals were being dug
by armies of men known as navigators or navvies all over the country where they
still form a network of inland waterways from the Grand Union Canal and the
Grand Junction Canal to the Ellesmere and Manchester Ship Canals at whose
junction at Ellesmere Port is the Boat Museum where some of the ships that used
to carry goods on them are preserved. Before the century was over there was not
a large town in England which was not on a canal or within fifteen miles of
one, some towns owing their very existence to the new waterways. Stourport in
Worcestershire, for example — a town of some 4,500 inhabitants with
ironworks, carpet-weaving factories and tanneries — had been developed because
of the importance of its site at the junction of the Stour, the Severn and the
Staffordshire and Worcester Canal.
Road transport was also being
transformed: John McAdam, a magistrate and road trustee born in Scotland in
1756, had introduced new methods of drainage and surfacing; turnpike trusts,
of which there were over nine hundred by the 1830s, had improved thousands of
miles of roads by the erection of gates and bars and the collection of tolls by
keepers, many of whose little houses, such as the one at Folly Bridge in
Oxford, are still in existence; and hundreds of bridges had been built. Among
the most remarkable of these were the world’s first iron bridge built in 1779
by the ironmaster, Abraham Darby, across the Severn in Shropshire at the place
known as Jronbridge — where several museums vividly re-create the area’s
industrial past — and the Menai Suspension Bridge built by the Scottish engineer,
Thomas Telford, in 1825. This was the forerunner of the Clifton
Suspension Bridge planned in 1829-3 1 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of
the Great Britain, the first ocean-going steamer with screw propulsion, which
now lies in dock at Bristol.
Many of those travelling across these new bridges had little notion of
the miserable lives led in the slums and factories of the growing towns. There
were, to be sure, factories where the conditions of work were considered
exemplary. For instance in that gloomy area of the Midlands known as the Black
Country — where the restored bottle kilns of the Gladstone Pottery Museum at
Longton provide a vivid impression of the work once undertaken there — Josiah
Wedgwood’s employees lived under their master’s firm paternalistic care in a
model village, Etruria, which had been especially built for them. And in
Birmingham, whose population had risen from about 12,000 at the beginning of
the 18th century to 45,000 in 1800, an American visitor to one of the town’s
factories found ‘no mark of ill-humour’ among the hundreds of persons employed
there. Yet there were other places, factories, mines and sweatshops, where the
conditions were appalling, where children were employed as well as women and
were pushed into tubs of cold water to keep them awake during their
interminable hours of labour.
In the earlier years of the nineteenth century there were protests and
uprisings, riots against the Corn Laws — which had been passed by Parliament in
1815 to protect British agriculture and maintain the level of rents by charging
high duties on imported grain — and demonstrations against the savage
punishments imposed upon machine-breakers whose activities, it was feared for a
time, might provoke a national revolution. In 1819 in St Peter’s Field,
Manchester, a large crowd of people, many of them distressed handloom weavers
attending a rally in support of parliamentary reform, were charged by mounted
troops who killed eleven of them and wounded hundreds more in what became known
as the Peterloo Massacre in ironic allusion to the battle of Waterloo. In 1820
a group of radicals meeting in a stable loft in Cato Street conspired to murder
the entire Cabinet while they were having dinner and to carry off the heads of
the Home and Foreign Secretaries in bags. Betrayed to the authorities, five of
the ringleaders were hanged. They were spared being drawn and quartered because
of public sympathy; but even so the hangman was attacked in the street and almost
castrated. Ten years later, in protests against low wages and farm machinery,
there were serious riots all over England as gangs of men with blackened faces,
sometimes in women’s clothes and often carrying flags and blowing horns, cut
down fences, destroyed machinery and burnt down ricks and barns. Men who
declined to join in the rioting were thrown into village ponds; and parties of
yeomanry called out to suppress it were attacked with pick-axes and hatchets.
When the risings were at last brought under control, several rioters had been
hanged, well over 600 sent to prison and 500 sentenced to transportation,
nearly all to the Australian colonies. Soon afterwards, in 1834, in the Dorset
village of Tolpuddle, six farm labourers who had administered oaths to their
fellow workers were arrested and charged with having administered ‘illegal’
oaths for ‘seditious’ purposes. Although trade unions had been legalized ten
years before, the men from Tolpuddle were arraigned under an eighteenth-century
Mutiny Act and, like the rick-burning rioters, were sentenced to
transportation.
The furious protests which these punishments aroused could not be
ignored, however; and it was clear that a new age, later to be known as the Age
of Reform, had begun.
NATIVES ROMAN BRITAIN NORMAN RULE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET
ANGLO-SAXON Twilight of Middle Ages Tudor England Early Stuart England
crown and people age of reform 20th century