Victoria (1837-1901)

Queen Victoria was a girl of 18 when her uncle William IV died, in June 1837, and she succeeded to the throne. An .only child with a widowed mother, she knew singularly little of the world; she had been educated alone, at home, by a possessive German governess, Baroness Lehzen, and until her accession she was dominated by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and the Duchess's reputed lover, Sir John Conroy. Yet as soon as she became queen, Victoria acquired an air of authority which was both charming and impressive, and she proved her new found independence by barring Conroy from her court, to her mother's chagrin.

During her early years as monarch, Queen Victoria relied heavily on her Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, as her mentor. An attractive man in his late fifties, Melbourne became both a father-figure and the object of a half-acknowledged crush for the young Queen, and she followed his opinions slavishly. It was an unfortunate bias. Though a Whig, Melbourne had a reactionary distrust of all kinds of reform; and under his influence the new Queen became extremely unpopular for a time.

In 1839 Queen Victoria was obliged, by Melbourne's resignation, to invite the Conservative Sir Robert Peel to form a government. Peel asked that the Queen's Whig Ladies of the Bedchamber should be replaced by Conservatives. in the usual way; when the Queen refused, causing the 'Bedchamber Crisis', Peel refused to govern, and Melbourne, to his satisfaction, returned to office. An equally damaging incident, in the same year, was the Lady Flora Hastings scandal, which arose when a lady-in-waiting began to swell suspiciously about the stom­ach. Queen Victoria, censoriously believing the worst, pursued the matter relentlessly, and when Lady Flora died of the cancer which had caused her swelling, the Queen was hissed in public, and mocked as 'Mrs Melbourne'.

It was the young Queen's marriage, in 1840, which began to turn the tide of public opinion in her favour. The husband selected for her, with her ardent approval, was her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Victoria was charmed by his good looks and graceful manners; she proposed to him and was accepted, and on 10 February, the couple, both aged 20, were married.

At the time, there was some mockery of Albert; the smallness of his father's German state, and his own relative poverty, were laughed at, and Parliament quibbled over his allowance and future status. But the Prince emerged as a man of intelligence and taste, and he did much to widen the outlook of his adoring, if not always easy-tempered, wife.

Their first child, the Princess Royal, was born within a year of their marriage, to be followed by 'Bertie', the heir to the throne, and seven more babies, all of whom survived infancy. Queen Victoria hated the indignities of pregnancy and childbirth, but she and Prince Albert believed devoutly in the importance of family life, and their example of virtuous domesticity set the tone for Victorian Britain, in 1845 they acquired a new home Osborne, in the Isle of Wight, which Albert helped to design; and, in their castle of Balmoral, in Scotland, they enjoyed regular Highland holidays, setting a fashion for all things Scottish back in England.

Albert had a liking for new ideas. Not only did he introduce Christmas trees into Britain, and take a hand in redesigning the nation's military uniforms and ceremonial, he achieved a spectacular success with his Great Exhibition, in 1851. This remarkable ven­ture, aimed at encouraging industry and trade of all kinds, was housed in a vast Crystal Palace erected in Hyde Park; a showcase for British Ingenuity, it drew visitors from all over the world, and greatly enhanced the Prince's reputation.

The Crimean War, which broke out in 1854, brought some unpopularity for Albert, as he was known to be in favour of peace, and in some quarters he was hysterically rumoured to be a Russian agent. In 1857, however, he was created Prince Consort, in accordance with his wife's wishes, and just before his death, in 1861, he made his most valuable contribution to British affairs, by intervening in an explosive situation which might have brought Britain into the American Civil War. A US warship had boarded a British merchantman, the Trent, to remove two Southern envoys on board her; when President Lincoln refused a request from Queen Victoria's government to release the envoys, a major crisis flared up. Albert, though already ill, worked tirelessly to prepare a carefully-worded despatch which would enable the Americans to step down without losing face. The threatened war was averted - but the Prince Consort died of typhoid shortly afterwards, on 14 December 1861, at the age of only 42.

Queen Victoria was devastated. She shut herself away with her grief, hiding from her subjects' eyes and carrying out her administrative duties from the seclusion of Osborne or Balmoral. Her refusal either to play a full part in state affairs or to hand over to her heir, the Prince of Wales, was much criticised, as was her growing reliance on a bluff Highland servant, John Brown, whom she allowed to treat her with rare familiarity. Yet Brown's masterful care helped her to regain some interest in life. In 1868, with the encouragement of a very different servant, Benjamin Disraeli, she published a book of memoirs, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, which was a great popular success, and helped to restore her standing with her people. Disraeli, himself an acclaimed novelist, flattered her with the phrase, 'we authors, Ma'am...!'

Of the two great political figures who dominated the later, widowed, years of her reign, Queen Victoria hated the reforming Liberal, Gladstone, but was immensely taken with Disraeli. While the admirable but pompous Gladstone addressed her, in her own phrase, as if she were a public meeting, Disraeli had the right blend of charm and flattery, and his Conservative politics were far more to her liking. He encouraged her to make public appearances, from opening Parliament to unveiling the lavish Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, and it was he who, in 1876, secured for her the title of Empress of India, to her delight.

While Queen Victoria, in common with many of her subjects, held views which would be called imperialist and reactionary today, her attitudes were sometimes surprisingly un-hidebound. She did not, for example, share in the general outcry for reprisals against the Indian people after the massacres of English women and children had taken place in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. During the tragic Irish potato famine of 1845-9, she had been shocked by the plight of the starving, and sent aid from her own purse, while many of the Establishment did nothing; and she deplored colour prejudice, whether displayed by the British in India or by the Boers in South Africa. Her own most familiar servant, after John Brown, was an Indian known as 'the Munshi' - and in 1898, writing about the next Viceroy of India, she insisted that he must 'hear for himself what the feelings of the natives really are, and not be guided by the snobbish and vulgar and overbearing and offensive behaviour of many of our Civil and Political agents.' In both style and content, it was a characteristic passage.

Writing was one of Queen Victoria's passions: she wrote endlessly and copiously to her children and descendants throughout Europe, whose marriages into foreign royal houses earned her the title of 'the Grandmo­ther of Europe'. She took a close interest in foreign affairs, giving every encouragement to Disraeli's foreign policy, which included supporting Turkey against Russia during their war of 1876-7, and then in 1878 propping up the Balkan regime of the Ottoman Sultan. Her opposition to Gladstone increased; in 1885, when Britain's General Gordon was killed in the Sudan, attempting to hold the city of Khartoum against nationa­list forces, the Queen administered a public dressing-down by sending Gladstone an uncoded telegram which rebuked his government for not aiding Gordon in time. The contents of the telegram became common knowledge, adding to the public outcry over Gordon's death.

By 1887 Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 50 years, and few of her subjects could remember another monarch. At her Diamond Jubilee, on 20 June 1897, there were scenes of wild public rejoicing: the Queen had become a revered symbol of Britain's stability and prestige, and when she drove to St Paul's Cathedral for the thanksgiving ceremony in her usual simple black dress and bonnet, shunning robes and jewels, it was a successfully dramatic touch. Amidst the splendours of prosperous, Imperial Britain, the Queen herself stood out us a small, unostentatious figure, still mourning her dead husband.

She died, appropriately perhaps, at the beginning of the 20th century, on 22 January 1901, aged 81, and was buried beside her beloved Albert in their mauso­leum at Frogmore. Several of her descend­ants were with her when she died, but the arm which supported her was that of her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.(J.Ross)

At nine o'clock on the morning of 20 June 1837, Viscount Melbourne the Prime Minister, wearing the dress uniform of a Privy Councillor, was ushered into Kensington Palace. He was escorted to a small receiving room. In it, quite alone, stood a blue-eyed girl, not five feet tall, dressed in mourning black. Melbourne bowed, and kissed her hand. She was eighteen years old, her name was Alexandrina Victoria, and she was now Queen of Great Britain. Melbourne would be her mentor.

That same morning, her Privy Council stood in a horseshoe and listened to her speech of declaration which had been written for her by Melbourne. Late in the evening, he returned to Kensington Palace and for an hour or so, the two talked. That night she noted in her diary, ‘I had a very important and very comfortable conversation with him.’

C+[King William]... humorous, tactless, pleasant, and unrespected, had played his part in lowering esteem for the monarchy, and indeed the vices and eccentricities of the sons of George III had by this time almost destroyed its hold upon the hearts of the people. An assault on the institution which had played so great a part in the history of England appeared imminent, and there seemed few to defend it. The new sovereign had been brought up by a dutiful mother, who was shocked at the language and habits of the royal uncles, and had secluded her in Kensington Palace from both the court and the nation. Her education was supervised by a German governess, with occasional examinations by Church dignitaries, and a correspondence course on her future duties with her maternal uncle, King Leopold of Belgium. The country knew nothing of either her character or her virtues. ‘Few people’, wrote Palmerston, ‘have had opportunities of forming a correct judgment of the Princess; but I incline to think that she will turn out to be a remarkable person, and gifted with a great deal of strength of character.' He was right.

Her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her private secretary Sir John Conroy (who appears to have been more than private secretary), had longed for her succession and hoped either for an earlier death of William IV or for an extension – a delay – of Victoria's coming of age. Both would have raised the question of a Regency, and thus the chance of even more power for Victoria's mother and for Conroy. Victoria was defended from this prospect by her governess, the Baroness Lehzen. In the journals of Charles Greville, there's a note which tells us how the new Queen dealt with Conroy.

*It is not easy to ascertain the exact саusе of her antipathy to him, but it has probably grown with her growth, and results from divers causes. The person in the world she loves best is the Baroness Lehzen, and Lehzen and Conroy were enemies. Her manner to the Duchess is, however, irreproachable, and they appear to be on cordial and affectionate terms.

Once Victoria was Queen, the dubious ambitions of her mother and of Conroy were defeated.

Victoria's coronation was a blaze of diamonds, encrusted scabbards and elderly burnished breastplates earned in some of the bloodiest wars Europe had witnessed. It was a pageant of British triumphalism, but for organization it would hardly have won a skirmish because, as Greville noted, few, including the Queen, knew what was going on.

*The different actors in the ceremonial were very imperfect in their parts, and had neglected to rehearse them. Lord John Thynne, who officiated for the Dean of Westminster, told me that nobody knew what was to be done except the Archbishop and himself, and the Queen never knew what she was to do next. She said to John Thynne, 'Pray tell me what I am to do, for they don't know;' and at the end, when the orb was put into her hand, she said to him, 'What am I to do with it?' 'Your Majesty is to carry it, if you please, in your hand.' ‘Am I?’ she said 'It is very heavy.' The ruby ring was made for her little finger instead of the fourth, on which the rubric prescribes that it should be put. She said it was too small, and she could not get it on. He said it was right to put it there, and he insisted, she yielded, but had first to take off her other rings, and then this was forced on.

It was said that one million people watched the procession but the real business of royalty was not the business of pageantry. More important to the young Queen was that she understood what was expected of her, and for others to understand what she expected. The Baroness Lehzen had been Princess Victoria's confidante, but Queen Victoria now needed more than a trustee governess. Melbourne was wary of letting anyone become the power behind the throne of the young Queen, and so he took on that role himself. This meant that he was with her for hours at a time, every day. They wrote to each other, sometimes three or four times a day. At royal dinners, the guest of honour would be at the Queen's right hand. But Melbourne was always at her left. As they came to know more of each other it became obvious that this was no ordinary relationship between monarch and Prime Minister.

Melbourne and Victoria were so close that London joked of a romance -although all knew there could be none. The Prime Minister was undoubtedly attracted to the young Queen and she to him. But this was no affair of the heart. Victoria needed someone she could trust and Melbourne was also her friend. And for the moment, while Melbourne was there, Victoria believed, as she wrote to Prince Albert, that 'The Whigs are the only safe and loyal people.' But the Whips would not be in power for long, even though Melbourne would continue to be an influence at Court.

C+By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne the Whigs had shot their bolt. The Court and the governing circles were isolated and unpopular; the middle classes were fearful of unrest and beginning to vote for the Tories. Meanwhile Lord Melbourne, who had little faith in law-making, with grace and pleasantness was doing nothing. On top of all this there appeared towards the end of the year the first signs of a great economic depression. Conditions in the industrial North soon became as bad as after Waterloo, and in May 1838 a group of working-class leaders published a 'People's Charter'. Chartism, as it was called, in which some historians discern the beginnings of socialism, was the last despairing cry of poverty against the Machine Age. The Chartists, believing, like the agitators for Reform before 1832, that an extension of the franchise would cure all their miseries, demanded annual Parliaments, universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, the removal of the property qualification for Membership of Parliament, the secret ballot, and the payment of Members. Their only hope of success was to secure, as the Radicals had done, the backing of a Parliamentary party and of the progressive middle classes. But they deliberately refused to bid for middle-class support. Their leaders quarrelled among themselves and affronted respectable people by threatening and irresponsible speeches. They had no funds, and no organization such as the Catholic Association had found in the parishes of the Irish clergy, or the Labour Party was to find later in the trades unions. For a time England was flooded with petitions and pamphlets, but the ferment varied in warmth from one part of the country to another. Whenever conditions improved the popular temper cooled, and no united national movement emerged as a permanent force.

Churchill's Machine Age was only one catalyst for the Chartists. Others were the depression which started towards the end of 1836; the insensitive administration of the Poor Laws; and the division of haves and have-nots.

The new Queen's Kingdom was less than satisfied with its lot. And Melbourne himself was tired. He was sixty and was sometimes forgetful. His party, the Whigs, had survived for as long as they had perhaps because they were simply the most acceptable alternative to the strengthened Radical movement on the one hand, and the Tories on the other. The Whigs were good at giving ground when the governing of the country required compromise, but Melbourne knew that this could not go on. Melbourne's instinct was simply to avoid the disagreeable, but that policy could not be maintained when the country faced so many difficulties. For example, there was a general recognition that the Poor Laws were not working properly or, more accurately, the Poor Laws were too harshly administered.

But attention was increasingly focused far away from the welfare of the poorhouse tenants towards Afghanistan and China; the First Afghan War and the Opium War. Afghanistan was a land of some 245,000 square miles. In the nineteenth century it was a large and often inhospitable buffer between British interests in India and the Russians, and perhaps the Persians. Whoever controlled Afghanistan could threaten or defend their interests with some assurance.

Russian threat to India had begun to overhang the minds of Englishmen. It was in fact a gross exaggeration to suppose that Russian armies could have crossed the ranges of the Hindu-Kush in force and arrived in the Indus valley. But the menace seemed real at the time. When it was learnt that a small body of Russians had penetrated into the fringes of Afghanistan, a British expedition was dispatched, in 1839, to Kabul and a British candidate placed on the Afghan throne.

The Russians supported the claims to the Afghan throne of a man called Dost Muhammad. The British candidate was the very unpopular Shah Shuja.

C+The result was disaster. The country rose up in arms. In December 1841, under promise of safe conduct, the British garrison of some 4000 troops, accompanied by nearly three times as many women, children, and Afghan camp-followers, began to withdraw through the snow and the mountain passes. The safe conduct was violated, and nearly all were murdered or taken prisoner. Only a handful of survivors reached India in the following January. A second expedition avenged the treachery in the following year, but the repute of European arms was deeply smitten and the massacre resounded throughout the peninsula.

Reputations counted for little when it came to profit and loss sheets in the British counting houses. And so it was with the commercial events which led to what became known as the Opium Wars. Opium farming was a profitable business for the English East India Company and although, officially, the Chinese banned opium imports, some of their officials in Canton were corrupt, and opium was stored in large warehouses. A senior Chinese official was sent to Canton to have the millions of pounds' worth of opium destroyed. The British sent troops and the Opium War began. It went on until the summer of 1842 when the heat was so intense that many of the troops died from sunstroke. In August of that year a truce was signed, the Treaty of Nanking, and the greatest prize was not actually opium, but the ceding by the Chinese to Britain of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile in London, in October 1839, Queen Victoria's two cousins Ernest and Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, arrived in England. In 1836, the year before Victoria became Queen, her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, had been determined that she should marry his nephew Albert. They had met and, although she liked Albert, she was not overly impressed. Then in 1837, when Victoria became Queen, she made it clear to Leopold that although Albert might be a decent enough prince, she was after all Queen. Albert was given a tutor. Baron Stockmar, who had instructions to 'bring on' the young man- as a trainer might a yearling.

And so it was that when Albert and Ernest arrived in 1839, and the Queen looked him over, she recorded in her diary: 'It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful!¹ On 13 October 1839, Victoria told Melbourne that she meant to marry her cousin. On 10 February 1840, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were married. Charles Greville, in his worldly way, thought it not quite a splendid occasion. Not enough pomp for such circumstances and very, very damp indeed. But then this was no June bride.

*The wedding on Monday went off tolerably well. The week before was fine, and Albert drove about the town with a mob shouting at his heels. Monday, as if by a malignant influence, was a dreadful day - torrents of rain, and violent gusts of wind. Nevertheless a countless multitude thronged the park, and was scattered over the town. I never beheld such a congregation as there was, in spite of the weather. The Queen proceeded in state from Buckingham House [as some called it] to St James's without any cheering, but then it was raining enough to damp warmer loyalty than that of a London mob. The procession in the Palace [Westminster] was pretty enough and she went through the ceremony with much grace and propriety, not without emotion, though sufficiently subdued, and her manner to her family was very pretty and becoming. Upon leaving the Palace for Windsor she and her young husband were pretty well received; but they went off in a very poor and shabby style. Instead of the new chariot in which most married people are accustomed to dash along, they were in one of the old travelling coaches, the postilions in undress liveries, and with a small escort, three other carriages with post-horses. The crowds on the road were so great that they did not reach the Castle till eight o'clock.

Prince Albert was not the most educated prince in Europe. He had had eighteen months at the University of Bonn and a little travelling under the guidance of Stockmar who commented that Albert did not concentrate very long on any one subject. And the Opposition had much fun pointing out that nowhere in official documentation was it written that Albert was a Protestant – which all British monarchs and their spouses had to be by law. Victoria had no intention to sharing her Constitutional responsibilities with her husband; however, she did want Albert to have a degree of precedence and privilege which Parliament (in fact the Lords) was not willing to grant. He would not be King but Victoria said her husband should have first place in the land after herself. Her royal uncles objected and they were supported by many in the Tory Opposition.

А Вill was put to Parliament that would have given Victoria what she wanted for her husband. But Melbourne, perhaps showing his growing infirmity, handled it badly and it had to be withdrawn.

Melbourne devoted much time to trying to make Victoria a bipartisan monarch but the country had turned against the Whigs. In 1841 they lost four by-elections, one after the other. In May they lost a budget motion in the House. On 4 June, there was a motion of no-confidence in the government: Melbourne lost it by one vote. On 28 August there was another defeat and Melbourne rose in the Lords to announce that the Whig government would resign.

The end had come and in his letter to the Queen, Melbourne allowed his emotions to show through. 'Lord Melbourne," he wrote, 'will ever consider the time during which Your Majesty is good enough to think that he has been of service to Her Majesty the proudest as well as the happiest part of his life.'

In September 1841, the year after the penny postage stamp was introduced, Sir Robert Peel once more became Prime Minister. Peel's Cabinet was a conservative group with a small ‘c’; some in his Administration had resigned Government in 1834 over Catholic Emancipation – and that was a Whig Administration – but, although care must still be taken when labelling political ties, it was at about this time that the Tories began to be thought of as Conservative with a capital ‘C’.

It was also at this point that a new cast stepped onto the Westminster stage: almost all the great names of the rest of the century had now taken their places and one by one they came forward: Derby the protectionist Conservative; Palmerstone who started the Opium War and would become the first Liberal Prime Minister; Gladstone, soon to be President of the Board of Trade, and Prime Minister four times. And Disraeli, Victoria's favourite Prime Minister. But for the next five years Robert Peel, the man who first organized the Metropolitan Police, would preside with considerable purpose over all his departments. That may now sound pretty obvious but the role of Prime Minister was little more than 100 years old and the authority of the office was eloping. Peel's predecessor, Melbourne, was regarded by the Tories as someone who gave the Government no central control; he just allowed the various departments to get on with it. The importance given to the office of a twentieth-century Prime Minister hadn't really been approached until towards the end of Lord Liverpool's premiership in the 1820s. Liverpool had believed Cabinet should be a body for collective decision making not, as it had been a number of departments and individuals who simply did what they wanted to do.

And there was another aspect of premiership which a modern-day Prime Minister doesn't have to worry about: the monarchy. Although the sovereign's powers were decreasing, he or she was still a considerable political force and often forcibly expressed fear or distaste for one or other of the political parties, as Victoria had during her first couple of years on the throne, for the Tories especially Peel and his Tories.

In August 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland. Famine was imminent and Peel соuld wait no longer, but when he put his proposals to the Cabinet several of his colleagues revoked and in December he had to resign. The Whig leader, Russell, refused to form an administration, and Peel returned to office to face and conquer the onslaught of the Tory Protectionists.

His own party was now turning on him. The fight to stop the repeal of the Corn Laws would strip the Tories of any cohesion Peel had hoped to preserve. And the man who led the Tory Protectionists and attacked Peel was the son of a Spanish Jew who had only been an MP for nine years. His name was Benjamin Disraeli.

Chartists, Protectionists, landowners and industrialists clashed in the furious debate over the repeal of the Corn Laws. The landowners said the League was backed by industrialists who wanted cheap corn, and therefore cheap bread, so that workers had one less good reason to demand higher wages.

The Chartists who wanted social and political reform were against the League, saying that if prices collapsed then agricultural workers would be sacked and they'd flood the already overcrowded labour market.

The labourers were suspicious of the League because it was run by the middle classes.

Peel, who knew that lifting the tariffs was inevitable, was opposed by the Whigs, and by people in his own party – the new Tories, the Protectionists. And there was Disraeli.

Disraeli had become a member of a group called Young England. They opposed Robert Peel and saw themselves as the future of Tory politics. The then Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, believed that Young England was nothing, but that somehow Disraeli made it appear important.

*With respect to Young England, the puppets are moved by Disraeli, who is the ablest man among them: I consider him unprincipled and disap­pointed, and in despair he has tried the effect of bullying. I think with you that they will return to the crib and prancing, capering and snorting; but a crack or two of the whip may hasten and insure their return. Disraeli alone is mischievous; and with him I have no desire to keep terms. It would be better for the parry if he were into the ranks of our open enemies.

Commission on the Labour of Women and Children in Mines reports:

*That in the districts in which females are taken down into the coal mines both sexes are employed together in precisely the same kind of labour, and work for the same number of hours; that the girls and the boys, and the young men and the young women, and even married women and women with child, commonly work almost naked, and the men, in many mines, quite naked.

That, in the East of Scotland, a much larger proportion of Children and Young Persons are employed in these mines than in other districts, many of whom are girls; and that the chief part of their labour consists in carrying coals on their backs up steep ladders.

And although there is a feeling in this report that the mine owners were unthinking and exploitative, there is too a line which suggests that sometimes the society itself was cruel.

*The younger Children are roughly used by their older companions; while in many mines the conduct of the adult colliers to the Children who assist them is harsh and cruel; the persons in authority in these mines, who must be cognizant of this ill-usage, never interfering to prevent it, and some of them distinctly stating that they do not conceive that they have any right to do so.

And, to add to all this, fatal accidents were frequent. A Mines Act was passed which, in theory, stopped females going underground and said that boys under the age of ten shouldn't be employed. But the one group who might have helped the wider cause of children, did not. The move to give factory children better education (its proposers had the lucrative textile industries in mind) was opposed by a petition of two million signatures from the Non-Conformist churches. They believed that education would be a chance for the Established Church to influence youngsters. The Bill that did get through the House did little more than limit the working day of eight to thirteen-year-olds to six and a half hours. Nothing was done to remove the dreadful conditions in the factory schools.

The ambition of reformers was to make sure that children and females didn't have to work more than ten hours a day. Bui for the moment, this couldn't be allowed through because industry relied so much on these two groups that restricting their hours to ten would mean that no machinery would operate for longer than that.

But, by 1847, a Ten Hour Bill got through. Ironically, one reason it did so was that Robert Peel opposed it. The Protectionists, who had fought Peel to his political death with the Corn Laws, simply voted for it because Peel was against it. Also, by 1847, many mills were running for less than ten hours a day anyway. And people who worked fewer hours were healthier and suffered less stress; the result was greater efficiencies from the labour force and the fears of lost production weren't realized. And, in 1851, the Royal School of Mines was set up to train men as inspectors to monitor and enforce the industrial reform that was now irrevocably under way.

Throughout Europe in the late 1840s there was a change in social as well as constitutional attitudes. There were revolutions in France, Germany, Austria and Italy (although Italy was still a collection of states and would not be a country as it is now until the 1860s).

In Britain Charles Dickens published Dombey and Son, William Thackeray Vanity fair, Macaulay his History of England and Charlotte Bronte her Jane Eyre. And in November 1847 two men were commissioned, at a secret meeting in London, to write 'A detailed theoretical and practical programme of the Party'. The document was written in German and translated into English by Miss Helen Macfarlane. That done, it was ready to be published in London in 1850. The two men were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and the document was called 'The Manifesto of the Communist Party'.

С+The turmoil in Europe was viewed in England with sympathetic interest, but it went unmatched by any comparable disturbance. The Chartist movement, for some time languishing, took fresh courage from the Republican example in France. It was also stirred by a new economic crisis at home. There was half-hearted talk of revolution, but in the end it was decided to present a new petition to Parliament, reiterating all the old Chartist demands. Such was the measure of revolutionary feeling in London in 1848.

In the same year Macaulay [in his History of England ] set out to show that the story of England since the Whig Revolution of 1688 was one of perpetual and limitless [physical, moral and intellectual] advance. This was a heartening note, much appreciated by contemporary readers. Optimism reigned throughout the land.

C+In 1849, after opening the new Albert Dock in Liverpool, the Prince had been so much impressed by the surging vigour of British industry, and its maritime cause and consequence, that he adopted with enthusiasm a plan for an exhibition on a far larger scale than had ever been seen before. It would display to the country and the world the progress achieved in every field. It would also be international, proclaiming the benefits of free trade between nations and looking forward to the universal peace which it was then supposed must inevitably result from the unhampered traffic in goods.

Britain was hardly a bringer of universal peace. Her soldiers had been, and still were, fighting - and would continue to fight - as far away as China, and in both hemispheres of the globe, in India, the First Sikh War had been fought three years earlier, the Second Sikh War was just finishing. The First Maori War had just finished after five years, and the conditions were being laid for the Burma Campaign. The First Afghan War had not ended until 1842, and the Crimean War would start within five years. In Africa, there were eleven wars to come in the remaining half of the nineteenth century.

C+For two years, against considerable opposition, the Prince headed a committee to further his project. In 1851the Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde Park. Nineteen acres were devoted to the principal building, the Crystal Palace, designed by an expert glass-house gardener Joseph Paxton. Housing most of the exhibits, and enclosing whole trees within its glass and iron structure, it was to be the marvel of the decade. In spite of prophecies of failure, the Exhibition was a triumphant success. Over a million people a month visited it during the six months of its opening. Nearly 14,000 exhibits of industrial skill and craft were shown, of which half were British.

By the middle of the nineteenth century there were more than twenty-seven million people living m these islands. The nation, or some of it, had gas lighting, photography, Davy’s safety lamp, penny postage stamps, and, for the first time, Christmas cards. By the second decade of the century all Jane Austen's novels were published. Маltа had been annexed, the Cape of Good Hope taken and Sir Thomas Raffles had bought Singapore and founded the Zoological Society. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the British believed implicitly in their military invincibility and in their ability to put down uprisings in far-off lands. In the 1840s, British troops had fought the First and Second Sikh Wars in India, the first Afghan War, and the First Opium War in China. And now, in 1854, the Crimean War began. The Russians had moved into an area of Eastern Europe which included what is now called Romania and was then part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans were the Turks. The Russians moved in on the pretext that they were the protectors of Slav Christians. The French and the British saw this Russian action as a portent of Russian designs on the rest of Europe. And the British were still convinced that Russian expansionism could move eastwards and threaten British interests in India.

The Ottoman Empire was huge and rickety, and the Victorians feared the instability that might follow its collapse should Russian adventurism prove irresistible to the Tsar.

C+The urgency and imminence of such questions were sharpened by the evident determination of Russia to seize the Danubian lands, Constantino­ple, and the Black Sea. England could not ignore the threat: the shadow of Russia, already a formidable Asiatic Power, appeared to be creeping over India. British diplomacy was confused. For it was also necessary to keep an eye on the French, who had ambitions for extending their influence in the Levant.

The most influential policy adviser to the government was Stratford Canning, a cousin of the one-time Prime Minister George Canning, whose understanding of what could happen had been obvious two decades earlier.

C+[George] Canning had planned to head Russia off from South-East Europe, not by direct opposition, but by founding on the ruins of the Turkish Empire a bloc of small independent states who would stand firm and if necessary fight for the sake of their own survival. With such a programme of emancipation he had hoped to associate not only France, but Russia herself. The creation of the kingdom or Greece was the first and only result of his efforts. But twenty years had gone by and the ruling politicians of England reversed the policy of Canning, and now attempted to check Russian expansion by the opposite method of propping up the decaying system of Turkish rule in South-East Europe. In the execution of this plan the Government was much assisted by Stratford Canning. Proud, difficult, quick-tempered, he enjoyed immense authority with the Turks.

Canning had come to the conclusion that persuading the Turks to reform the administration of the Ottoman Empire would simply delay its collapse. But other events would hasten what Cunning called 'the evil hour'. And the Russian Orthodox belief that it should protect Christian Orthodox Serbs exacerbated the situation.

C+The Tsar sent his envoy, Menschikoff, to Constantinople to revive his claims for a general protectorate over the Christians in the Turkish Empire. This, if granted, would have given Russia authority over the many millions of Romanians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians within the Ottoman domains. The balance of power, for which the British Government always sought in the Near East, as elsewhere, would have been destroyed.

Menschikoff was tactless and his demands angered the Turks. The electric telegraph, recently invented, only reached to Belgrade. [Stratford] was the man on the spot, with considerable freedom from Cabinet control and with strong views on the Russian danger and the need to support Turkey.

Now the political situation in England was in some state of change and difficulty. In 1852, Lord John Russell's Whig government collapsed. In February, the Earl of Derby became Prime Minister. By the end of the year, he had gone and the Earl of Aberdeen had formed the first Coalition Government in English political history. Lord John was his new Foreign Secretary, but only for a couple of months, although he did stay in the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio.

The new foreign secretary was not the one man who would have made more sense of foreign policy, Palmerston, but another earl, Lord Clarendon. However, Palmerston was influential. Canning relied on his help and on the general anti-Russian feeling in Britain. The Turks, knowing they had Canning's support and believing that any British Government idea of appeasement would fall away if the Russians attacked, rejected all demands from the Tsar. And so, on 1 June 1853, the Government ordered the British Fleet to sail for the Dardanelles.

But the Cabinet could not make up its mind what it really wanted to do next. And although at that point war might have been avoided, what the Turks did next made that impossible.

C+On October 4 the Sultan declared war on Russia, and soon afterwards attacked the Russians beyond the Danube. Such efforts as Aberdeen and Stratford [Canning had been created the first Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe] could still make for peace were extinguished by a Russian onslaught against the Тurkish fleet of Sinope, in the Black Sea. Indignation flared in England, where the action was denounced as a massacre. Aberdeen was accused of cowardice. In February 1854 [Tsar] Nicholas recalled his ambassadors from London and Paris, and at the end of March the Crimean War began, with Britain and France as allies of the Turks. To the last, Aberdeen vacillated. 'I still say that war is not inevitable,' he futilely wrote to Clarendon in February, 'unless indeed, we are determined to have it; which, for all I know may be the case."

The operations were ill-planned and ill-conducted on both sides. With the exception of two minor naval expeditions to the Baltic and the White Sea, fighting was confined to Southern Russia, where the great naval fort of Sebastopol, in the Black Sea, was selected as the main Allied objective. The necessity for this enterprise was questionable: the Turks had already driven the Russians out of the Danube valley, there was little danger of an attack upon Constantinople, and it was folly to suppose that the capture of Sebastopol would make much impression on the vast resources of Russia. However, the British expeditionary force was encamped in Turkish territory and some use had to be made of it. Orders from London dispatched it to the Crimea against the wishes of its commander. Lord Raglan.

Raglan was sixty-six years old. He had fought, and was wounded, at Waterloo in 1815. He was not a distinguished general and for some reason persisted in calling the enemy the French. However he may be remembered for his style of coat and raglan sleeve. Many of his commanders were about the same age and older, with the exception of his Cavalry Commander, Lord Cardigan, who, apart from leading the charge of the Light Brigade, had the woollen jacket, the cardigan, named after him.

C+At Balaclava in October, the British cavalry distinguished themselves by two astonishing charges against overwhelming odds. The second of these was the celebrated charge of the Light Brigade, in which 673 horsemen rode up the valley under heavy fire, imperturbably, as if taking part in a review, to attack the Russian batteries. They captured the guns, but only a third of the Brigade answered the first muster after the charge. Lord Cardigan calmly returned to the yacht on which he lived, had a bath, dined, drank a bottle of champagne, and went to bed. His brigade had performed an inspiring feat of gallantry. But it was due, like much else in this war, to the blunders of commanders. Lord Raglan's orders had been badly expressed and were misunderstood by his subordinates. The Light Brigade had charged the wrong guns.

The Commander who misread the orders was later promoted to Field Marshal. His name was Lord Lucan. As William Howard Russell, the famous corre­spondent of The Times, reported, 'At twenty-five to twelve not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of those bloody Muscovite guns.'

It was all a fine nineteenth-century example of useless military heroism. Of the 673 cavalry in that charge, 113 were killed, and 134 wounded. Nearly 500 horses were left for dead in what Tennyson would call ‘The Valley of Death’. After the charge, the British and their allies were still determined to take Sebastopol, the great Russian fort on the Black Sea.

But before that could be achieved, the two sides met again, this time at the battle of Inkerman. On the eve of the battle, a British force of 3600 men faced 15,000 Russians.

C+It was a desperate infantry action, in which the British soldier proved his courage and endurance. Russian casualties were nearly five times as many as those of the Allies. But Inkerman was not decisive. It became plain there was no hope of taking Sebastopol before the spring of 1855.

Dreadful weather took command of the campaign. The soldiers were still in their summer clothes and many had lost their kit altogether.

C+Amid storms and blizzards the British Army lay, without tents, huts, food, warm clothes, or the most elementary medical care. Cholera, dysentery, and malarial fever took their dreadful toll. Raglan's men had neither transport nor ambulances, and thousands were lost through cold and starvation because it did not occur to the Government of the greatest engineering country in the world to ease the movement of supplies from the port of Balaclava to the camp by laying down five miles of light railway.

The hospital ships running between the Crimea and Constantinople (Istanbul, as it is now called) were hardly safe havens for the wounded. One in ten died on that voyage and in February, half the patients in one died - and by no means al1 of them from their wounds. And then conditions started to improve, and lives began to be saved. The Government finally woke up to the disaster that would eventually bring them down, and Florence Nightingale and her nurses had arrived in the Crimea. But the scandal of the Crimea could no longer be hidden from the British public. A Commission of Inquiry was set up although its report was not published until the worst was over.

Raglan resigned and then, ten days later, died, and in September 1855, Sebastopol at last fell. In March 1856, yet another Paris Peace Treaty was signed. The war was over and Britain, under its new Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, got on with the business of industrial and economic expansion and, as she expanded her interests abroad there were extra mouths to feed at home.

The population of England and Wales had grown from less than fourteen million at the 1831 census, to nearly eighteen million in 1851. In the same period, Scotland's population grew from 2.2 million to 2.8 million. In Ireland, the population had fallen from 7.8 million in 1831 to 6.5 million at the eve of the Crimean War - and, for the moment, that downward trend continued. The famine had had its effect, but emigration now contributed greatly. In Scotland alone, more than 10% of the population was Irish burn. Famously, the biggest movement was to America. But those seeking a new life in the New World weren't all Irish In 1850. the number of Americans who'd been born in Great Britain was reckoned to be 1.3 million.

The 1851 census provides a picture of the nation, and of what the people of Britain were doing for a living halfway through the century. The biggest single group was still agricultural workers – nearly one and a half million of them. Then came domestic servants-about one million.

Palmerston was the man of the moment, the man who sensed that the country wanted an Inquiry into the mismanagement of the Crimean War and who risked the resignation of two of his Cabinet Ministers - Gladstone and Herbert – in the process. A more innovative Prime Minister might have suffered, but Palmerston was at the pinnacle of his public popularity. And no matter how talented the Peelites (who included Gladstone and Herbert) were, they had no great numbers to support them. And Palmerston had, as Disraeli pointed out, a war, the supreme test of foreign policy and domestic political diversion. Furthermore, Palmerston understood how to exploit the authority of his office. The nineteenth-century constitutional analyst, Walter Bagehot, once described the office of Prime Minister as that of the nation's head master, a person with influence, an authority, a facility in giving a great tone to discussion, or a mean tone, which no other person had. He saw Palmerston as a head master who applied not a mean, but a light tone to the proceedings of Parliament.

Palmerston was twice Prime Minister, and when he won the 1858 General Election, he won it on his personality rather than his policies. Equally, the Party really did accept Palmerston's opinion that no new legislation was necessary. On one occasion he was asked what new ideas he would bring before the House. 'Oh', he said, 'there is really nothing to be done. We cannot go on adding to the Statute Book ad infinitum ... we cannot go on legislating for ever'

Within a year of bringing the war with Russia in the Crimea to an end, Palmerston, his Government, and most of all, his far-flung soldiers, were about to face a test of great and long-lasting consequence - the Indian Mutiny.

The British had been in India since 1663 when the East India Company set up in Bengal, having been chased from their other holdings in South East Asia by the Dutch. Bengal had been ruled by the Moguls since 1576. About halfway through the eighteenth century, Clive of India defeated the ruler of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey and the Moguls ceded Bengal to the East India Company. The Company nominated an Indian prince to the throne, but in truth ruled through a British governor – whom, of course, they appointed.

The Indian Mutiny started in 1857. For about twelve months Indians had rebelled against British rule – rule not by the British Government, but by the East India Company. The Company had its own governor, princes in its pocket, its own bureaucracy and, most important, its own army.

C+The East India Company's Army of Bengal had long been of ill-repute. Recruited mainly in the North, it was largely composed of high-caste Hindus. This was bad for discipline. Brahmin privates would question the orders of officers and NCOs of less exalted caste. [And] the Company's British officers were often of poor quality. By the 1850s, railways, roads, posts, telegraphs, and schools were beginning to push and agitate their way across the countryside, and were thought by many Indians to threaten an ancient society whose inmost structure and spirit sprang from a rigid and unalterable caste system. If everyone used the same trains and the same schools, or even the same roads, it was argued, how could caste survive? Unfounded stories spread that the Government intended to convert India forcibly to Christianity.... the introduction of a new type of ammunition provided a spark and focus for the mass of discontent.

... rumours began to flow that the cartridges for the new Enfield rifle were greased with the fat of pigs and cows, animals which Moslem and Hindu respectively were forbidden to eat. The cartridges had to be bitten before they could be inserted in the breech. Thus sepoys of both religions would be defiled. There was some truth in the story, for beef-fat had been used in the London arsenal at Woolwich, though it was never used at the Indian factory at Dum-Dum, [where the dum-dum bullet, the soft-nosed cartridge that expands when it enters the target, gets its name from], and as soon as the complaints began no tainted missiles were issued. Nevertheless the tale ran through the regiments in the spring of 1857 and there was much unrest. In April, some cavalry troopers at Meerut were court-martialled and imprisoned for refusing to touch the cartridges, and on May 9 they were publicly stripped of their uniforms. Next night three regiments mutinied, captured the prison, killed their British officers, and marched on Delhi.

Every British family that could be found was killed by the Indians. Now they went to the palace of the aged Bahadur Shah, the retired King of Delhi. He was taken from his home and proclaimed Mogul Emperor. But the people did not rush to his side. For three weeks there was stalemate. But then, and probably too late, the mutiny spread.

C+ At Lucknow, the capital, Henry Lawrence prepared the Residency for what was to be a long and glorious defence. Meanwhile, rightly perceiving that the key to the revolt lay in Delhi, the British mustered such forces as they could and seized the ridge overlooking the city. They were too few to make an assault, and for weeks in the height of summer 3000 troops, most of whom were British, held the fifty-foot eminence against an enemy twenty or thirty times their number. Early in August reinforcements arrived from the Punjab, having marched nearly thirty miles a day for three weeks. Thus animated, the British attacked on September 14 and after six days' street fighting the city fell.

There was a terrible massacre of British and loyal Indians at Cawnpore, and of the survivors – who had been granted safe conduct – all the men were subsequently killed and the women and children were imprisoned and then assassinated.

C+...the British troops took horrible vengeance. Mutineers were blown from the mouths of cannon, sometimes alive, or their bodies sewn up in the skins of cows and swine.

The recapture of Delhi destroyed all semblance and pretence that the mutiny was a national revolt. Fighting, sporadic but often fierce, continued in the Central Provinces until the end of 1858, but on November 1, the Governor General, 'Clemency' Canning, derisively so called for his mercifulness, proclaimed with truth that Queen Victoria was now Sovereign of all India.

An Act of Parliament took away the East India Company's territories and their soldiers, and gave them to the Crown. A council was established, with a principal Secretary of State, and this took over full government. And to show that it was now Victoria and not the East India Company who ruled, it was at this point that the title Viceroy of India first appeared. People in Britain were encouraged to go to India, to become planters. The railways were extended. Forestry commissions were set up, the judicial system overhauled, canals were improved. And so a new order was established, a new era in colonial living founded.

The 1850s saw a distinct change in the needs of British political leadership. The old guard still believed that government was best left in the hands of the ruling classes. Government and the House were not places to discuss wage demands and working practices, but grand strategy, and the exercise of sovereign authority. Anil the middle classes, the nub of the electorate, appeared still to prefer to be ruled by their betters rather than by their peers.

C+Standing apart both from the Whigs and Derby’s Tories were the Peelites, of whom the most notable was William Gladstone. Having started his Parliamentary career in 1832 as a strict Tory, he was to make a long pilgrimage into the Liberal camp. The death of Peel had destroyed his search of a new theme. The son of a rich Liverpool merchant with slave-owning interests in the West Indies, Gladstone came from the same class as his old leader, and believed, like him, in the new arguments for Free Trade.

Gladstone was no friend of the slave traders nor owners. In fact his first major Speech in the House was made during the debate to do away with slavery. But because his father owned slaves, Gladstone had (to be exceptionally charitable) seen both sides of the argument. In that first speech, he seemed to contradict the much stronger position he would take later in life.

C+Though admired as an administrator and an orator, his contemporaries considered him wanting in judgment and principle, but in fact, as Palmerston perceived, he was awaking to the political potentialities of the English middle class. 'He might,' he said, ‘be called one of the people; he wished to identify himself with them; he possessed religious enthusiasm, and made it powerful over others from the force of his intellect.’ Long years of waiting made Gladstone sure of himself.

It was in this atmosphere that Gladstone became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Aberdeen’s coalition government of 1852. Gladstone, who would be remembered as the great Liberal prime minister, entered Parliament as a Tory in 1832. With the exception of a few months, he remained an MP for sixty-three years.

Now, at the age of forty-three, standing in the Commons Chamber, he gave the country his ideas of an economy which would move towards Free Trade, a fairer taxation system and, he hoped, within seven years, the abolition of Income Tax. Here's a fragment of his Budget speech. Gladstone was talking about Income Tax.

*The Committee will recollect that I said we thought it our duty to look the whole breadth of this difficulty in the face - not to endeavour to escape it, not to endeavour to attenuate, or to understate it, but to face and to settle ... the whole question of the income tax. We propose then to re-enact it for two years, from April 1853 to April 1855 at the rate of seven pence in the pound. From April 1855 to enact it for two more years at six pence in the pound; and then for three more years - I cannot wonder at the smile which I perceive that my words provoke - for three more years, from April 1857 at five pence. Under this proposal, on April 5, 1860, the income tax will expire.

Of course, income tax never was allowed, as Gladstone put it, to expire. By the following year, the Crimean War had started, and just as Kings and Queens had done for centuries, the Government turned to the people to finance the war. Instead of seven pence, then six pence and then five pence, income tax was doubled. Someone had to pay for the Government's miscalculations, particularly in wartime.

The Arrow War - the Second Opium War – began in 1856. A Chinese magistrate ordered the torture and execution of a French missionary in Kwangsi Province, then, in October, the Chinese boarded the Arrow. The Arrow was a small vessel, owned by a Chinaman, who, because he lived in Hong Kong, had registered the vessel in the colony - it was an early example of the use of flags of convenience.

Some of the ships (they were called Lorchas) were used for piracy and smuggling. The Chinese took twelve of the men who had been aboard the Arrow and threw them into prison. The Arrow War was under way and the French and British, perhaps bolder after their defeat of Russia in the Crimea, joined forces to defeat the Chinese – which they did. British gunboats bombarded the Chinese on the banks of the Canton river. The Chinese declared every Englishman an outlaw. In Parliament the Prime Minister, Palmerston, was attacked, called an election and won it with a manifesto of pure jingoism. The British and French, supported diplomatically but not militarily by the Americans and Russians, demanded the right to set up embassies in Peking. Peking was a closed city and the Allies, instead of pretending the opium trade didn’t exist, legitimized it and the Chinese could do nothing about it.

In 1860, faced with an Anglo-French army, the Chinese called for a truce but then broke it. A delegation led by Sir Harry Smith Harkes was captured. He was humiliated and starved, others were murdered. In revenge, the British burned down the Emperor’s revered Summer Palace. As the Daily News, one of the eleven daily papers, then printing in London, reported in its ‘Foreign Intelligence’ column, the best thing the Chinese could do was to learn the lesson that, emperor or no emperor, the British were not to be trifled with. It was a sentiment that the Chinese have continued to ignore

The new decade (the 1860s) was to be one of continuous upheaval in Europe, religious and moral disturbance in Britain in the aftermath of Darwin’s Origin of Species, personal tragedy for the monarch when her Contort, Prince Albert, died, and carnage in the United Stares.

In 1861 the Civil War between the Confederate and Union forces began in America. In the same year, Italy became one nation and Victor Emmanuel II its first King. The two events aren’t linked, but they made a powerful contrast that wasn't lost on Europeans. Here was a Europe able at last to celebrate the unity of long-divided peoples, while in America – which seemed to represent everything that was possible for a nation: a truly new world of opportunity – all seemed about to be destroyed by the vеrу people who had created it.

C+... the prospects of the United States filled America with hope and Eurорe with envious admiration. The continent had been conquered and nourished. Exports, imports, and, most of all, internal trade, had been more than doubled in a decade. The American mercantile marine outnumbered the ships under the British flag. Nearly £50 million in gold was added to the coinage each year. More than 30,000 miles of railway overcame the vast distances, and added economic cohesion to political unity. Here democracy, shielded by the oceans from European dangers, founded upon English institutions and the Common Law, stimulated by the impulse of the French Revolution, seemed at last to have achieved both prosperity and power. In all material affairs the American people surpassed anything that history had known before.

Yet thoughtful men and travellers had for some years observed the approach of a convulsion which would grip not only the body but the soul of the United States Of the three races who dwelt in North America, the Whites towered overwhelming and supreme. The Red Men, the original inhabitants were ousted and eclipsed. Almost all the four million negroes were slaves. It was laid that over 660,000 slaves were held by ministers of the Gospel and members оf different Protestant Churches. Five thousand Methodist Ministers owned 219,000 slaves; 6500 Baptists owned 125,000 and so on.

In the 1830s the British Parliament had banned slave owning. The effect of this Act was to reduce the profits of the British planters in the West Indies. Their life style wasn't so unlike those in the American South. Little wonder that the Southerners saw what had happened in the West Indies and became determined that no Federal anti-slavery legislation would go uncontested. In England, the political and moral oppositions to American slavery were inflamed by the publication, in 1852, of Harriet Beecher Stowe's book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. That book is not always today seen for what it was in mid-nineteenth century Britain: it was a polemic against slavery. More than one million copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold in that first year of publication in England. The only other book to sell more copies was the Bible.

When the intractable Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President of the United States on 4 March 1861, war was inevitable. The Southern states decided to secede from the Union. The united states were no longer.

In England there were mixed feelings. If the war had been entirely about slavery, then the British would probably have supported the North. But Lincoln had said publicly that he wouldn't interfere in the slavery policies of the Southern states. And so, in Britain, there was a notion that if the issue was not simply slavery, then the Southern states had the right to go their own way. In fact in May 1861, the British officially declared neutrality and made it illegal for British subjects to fight on either side or help supply weapons. Lord John Russell and Gladstone even considered that Britain might have a role as mediator, although there wasn't much Cabinet support for the idea.

And so the war began, with Lincoln's Federal Army expected to quickly bring the Southerners to heel. But Jefferson Davis and his two generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, were determined and clever soldiers.

C+… opinion in England was curiously divided. The upper classes, Conservative and Liberal alike, generally looked with favour upon the South, and in this view Gladstone concurred. Disraeli, the Conservative leader, was neutral. The Radicals and the unenfranchised mass of the working classes were solid against slavery. The arrest on a British ship, the Trent, of the Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell, by a United States cruiser roused a storm. The Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, penned a hard dispatch which the Prince Consort persuaded the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, to modify. A clause was inserted which enabled the Federal Government without loss of honour to declare their cruiser's action unauthorized. President Lincoln took some persuading, but in the end he sagely remarked 'One war at a time', liberated the captives, and all remained in sullen suspense. Blockade-running, both in cotton outwards and arms inwards, developed on a large scale; but not a single European government received the envoys of the Confederate states. No one in Europe imagined the drama of terrific war which the уеar 1862 would unfold. None appraised truly the rage of the antagonists. None understood the strength of Abraham Lincoln or the resources of the United States. Few outside the Confederacy had ever heard of Lee or Jackson.

Britain’s interest in what was going on in America was more than strategic and political. It was already touching the British where they were must vulnerable – in the economy. The cotton blockade was not taken lightly in Britain. In peacetime, something like 80% of Britain’s supply of raw cotton came from the United States. Probably 600,000 of Britain's workers directly and indirectly depended for their livelihoods on the cotton industry. At first, there was little shortage. The record American crop of 1860 had reached Britain before the war started. But eighteen months later, the industry in Lancashire was all but closed down. And the war looked like being a long drawn out business.

What might have been an uprising easily put down became a protracted war, until the resources and resourcefulness of the Federal Armies told. General Grant beat Lee at Gettysburg in 1863 and the Confederates were forced to surrender at Richmond. Americans fought each other until more than 620,000 soldiers and about 50,000 civilians were killed.

1861 was to be the most miserable year for Queen Victoria. On the morning 6 March her mother, the Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore with Victoria at her bedside. The Queen had never before witnessed the death of another human being. The deep distress was overwhelming and for six months the Queen struggled with her grief. Some of her closest friends believed that she was 'determined to cherish her grief’.

And Victoria still saw her husband as the handsome prince she had married twenty-one years earlier, yet, by 1861, he was portly, his hair was going and his dull complexion reflected the anxieties and workload he took so seriously as Prince Consort. He was obviously ill. He suffered bouts of vomiting and high temperatures, his gums were inflamed and his glands swollen. In November, after a visit to Sandhurst to see the new Staff College, he returned to Windsor soaked through, full of rheumatic pains and quite unable to sleep for nights on end. One of the Queen's doctors explained that the Prince was suffering from ‘gastric fever’. This was not true, however the reason for telling him this was more than poor diagnosis. They actually believed that the Prince had typhoid, but they well knew his terrible fear of the disease and the seriousness of his illness was hidden from him. Also, the royal physicians, for all their standing, were not particularly celebrated for their accuracy in diagnosing serious illness. It is even possible that Albert had bowel cancer.

In the evening of 14 December, Prince Albert's breathing quickened and his doctors understood the pneumonia they could not control was with him. At some time shortly before eleven o'clock that same night, his breathing eased and then ceased. The Queen, kneeling by her husband's bed, holding his hand, waited and then whispered, 'Oh, yes, this is death; I know it. I have seen it before."

Her father had died when she was eight months old, and with her mother dying just nine months before Albert, Victoria now experienced absolute loneliness. She went into the deepest mourning, from which she never quite emerged. And she went to the place she dearly loved, her retreat, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Some of those very close to her wondered for her sanity. At first she would see no one, not even her Prime Minister, Palmerston - perhaps especially Palmerston, whom she had hardly trusted throughout her reign. The scene at her first and much delayed Privy Council meeting only added to the bizarre stories. Ministers stood in the traditional three-quarter circle, but instead of being with them, the Queen hid in an adjacent room and they had to shout to her through the door that was left just ajar.

At night she cried herself to sleep cuddling his red dressing gown. Wherever she went, she was never without his watch and red handkerchief. She even carried his keys. She grew thin, became abnormally weak and sometimes could scarcely walk. On occasions, she couldn't speak. The Queen may have been suffering from a nervous breakdown without her staff realizing what was happening. She was to write later that year, 'For me my very misery is now a necessity and I could nut exist without it.'

Gradually the sympathy of her people and her ministers turned against the Queen. Her self-imposed seclusion became too trying. People like to see their monarch. They could not. She shied away from the noise and the ceremonials that were part of her expected duties, especially those in London. She became a stranger in her own capital. In 1864, a notice was tied to Buckingham Palace railings: 'These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupants' declining business.'

Many of her people were experiencing a misery of their own, 1861 was the year of the new census. In the mid-1860s, there were about twenty-one million people living in England and Wales, more than three million in Scotland, and in Ireland about five and a half million. The 1861 census shows that of those twenty-one million English and Welsh, more than two and a quarter million were agricultural workers or domestic servants - still the two commonest occupations.

In July 1864 Prussia occupied Schleswig and Holstein. Britain did nothing much, even though she had a treaty with Denmark, and even though Palmerston had told the Commons that if Denmark were attacked, then Britain would not stand aside. More important, Palmerston, the man so interested in foreign affairs, completely misread Bismarck's determination and ability. He called him 'crazy'. He believed the French could become involved (a lasting fear of his generation), and he believed his military advisers who said the Prussian Army was not very good. Bismarck had outmanoeuvred everybody, as he would continue to do. He had Austria and Russia on his side and a certain belief that France and Britain would not hold together as allies to do anything to stop him.

С+ An ominous precedent was thus set for what the Germans politely called Realpolitik while Britain and France looked on. Realpolitik meant that standards of morality in international affairs could be ignored whenever material advantage might be gained. In this instance Denmark, the small victim, was not extinguished, nor were the peace terms unduly onerous.

In London Palmerston and Russell were attacked in the House and in the Press. Lord Derby described the government's foreign policy as ‘a policy of meddle and muddle’. But it is doubtful if the country would have wanted to go to war. Even if they had, it wasn't realistic. Britain was probably incapable of sustaining an intervention without the support of its naval power and the assurances of an equally powerful allied army.

Within a few months, and while Bismarck's Prussians plotted their next moves (against Austria and then France), Palmerston had grown physically weak. This old Irish peer was in his eighties, and although, in the General Election of 1865 Palmerston's continuing ability to appeal to the middle-class voters (and therefore the vast majority of those allowed to vote) won him another majority, by October of that year, he was dead.

Victoria, who never settled to him, saw his death as a sad state of affairs for the nation. Palmerston reflected a sometimes over-confident nation by his style, language, and prejudices, and especially his notion that all foreigners could do with a good dose of English advice. But Palmerston took his own decisions based on his own readings of any subject. His prejudices tended to be arrived at rather than instinctive. Palmerston was not a party man, he was simply Palmerston and when he was gone, so too was a remarkable age of English politicians.

Palmerston's Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell (the grandfather of the philosopher Bertrand Russell), once again became Prime Minister in 1865, and once more most people expected Russell to bring a new Reform Bill to the House.

Since 1832, the population pattern had changed - there were now new industries, new towns, and bigger boroughs, but the distribution of seats was the same. Russell's Cabinet decided to take one issue at a time, but without having thought it through. The Bill was defeated in the House and Russell offered his resignation. The Queen refused to accept it, but a week later, she was forced to. Derby became Prime Minister, and Disraeli his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So with Disraeli, the Conservative, in Government and with Gladstone, the Liberal, in Opposition, the battle line was drawn for the debate on what would become the Second Reform Act. Disraeli took the lead. Derby was Prime Minister, but he was in the Lords; Disraeli was leader of the Commons. The Conservatives had just as much of а ргоblеm drafting their own Bill as Russell's government had had. Three ministers resigned, but eventually it went through.

The Reform Act was a political success, although it could never be said to have righted all the thirty -five-year-old legislation it replaced. The urban working class man (as long as he was a householder] was now allowed to vote, the working class man in rural areas was not. There was still no such thing as a secret ballot. Nor were the women allowed to vote. Forty-five new parliamentary seats were created. The electoral boundaries were reshaped on advice of a Commission, which Disraeli made sure was loaded with Conservatives. But, as might have been expected, working-class voters found few working-class men to send to Westminster.

Disraeli, not so much interested in the detail as in the result, was triumphant. There was just one further step needed and he hadn't long to wait. In February 1868 Lord Derby, who had been Prime Minister for less than two years, was too ill to carry on and so Disraeli, at the age of sixty-four, took over the Conservative leadership.

His letter to the Queen accepting the Premiership quite properly offered his devotion. But Disraeli immediately played on her vanity and her undoubted experience, coloured as it was by her assumption of what Prince Albert would have done in almost any circumstance.

*Your Majesty’s life has been passed in constant communication with great men, and the acknowledgment and management of important transactions. Even if your Majesty were not gifted with those great abilities, which all now acknowledge, this rare and choice experience must give your Majesty an advantage in judgment which few living persons, and probably no living prince, can rival.

Victoria rather cared for that letter and for the moment, Disraeli was where he'd long wanted tо be – in Number Ten. But by December, the Conservatives would be out and Gladstone and his Liberals would be in.

C+These two great Parliamentarians in alternation ruled the land from. 1868 to 1885. For nearly twenty years no one effectively disputed their leadership, and until Disraeli died in 1881 the political scene was dominated by a personal duel on a grand scale. Both men were at the height of their powers, and their skill and oratory in debate gripped and focused public attention on the proceeding of the House of Commons. The political differences between them were no wider than is usual in a two-party system, but what gave the conflict its edge and produced a deep-rooted antagonism was their utter dissimilarity in character and temperament.

The arrival of these two at the political pinnacle coincided with the emergence of two distinct political parties, as opposed to vague labels beneath which various small groups congregated.

C+Thus they faced each other across the dispatch-boxes of the House of Commons: Gladstone's commanding voice, his hawk-like eyes, his great power to move the emotions, against Disraeli's romantic air and polished, flexible eloquence. To face Gladstone, Disraeli needed all the courage and quickness of wit with which he had been so generously endowed. Many Tories disliked and distrusted his reforming views, but he handled his colleagues with a rare skill. In all his attitudes there was a degree of cynicism; in his make-up there was not a trace of moral fervour. Large sections of the working classes were held to Church, Crown, Empire, and aristocracy by practical interests which could be turned to party advantage. Or so he saw it. He never became wholly assimilated to English ways of life, and preserved to his death the detachment which had led him as a young man to make his own analysis of English society. It was this which probably enabled him to diagnose and assess the deeper political currents of his age.

Disraeli was a novelist before he became a politician. His father, Isaac D’Israeli, had written or edited collections of literary and historical anecdotes. Disraeli's literary education began among his father's books and he never went to university. But, when he was twenty-two, he published his first novel Vivian Grey. By the time he'd become an MP, in 1837, Disraeli had published nine books. In the 1840s, his political novels Coningsby and Sybil were published. It is in the first that Disraeli wrote his definition of what Conservatism was then. He attacked something called the Tamworth Manifesto – a speech made in Tamworth, by the then Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel, Disraeli's leader. It was always considered to be the speech that distinguished the new Conservatives from the old Tories.

As for Gladstone, he disliked, or rather, felt bitter towards, Disraeli. Yet perhaps his sharpest feeling against him was the way in which he had kidnapped the Queen – politically that is. Gladstone was convinced that Disraeli had blatantly and unscrupulously brought Victoria into the Conservative fold. Disraeli certainly left nothing to chance, although any explanation to be found in his own writings doesn't go that far.

*The principles of the English Constitution do not contemplate the absence of personal influence on the part of the Sovereign; and, if they did, the principles of human nature would prevent the fulfilment of such a theory.

Which was all still true. But before the end of 1868 it was William Ewart Gladstone, not Disraeli, who was Prime Minister. And for the next half decade, Disraeli, the Queen's most devoted servant, would, once more, be on what he saw as the wrong side of the House. Gladstone became leader of the Liberals at the start of 1868 and so, for the first time, the leaders of the two main parties were men born in the nineteenth, not the eighteenth, century.

1868 was the year in which flogging was banned in the army. Sailors weren't so lucky: it would take the Admiralty another three years to be convinced of the wisdom of sparing the lash – and then only in peacetime. Transportation of criminals to the colonies was also banned. Work began on a draft Bill to abolish debtors' prisons and this was the year in which the Trades Union Congress (the TUC) was founded. It was also a year of three Prime Ministers: Derby, Gladstone and Disraeli.

Disraeli had no great intellect, but enormous and ill-disciplined style. He lacked the depth, or perhaps the real interest, to offer a way along which social injustice might be overcome. Napoleon III, the French leader of the day, said Disraeli was ignorant of the world. Disraeli's ambition was greatly inspired by his sense of being an outsider desperate to be accepted.

This then was the man who, despite Victoria's deepest reservations, would be accepted by the monarch as one of, if not the, most favoured prime minister of her time. For all his faults, Disraeli was a man of great courage and honourable emotions - which the Queen understood even if his political enemies, and friends, refused to contemplate them. It was the Oxford historian, Llewellyn Woodward, who wrote that Disraeli 'brought politics nearer to poetry, or, at all events, to poetical prose, than any English politician since Burke'.

However in November 1868, Disraeli's Conservatives lost the General Election. They did so because they were outwitted by Gladstone on the question of Ireland. Earlier in the year, Disraeli had hoped to shelve the Irish debate by referring the questions of education and land to a commission of inquiry. What couldn't be hidden, even by a Royal Commission, was the question of the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland. Gladstone put down a motion in the House to rid the state of the church he called a 'hideous blot'. This meant that the Catholics went over to Gladstone.

On the first vote, Disraeli was defeated, but adjourned the House for Easter. After Easter, he was again defeated, but had anticipated that. His plan was not to resign but to dissolve Parliament. This would delay the end of the Government, and give him the chance (which the Queen supported) of winning an election and staying in power. And when the Government went to the country, it was defeated. Gladstone and his Liberals had a majority of more than too seats.

For Disraeli, there were but three consolations. First, Gladstone lost his seat (but would have another, of course). Second, he asked the Queen for, and got, a title for his wife Mary Anne (she became Viscountess Beaconsfield. He became the Earl of Beaconsfield on his retirement eight years later). Third, and most important to Disraeli, he kept the friendship of the Queen.

None of this impressed Gladstone who was now Prime Minister of a Liberal Government. In the first Cabinet sat eight peers and seven commoners (including Gladstone himself). John Bright, the great orator and reformer at the Board of Trade, George Villiers, the fourth Earl of Clarendon, at the Foreign Office. Robert Lowe at the Treasury, Edward Cardwell, who was to reform the army. They were a mixture of reformers, small 'c' conservatives, radicals and Whigs.

Gladstone’s first task was Ireland and when the Queen's telegram arrived asking him to form the next government, he is said to have remarked, 'My mission is to pacify Ireland.' Ireland had long preoccupied Gladstone. Here is part of a letter to his wife, Catherine, written more than twenty years earlier.

*Ireland, Ireland! that cloud in the west, that coming storm, the minister of God's retribution upon cruel and inveterate and but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us those great social and great religious questions – God grant that we may have courage to look them in the face, and to work them through.

On 1 March 1869, Gladstone introduced his Irish Church Bill (to disestablish the Church of Ireland) in the Commons, it went through on the second reading by 118 votes. On the third, by 114. But the real battle came in the Lords. It was than a battle for a Bill, this was a Constitutional matter. The Government was telling the Lords to send back its Bill without blemish, but the Lords might well vote against it on the second reading. At this point, the Queen intervened. As much as she preferred Disraeli to Gladstone, up with a Constitutional crisis, the monarch would not put.

In the 1860s the Industrial Revolution put to sea. For shipping, it was necessary to have high-quality steel, not so much to build the ships themselves, but to make boilers that could stand enormous pressures, and which wouldn't be too big. The secret which engineers needed to unlock was a technique to use the steam not once, but twice – and that could only be done if the steam was pushed through under enormous pressure.

In 1865, a Liverpool engineer-turned-shipowner called Alfred Holt built three ships fitted with engines that met the criteria, and could carry 3000 tons of cargo - twice as much as the big clippers - as well as plenty of coal, and could steam, at ten knots, for more than 8000 miles without stopping. This meant that one of these new steam ships could get to China and back in about two months. Even in good weather conditions the dippers would take three months, and carry nowhere near that amount of cargo.

And then, in the year that the Cutty Sark was built, 1869, the Suez Canal was opened. This gave the new steam ships an advantage. By the end оf the 187Os only the smaller ships were built of wood. A centuries-old tradition had died. Also about to die was one of Britain's most famous writers, Charles Dickens. In 1868 he returned from a series of gruelling public readings in America. He was in poor health but two years later he began work on his final novel, Edwin Drood. He did not live to finish it. Dickens was an optimist who believed that human nature would eventually over-ride the power of the institutions in which he had so little trust. The extent to which he was mourned by the vast middle class suggests that he was far from alone in his belief.

One of the first demonstrations of a change in social policy came in the same year Dickens died – in education. The Minister who introduced the new Education Act was William Edward Forster. His Bill was an important advance. Its purpose was to provide more schools, good and active schools inspectors, and religious freedom - a controversial subject if ever there was one. The Church schools could and did carry on, with increased grants, but no local authority money. Most important, this was to be the first time that local authorities had money for education. Local education boards could now put education on the rates fоr the first time, children would not be denied elementary education because they came from impoverished families. It was a beginning.

The imaginative reforms of the Gladstone government are said to have drawn the template for the twentieth-century state: Education, the Law, the Civil Service. But the very brilliance of the Gladstonian changes helped bring about his government's downfall. Real reform means the reform of the institutions that make up the Establishment, and thorough reform creates enemies within the Establishment. So perhaps Gladstone tried to do too much. Certainly the reform of the army came too late to have an effect on the implementation of foreign policy. An illustration of this came in the summer of1870.

France had declared war on Prussia. There was plenty of diplomatic posturing, but with a run-down army, there really was little that Britain could have done, and so Britain did nothing. No one supported the French, who lost, and the Emperor, Napoleon III, was captured. The Empress escaped to Britain wherе she made their home at Camden House in Сhislehurst, south of London. But the astonishing military efficiency of the Prussian Army reinforced the Gladstone Cabinet's belief that the British Army had to be re-structured and re-equipped as a matter of national urgency. And of equal long-term importance, as a result of the armistice treaty negotiations it was decided that all nations should now recognize William of Prussia as the German Emperor.

C+...gradually the Powers of Europe drifted into two separate camps, with Britain as an uneasy and uncommitted spectator. From this division, growing into an unbridgeable chasm, the eruptions of the twentieth century arose. Nevertheless, so long as Bismarck led Germany, he was careful to do nothing to arouse British hostility. Not until Kaiser William II had dismissed the great Chancellor and plunged into provocative policies did Britain fully awake to the Teutonic menace.

At home, one of the reforms of the Liberal Government was about to work against Gladstone. In 1872 he had introduced the Ballot Act. For the first time in British history, men would vote in secret, in theory at any rate, they would not be pressured by lords or masters, landlords or employers. The Conservatives saw the advantage of good party organization, and Conservative Associations began to appear across Britain. The Liberals began to lose by-elections.

In 1873 Gladstone was defeated in the Commons when he tried to introduce a Bill to set up a new Dublin University at which Roman Catholics and Protestants could study side by side. In January 1874, Gladstone called an election and ran on the platform not simply of tax cuts, but of the abolition of Income Tax altogether. The voters were not fooled. And so, perhaps thanks to the secret ballot which the Liberals had introduced, the Conservatives came back to majority government for the first time since the collapse of the Tories almost thirty years earlier - which, of course, Disraeli had helped bring about.

C+While his great adversary devoted his leisure to felling trees at Hawarden [the Gladstone home in Flintshire] and writing articles about Homer, Disraeli seized his chance. For twenty-five years he had been the leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons and now he was over seventy. His physique had never been robust, and his last years, made lonely by the death of his wife, were plagued by gout and other ailments. [He] succeeded in persuading much of the Conservative Party not only that the real needs of the electorate included healthier conditions of life, better homes, and freedom to organize in the world of industry, but also that the Conservative Party was perfectly well fitted to provide them. Well might Alexander Macdonald, the miners' leader, declare later that 'The Conservative Party have done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals have in fifty.' Gladstone had provided the administrative basis for these great developments, but Disraeli took the first considerable steps in promoting social welfare.

The second part of the new Conservative programme, Imperialism, had also been launched before Disraeli came to power. Gladstone's passion for economy in all things military, his caution in Europe, and his indifference to the Empire jarred on a public which was growing ever more conscious of British Imperial glory. At first Disraeli was brilliantly successful. The Suez Canal had been open for six years, and had transformed the strategic position of Great Britain. No longer was the Cape of Good Hope the key to the route to India and the Far East. The Foreign Office had been curiously slow to appreciate this obvious fact and had missed more than one opportunity to control the waterway. In 1875 Disraeli, on behalf of the British Government, bought, for £4 million, the shares of the Egyptian, Khedive Ismail, in the Canal. [He] was bankrupt and glad to issue. The route to India was safeguarded, a possible threat to British naval supreme was removed, and - of fateful importance fur the future - Britain was inexorably drawn into Egyptian politics.

In the mid-nineteenth century there was a rise in nationalism, especially in South Eastern Europe. The main area of contention was the Balkan Peninsula: Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and the Austrian-controlled districts of Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. The Christians in the region began to rebel against the Islamic rule of the Ottoman Empire.

The Russian Christian Orthodox Tsars defended the rights of the Christians. The British supported the Turks because they feared the Russians might get control of the Mediterranean and Indian trading routes. Meanwhile, the Russians had made it clear that they wanted control of the waterway between Asia and Europe; the Bosphorus. The first major confrontation came in 1830 with the Greek War of Independence, but more particularly in 1854 when Russia went to war with Turkey. In this war, the Сrimeаn War, Turkey was supported by the British and French.

In 1874, there was a bad harvest in Hercegovina. In the following year, Slav peasants in Herzegovina revolted against the tax collectors, and Serbian volunteers came to help them The fighting spread through Bosnia. In the late spring of 1876, the Bulgarians joined the rebellion. The Turks sent in troops.

C+The Crimean War had been mismanaged by the soldiers, and at the peace the diplomats had done no better. Most of the Balkans still remained under Turkish rule, and all attempts to improve the Ottoman administration of Christian provinces had foundered on the obstinacy of the Sultan and the magnitude of the task. Slavs, Romanians, and Greeks were united in their detestation of the Turk. Revolt offered little hope of permanent success, and they had long looked to the Tsar of Russia as their potential liberator. Here was a fine dilemma for the British Government. The possibility of creating independent Balkan states was not yet seriously contemplated. The nice choice appeared to lie between bolstering Turkish power and allowing Russian influence to move through the Balkans and into the Mediterranean by way of Constantinople. The threat had long been present, and the insurrection which now occurred confronted Disraeli with the most difficult and dangerous situation for Great Britain since the Napoleonic Wars.

Disraeli, now in his seventies, was tired, gouty and asthmatic, and had wondered aloud to the Queen whether or not he should retire. She persuaded him to stay, but sent him to the Lords as the first Earl of Beaconsfield, which she believed to be a less strenuous place, but from which Disraeli could, as she put it, 'direct everything'. But he could not direct the news of terrible Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria.

C+Disraeli, handicapped by faulty reports from his ambassador at Constantinople, who was an admirer of the Turks, failed to measure the deep stir in public opinion. In reply to a Parliamentary question in July he took leave to doubt whether 'torture has been practised on a great scale among an Oriental people who seldom, I believe, resort to torture, but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner'. This tone of persiflage fanned into fierce and furious activity the profound moral feeling which was always simmering just below the surface of Gladstone's mind.

What happened after the Bulgars joined the rebellion and the Turkish irregular troops, the Bashi-Bazouks, arrived, was indeed massacre. It's been estimated that 12,000 Christian Bulgarians were massacred. The exact figure was never known. Gladstone had been in semi-retirement for nearly two years - since his general election defeat. When the massacre reports began to circulate he was at Hawarden, contemplating the writings of Thomas Aquinas. He was working on the question of religious and philosophical retribution. Bulgaria called him away from his studies and in three days he wrote what was to become his famous pamphlet, ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’. It was this document, or rather the events which prompted him to write it, that brought Gladstone back to Front Bench politics.

*I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps any other people in Europe it depends, to require, and to insist, that our Government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour to concur with the other States of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs, and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Passhas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the provinces they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to the memory of those heaps on heaps of dead: to the violated purity alike of matron, of maiden, and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God or if you like of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large.

The uncompromising accusations, the finger pointing at criminal acts and unquestionable sin, could never have been made by Disraeli. This was Gladstone at his most outraged.

*There is not a criminal in a European gaol, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea islands, whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged; which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and which may again spring up in another more murderous harvest, from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. No Government ever has so sinned.

Curiously, Gladstone was not directly identified with his pamphlet until the following year. Disraeli, or the Earl of Beaconsfield as by then he was, was overwhelmed with anger. After all, Gladstone's insistence that the Government had done nothing suggested a guilt that was not quite fairly cast. To Disraeli, Gladstone was no better than the Bulgarians (see below) - and he said so.

At the end of 1876, a conference was held at Constantinople which agreed Russian proposals for Turkish reform. The problem was the Turks didn't agree to them. The Sultan, persuaded by the Young Ottoman leader, Midhat Pasha, appears to nave believed that recent history would repeat itself - that there'd be another Crimean War. Then, in the spring of 1877, the Austrians, ever mindful of the rich pickings of the Balkans, agreed to remain neutral in the inevitable war between Turkey and Russia, as long as she would be given Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that the Russians would promise not to set up a Slav state at the end of the war. So, the war began. The Russians went into the Balkans – the graveyard of so many strategic ambitions. The advance should have been swift but it wasn't. At a place called Plevnia in Bulgaria, the Turks held out until starved into submission.

Gradually, the mood in Britain changed. The nasty Turks who'd massacred 12,000 innocent Bulgar Christians were now the heroic defenders. It became for some, a weekend sport to go along to Gladstone's London house and shout at his windows. By the third week of January 1877, the Russians had reached the gates of Constantinople.

The British people resorted to jingoism. In the streets and in the music halls, the strident verses rang out.

We don't want to fight, but by jingo, if we do,

We've got the men, we've got the ships, we've got the money too.

The Royal Navy was ordered to Constantinople and Disraeli's Government asked for an extra £6 million as a war fund.

C+In February a fleet of British ironclads steamed into the Golden Horn. They lay in the Sea of Marmora, opposite the Russian Army, for six uneasy months of truce; the whale, as Bismarck said, facing the elephant.

In March Turkey and Russia signed the Treaty of San Stefano. Andrassy, the Austrian Foreign Minister, in anger called it 'an orthodox Slavic sermon'. It gave Russia effective control of the Balkans, and was obviously unacceptable to the other Great Powers [Britain, Prussia, Austria and France].

At the Congress of Berlin, a conference of the Great Powers, the area was carved up between them. Russian territory now extended to the mouth of the Danube. Bulgaria received her autonomy. Montenegro, Romania and Serbia were designated principalities. Austria was allowed to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, as she'd originally demanded. And in a separate piece of diplomatic trading with Turkey, Britain was given charge of a Mediterranean island called Cyprus.

When Disraeli returned from the Congress of Berlin, he claimed he had brought 'peace with honour', and there was one aspect to the settlement which was to have far-reaching consequences in British history. The Russians believed they had been defeated by Bismarck manipulating the other European partners against the Tsar. Gradually, the friendship between Russia and Germany cooled. Not many years into the future this led to an alliance of France, Britain and Russia – but not Germany.

If Disraeli had gone to the country after the Congress of Berlin, he would probably have secured a huge Commons majority. But he didn't because other matters were pressing. And when he did, almost inevitably, the nation forgot Disraeli, the preserver of peace, and Gladstone triumphed. However Disraeli earned himself a secure place in the affections of the sometimes very affectionate Queen. Disraeli had presented Victoria with the most sumptuous jewel in her crown.

C+Queen Victoria, to her great pleasure, was proclaimed Empress of India. Such a stroke would never have occurred to Gladstone, or, indeed, to the next generation of Imperialists. But Disraeli's oriental, almost mystical, approach to Empire, his emphasis on Imperial symbols, his belief in the importance of outward display, gave his policy an imaginative colour never achieved by his successors. His purpose was to make those colonies which he had once condemned as 'millstones round our necks' sparkle like diamonds.

On 1 January 1877, Victoria made a note in her journal that for the first time she had signed herself as Queen and Empress. The Imperial Raj was confirmed. In India, it was an occasion akin to the blessing and recognition of a high priestess. The Eаr1 of Lytton, the new Viceroy, applied all the literary talents inherited from his novelist father in his telegram of loyal greeting.

*Her Majesty's title as Empress of India was proclaimed at noon this day upon the Plain of Delhi, with the most impressive pomp and splendour in an assemblage attended by fifty ruling Chiefs with their followers; a vast concourse of native Princes and nobles from all parts of India; the Khan and Sirdars of Khelat: the Ambassadors of Nepaul, Yarkand, Siam, and Muscat; the envoys of Chitral and Yassin; the Governor-General of Goa and Consular body; all the Governors, lieutenant Governors, and chief authorities, military, civil, and judicial, of British India, besides an immense gathering of Her Majesty's unofficial subjects of all classes, European and native. The flower of her Majesty's Indian Army was drawn up on the Plain, and made a splendid appearance.

If the language, and references to natives, jars in the late-twentieth century, at the time, it did not. The Maharajah of Cashmere, for example, believed it was indeed an auspicious day and the Empire really would be seen as a protective cloak for the people, whatever their caste. Disraeli considered the colonial impression important for Britain's world standing. Most of all, he loved the pomp of the whole affair and delighted in the pleasure his huge sweet-scented imperial bouquet gave his Queen.

Yet Imperial triumphs could not hide the need for further reform in Britain. Disraeli's Conservative Cabinet spent much thought on it, and continued the reforms others had started. But, just as Disraeli hadn't been able to find a solution to the problem of the two nations, the haves and the have-nots, in his fiction, nor could he truly find one in real life.

And then, once more, war erupted on two fronts: Afghanistan and Africa, and in one year Disraeli's popularity had more or less evaporated. There's some evidence to suggest that, even by the 1870s, with their Queen Empress of India, the British were not necessarily well tuned to the idea of Imperialism. Perhaps there was too much depressing news at home. The economy was in a more or less terrible state, and there were continuing unsolved difficulties, especially Ireland. When the election came in 1880, the result was clear enough: Conservatives: 240 seats; Liberals: 347. The Queen didn't want Gladstone as her Prime Minister. She didn't want anyone but Disraeli and she all but ignored the result of the election. She said that Gladstone would 'ruin the country', Gladstone had declared that he was loyal to the Queen, that he was devoted, but the Queen didn't for one moment believe that. And so it was with enormous reluctance, on St George's Day 1880, that Victoria accepted the inevitable.

Gladstone's fight was against what he called Beaconsfieldism. He wanted to undo everything that Disraeli stood for. Disraeli could do little but watch in growing anger. He still directed his Party's campaign against Gladstone in Parliament, and there were those who believed that this was the old Disraeli, but the cold white winter of 1880 and his asthma were killing him.

On 29 March he told his friend, Philip Rose, 'I shall never survive this attack. I feel it is quite impossible... this is the last of it.' On 29 April 1881, the body of Benjamin Disraeli was entombed in the churchyard vault close by his country home, Hughenden, in Buckinghamshire. Three princes – including the Prince of Wales – six dukes, and a crammed bench of lesser nobles mourned him, as the crimson cushion, on which rested his coronet and his insignia of the Garter, was carried before the coffin on which had been placed wild primroses – flowers sent by the Queen. She was distraught. The man she had once loathed had become her closest confidant. 'The terrible void makes the heart sick,' she said.

Sir Edward Hamilton, Gladstone's private secretary, hardly an admirer of Disraeli, reflected in his journals on the passing of an extraordinary statesman.

*Thus ends one of the most remarkable and eventful careers in English history. One cannot help feeling that by his death a prodigious blank is made in politics. They will be now denuded of half their brilliancy, interest, and excitement. One of ‘the two great gladiators’ in the nineteenth century is gone, and the remaining one will, I know, greatly feel the disappearance of the other. Most conspicuous of all the qualities of Lord Beaconsfield comes his courage. Next to his courage would probably come his extraordinary dexterity and ingenuity, and after that his sagacity and knowledge of character.

С+Не made the Conservatives a great force in democratic politics. The large-scale two-party system with its 'swing of the pendulum' begins with him. Tory democracy - working men by hundreds of thousands who voted Conservative – became the dominant factor. The extension of the franchise, which had hitherto threatened to engulf the past, bore it proudly forward. Such was the work оf Disrаеli, for which his name will be duly honoured.

In 1881scaresly remembered men were also dying, for their country in Africa. This was the First Boer War – or, as it's sometimes known, the Transvaal Revolt. British troops arrived in the Cape in 1795. After some diplomatic juggling the British began to assume the government of the area early in the new century. They were largely ignored by the Dutch settlers, who wished to get on with their own lives. Then in 1828, Britain declared that English had to be the official language. That was bad enough, but when, five years later, the British passed a law freeing all slaves, it was too much for the Boers. As a result, more than 50% of the Boers trekked, with their Bibles in one hand and rifles in the other, away from the coastal regions towards the interior. This Great Trek welded the Boers into a nation with all the fervour of a chosen people.

In 1867, diamonds were discovered and the British declared the area around the mines as their territory. And then came the annexation of the Transvaal on 16 December 1880, the Boer flag was raised over Heidelberg. In February l88l, two months before the death of Disraeli, the Boers cut to pieces the British Army at the Battle of Majuba Hill. In Britain, hardly anyone had expected the revolt of the Boers to be so decisive.

C+Gladstone had denounced the annexation of Transvaal. He himself was convinced that federation was the only solution for the South African puzzle, and continued with the negotiations that had already been under way at the time of Majuba. The outcome was the Pretoria Convention of 1881, which modified in 1884, gave virtual independence to the Transvaal.

It remained a colony, and so it was not wholly independent, as the Boers wanted.

C+All might have gone more smoothly in the future but for two developments. Immensely rich gold fields were discovered on the Rand and a large, bustling cosmopolitan mining community was suddenly planted in the midst of the Boer fanners' Republic. Meanwhile at Cape Town, Cecil Rhodes had entered politics, resolved to create a vast, all-embracing South African dominion, and was endowed by nature with the energy that often makes dreams соmе true.

More immediately, Gladstone's Liberal Government was faced with a stiffer problem – Ireland. The terrible storms that had swept the summer pastures and arable crops of these islands at the end of the 1870s and the early 1880s had sent the economy into further decline. Irish tenant farmers were destitute. In one year alone, there were 10,000 evictions. Fury translated into violence. The Irish Land League, formed in 1879 to campaign for the security of tenants and for Home Rule, had, as its President, Charles Parnell.

Parnell was an Anglo-Irish Protestant, who since 1875 had been an MP at Westminster. The strength of the Irish lobby, the 'Home Rulers' as they're sometimes known, was great enough to force the Government to agree to put through legislation for compensation for the evicted tenants. But the Bill, at best a half-hearted piece of Parliamentary draftsmanship, was thrown out by the Lords. The Irish reacted with violence. There were burnings and beatings, and Parnell invented a tactic whose description has remained in the English language:

*When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside, you must show him in the streets of the town, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and in the market place, and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed, and you may depend on it, that there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost of shame, as to dare to transgress your unwritten code of laws.

In other words, ostracize him. A few days after Parnell's speech, such a man was used as an example. No one would work for him, he couldn't get his horses shod, and no shop would serve him. And when he and his family escaped to the Harman Hotel in Dublin, the manager made them leave. Because of all this his name has lodged itself in the English language. His name was Captain Boycott.

The Home Rule movement wanted to repeal the Act of Union and bring back an Irish Parliament which at least had responsibility for internal government. After the election of 1874, there were nearly sixty Irish MPs sitting at Westminster. After the 1886 election, they held the balance of power at Westminster, There was, for Gladstone at least, another strand to this. It was the realization that unless some constitutional solution could be found, independence might come about by violent means. The origin of that fear was found not in London, nor in Dublin, but in New York.

In the late 1850s, James Stephens formed the Fenian Society in New York. Its aim was Irish independence from Britain. In 1867 the Fenians moved their campaign to Britain. They murdered a policeman and three Fenians were hanged. They then blew a hole in the wall of Clerkenwell gaol. Twelve people were killed. The Fenians – or the Irish Republican Brotherhood as they became - eventually faded, but only because they were replaced in 1916 by a new organization – the IRA, the Irish Republican Army.

By this time, terrorism, as it is now known, was rife. There was still in Ireland a viceroy, just as there was in India. In March 1881 a Coercion Act was passed to give him absolute power – including what was called, in the later-twentieth-century in Belfast, the power of internment.

C+Parnell, driven by Irish-American extremists and by his belief that even greater concessions could be extracted from Gladstone, set out to obstruct the working of the new land courts. The Government had no alternative, under the Coercion Act, but to arrest him. ... what was called the 'Kilmainham Treaty' [after the Kilmainham Gaol in which Parnell was imprisoned] was concluded, based on the understanding that Parnell would use his influence to end crime and terror in return for an Arrears Bill which would aid those tenants who, because they owed rent, had been unable to take advantage of the Land Act. WE Forster, Chief Secretary for Ireland and advocate of coercion, and the Viceroy, Lord Cowper, resigned. They were replaced by Lord Frederick Cavendish and Lord Spencer. Parnell and two of his benchmen were released on May 2, and it seemed that at last there was some likelihood of peace. But these bright prospects were destroyed by a terrible event.

Within hours of Cavendish arriving in Dublin, he and his under-secretary went for a walk in Phoenix Park. They were set upon by a group calling themselves the Invincibles and stabbed to death with surgical knives. Another Coercion Act quickly followed. The Phoenix Park assassins were captured and five were hanged.

Gladstone still believed that Parnell remained the key to peace. The majority of the Cabinet believed this was akin to supping with the Irish devil. There were allegations that Parnell had been involved in – or at least approved – the assassinations, but in truth there is little evidence to say that he was. For the next couple of years there was a period of calm, but not for Gladstone. He presided over a Britain trying to recover from economic depression. In 1885, he was defeated on a budget amendment, and resigned. He then lost the 1885 election, partly because his Liberal Party was split.

C+In the new House of Commons the Liberal majority over the Conservatives was eighty-six. But Parnell had realized his dream. His followers, their ranks swollen by the operation of the Reform Act in the Irish counties, also numbered eighty-six.

In other words, the Irish held the balance of power.

The most significant point in all this was that, very quietly, Gladstone had taken one of the most important decisions in nineteenth-century politics. He had become a convert to Home Rule for Ireland. He realized that for Home Rule to come to anything, supporting the Conservatives was more likely to bring it about than attempting to drag his own people through the lobby. What actually happened was a fiasco of political mismanagement. A new Coercion Bill was introduced, and defeated. Salisbury was forced to resign and Gladstone became Prime Minister again. Within months his Home Rule Bill was before the House. Within days it had been thrown out and so was he. Salisbury was back. The Irish Question was still on the table.

Unanswered also, was what to do about Britain's foreign policy in the Middle East.

Britain and France had set up joint rule in Egypt. Since the previous century, Britain and France had vied for control over the country. Now, after an uprising by Colonel Arabi Pasha, there was every possibility of a nationalist rebellion in Egypt.

C+On June 11,1882, fifty Europeans were killed in riots in Alexandria. The Cabinet decided to dispatch an army under Sir Garnet Wolseley to Egypt. The decision was crowned by military success, and Arabi's army was decisively defeated. The Liberal instinct was now to withdraw, but Egypt could not be left a vacuum.

British advisers had tried to help in Sudan, but had not been able to prevent what happened in 1881. There was a fanatical leader called Muhammad Ahmad. He was known as the Mahdi, or 'the guided one'. Very quickly the Mahdi had control of most of the Sudan. Gladstone saw the Sudanese rebellion as a 'struggle for freedom'. He decided that it was only right to leave the country, and the Egyptians were forced to agree with him.

To make the decision was easy; to carry it out more difficult. But on 14 January 1884, General Charles Gordon, who had achieved fame in the Chinese Wars of 1859-1860 and 1863-1864 when he commanded the Chinese Army against the Taipings, left London charged by the Cabinet with the task of evacuation. He arrived in Khartoum in February, and once there he judged that it would be wrong to withdraw the garrisons and abandon the country to the mercy of the Mahdi's Dervishes. He accordingly asked for reinforcements and put forward plans for counter-attack. He was resolved to remain in Khartoum until his self-imposed mission was accomplished. By May of that year, 1884, Gordon was trapped in Khartoum. Public opinion demanded that he should be rescued. The Government, with other matters on its mind and obviously dithering, did nothing until it was too late. At last, Gordon's dilemma became a Cabinet crisis. Gladstone gave in and General Wolseley was ordered to Cairo.

The political face of Britain was indeed changing. When the final decade of the nineteenth century opened, the Conservative Leader, Lord Salisbury, had been in power for more than four years. His government lacked the sparkle of the Disraeli and Gladstone Parliaments, yet there were achievements including the Local Government Act and the Factory Act. And because the Conservatives thought that some future Liberal administration would make all schooling free, thus destroying the position of the Church Schools, they introduced a Bill to make all elementary schooling free. Some Conservative back-benchers denounced that Bill as a 'surrender of Conservative principles'. Yet 83% of schoolchildren would now get free education, paid for by the people, the taxpayers.

It would, in the wording of the Act, be 'a grant in aid of the cost of elementary education in England and Wales at the rate of ten shillings a year for each child of the number of children over three and under fifteen years of age'. Yet Britain was falling behind other nations, and its own ambitions, by not providing a comprehensive secondary education. Here's a section tram a Royal Commission report published in the middle of the 1890s.

*Elementary education is among the first needs of a people.... But it is by those who have received a further and superior kind оf instruction that the intellectual progress of a nation is maintained. It is they who provide its literature, who advance its science, who direct its government.

In England, those classes which have been wont to resort to the universities have, during the last sixty or seventy years, fared well. Those who could afford to pay the very high charges made at some of the great endowed schools have had an education which, if somewhat one-sided, has been highly stimulative to certain types of mind. But the great body of the commercial and professional classes were long forced to content themselves with a teaching which was usually limited in range and often poor in quality, and whose defects had become so familiar that they had ceased to be felt as defects.

There had been improvements, of sorts. During the previous quarter of a century there were more schools. But there wasn't a central government watchdog and certainly no yardstick for standards. And the new free elementary education was really concerned with overcoming illiteracy, and it wasn't until progress had been made here that secondary education became more imaginative. By 1889, the new County Councils were told to provide technical education. This meant new colleges and they became grant maintained from central government. However, the Royal Commission report stated that the 'educational opportunities offered to boys and girls who leave school are still far behind the requirements of our times’.

The importance of this Royal Commission report is not that it directly achieved a great deal, but that it led to later reform. This was because one of the Commissioners, Robert Morant, was the draftsman of the great Education Act of 1902. He made sure many of the Commission's recommendations appeared in that legislation, the architecture of which survived until the Butler Education Act forty years later. And so at the beginning of the decade, the Conservatives had introduced worthy but uninspiring legislative programmes. The party managers had wanted trusty Conservative, not Radical Conservative, government and that was what they got.

Gladstone's party seemed full of ideas, but little cohesion. So there was not much of a choice for the British people at the election of 1892.

C+Liberal prospects, which had been so bright in 1889, were now badly clouded. They were not improved by the adoption of the comprehensive 'Newcastle Programme' of 1891.

The Newcastle Programme was named after the Liberal Party conference which took place in Newcastle in October 1891. It promised Home Rule for Ireland (Gladstone's last ambition), re-establishment of the Scottish and Welsh Churches, rural government, Parliaments every three years and industrial accident compensation for workers.

C+In trying to meet the demands оf еvеrу section of the party this рrоgrammе gave far more offence than satisfaction. When the election came in the summer of the following year the result was a Home Rule majority of only forty, dependent on the Irish Members. The majority was too thin for Gladstone's purposes, but he formed a Cabinet which included men as gifted as Harcoun, Rosebery, Morley, and Campbell-Bannetman. The brightest star of them all was HH Asquith, the most able Home Secretary of the century.

Three of them, Rosebery, Asquith and Саmрbеll-Bannetman, were in turn to be the last three Prime Ministers of a wholly Liberal government.

C+Gladstone was resolute. Work began immediately on a second Home Rule Bill, and in February 1893, he introduced it himself. At the age of eighty-four he piloted, the Bill through eighty-five sittings against an Opposition led by debaters as formidable as Chamberlain and Balfour. There have been few more remarkable achievements in the whole history of Parliament. It was all in vain. Passing through the Commons by small majorities, the Bill was rejected on the second reading in the Lords by 419 votes to forty-one. Thus perished all hope of a united, self-governing Ireland, loyal to the British Crown. A generation later civil war, partition, and the separation of the South from the main stream of world events were to be Ireland's lot. The immediate reaction in England was one of indifference. Encouraged by their victory, the Lords hampered the Government incessantly. Only one major issue was successful, a new Local Government Act.

This was the Act of Parliament which led to the creation of urban and district councils, and elections to parish councils. But it wasn't the Act the Government had wanted; the Lords had wrecked it.

In 1898 Britain was once more at war and it was a war which would take her into the twentieth century. This war was the Boer War.

It was one of those conflicts of which most have heard, yet can't quite place in the historical calendar and most certainly can't remember why British troops, were fighting in Africa. Yet a half a million men fought in the Boer War. One in ten were killed or wounded. This war was the second war between the British and the Afrikaners, or Boers. Boer is the Dutch word for farmer and the Afrikaners were farmers of Dutch origin.

There are three particular characters in the story of Africa and Britain and the Boer War: Cecil Rhodes, Paul Kruger and Dr Leander Starr Jameson. Cecil Rhodes was the man who founded the De Beers diamond company and after whom Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named. He was a parson's son who, as a child, was ill and so went to South Africa because it had a healthier climate. He made his money out of diamond mining and, in 1889, set up the British South Africa Company to develop the northern neighbouring territories of the Transvaal – which became Rhodesia.

Paul Kruger was an Afrikaner. He was the President of the Transvaal. His battle wasn't directly with the British Government, but the so-called Uitlanders, the non-Dutch Afrikaner settlers. They had grievances which he refused to acknowledge.

Jameson is perhaps the least known of the three. He was Cecil Rhodes's friend and the colonial administrator. He succeeded Rhodes as leader of his Progressive Party and, in 1904, became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. In summary, Jameson, on behalf of Cecil Rhodes, led a raid on the Transvaal in an attempt to overthrow the President, Paul Kruger. This invasion failed, but it worsened relations between Britain and the Afrikaners and the eventual result was the Boer War.

С+When Joseph Chamberlain became Colonial Secretary in 1895; he was confronted by a situation of great complexity. The Transvaal had been transformed by the exploitation of the extremely rich gold fields on the Witwatersrand. This was the work of foreign capital and labour, most of it British. The Uitlanders – or Otherlanders, as foreigners were called – equalled the native Boers in number, but the Transvaal Government refused to grant them political rights, even though they contributed all but one-twentieth of the country's taxation. Paul Kruger, the President of the Republic, who had taken part in the Great Trek and was now past his seventieth year, determined to preserve the character and independence of his country. He headed the recalcitrant Dutch, unwilling to make common cause with the British, and opposed to the advance of industry, though ready to feed on its profits. The threat of a cosmopolitan gold field to a close community of Bible-reading fanners was obvious to him. But his fears were intensified by the encircling motions of Rhodes' British South Africa Company, which already controlled the territories to the north that were to become the Rhodesias, and was now trying to acquire Bechuanaland to the west. [Bechuanaland is now Botswana.] Rhodes, who had large financial interests on the Rand, dreamt of a United South Africa and a Cape-to-Cairo railway running through British territory all the way.

Jameson took 500 men when he invaded the Transvaal. But the uprising had been postponed although Jameson didn't know that until too late. He and his men were captured by the Boer army, and Rhodes was forced to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.

The Boers now believed that their whole way of life was threatened by Britain and, under Kruger, they began to arm themselves for war. But it didn't come immediately. In London, Chamberlain believed war could be avoided in spite of the best advice he was getting from South Africa. The weakness in Chamberlain's, and to a similar extent, Rhodes's, reading of the situation, was that they both failed to understand the determination and grit of Kruger and the Boers. By autumn 1899, all negotiations were meaningless. Furthermore, both sides had so aimed themselves, that the threat of war had a momentum of its own.

C+At the outbreak of the war the Boers put 35,000 men, or twice the British number, in the field, and a much superior artillery derived from German sources. They crossed the frontiers in several directions. Within a few weeks they had invested Ladysmith to the east, and Mafeking and Kimberley to the west. At Ladysmith, on the Natal border, 10,000 men, under Sir George White, were surrounded and besieged after two British battalions had been trapped and forced to surrender their guns at Nicholson's Nek. At Mafeking a small force commanded by Colonel Baden-Powell was encircled by many times its number under Piet Cronje. At Kimberley, Cecil Rhodes himself and a large civilian population were beset. Meanwhile a British army corps of three divisions was on the way as reinforcement, under the command of Sir Redvers Buller, and volunteer contingents from the Dominions were offered or were forthcoming. [But], within a single December week each of them advanced against the rifle and artillery fire of the Boers, and was decisively defeated with, for those days, severe losses in men and guns.

In Britain, there was something close to bewilderment and disbelief at the defeats. For example, at Magersfontein there were more than 1000 casualties. Some of the Scottish units lost as many as six out of every ten officers. The bleak seven days for the British army became known as Black Week and Buller, who at one point panicked and ordered the besieged soldiers at Ladysmith to surrender (which they didn't), was sacked and replaced by Lord Roberts with the hero of Omdurman, Lord Kitchener, as his Chief of Staff. Perhaps, if the Boers had been content with keeping the three towns of Ladysmith, Кimberley and Mafeking undersiege, they might have beaten the British. Instead they tried to capture the towns, thus using resources they could ill-afford and tactics they little understood.

The Boers were good at mounted, hit and gallop warfare and at holding onto defensive positions – they literally retreated into laagers. And now with Roberts and Kitchener running the war, with Buller sent off to Natal and with reinforcements in place, the campaign began to take on a new shape. The objectives were Bloemfontein and Pretoria, the Boer capitals. Cronje moved many of his troops from Mafeking to protect Kimberley but he was outwitted and surrendered his 4000 men to Kitchener.

C+Thereafter all went with a rush. Buller relieved Ladysmith; on March 13 Roberts reached Bloemfontein, on May 31, Johannesburg, and on June 5, Pretoria fell. Mafeking was liberated and its relief provoked unseemly celebrations in London. Kruger fled. The Orange Free State and the Transvaal were annexed, and in the autumn of 1900 Roberts went home to England. After almost exactly a year of lively fighting, and with both the rebel capitals occupied, it seemed to the British people that the Boer War was finished, and won.

But the war was not won. The Boers now embarked on what they were best at – a guerrilla campaign. It began in autumn 1900, and it went on until spring 1902. It was the most vicious part of the war. Kitchener dealt with what was, in effect, a resistance movement, by setting up concentration camps. In fourteen months, more than 20,000 inmates of these camps died - mostly as a result of the conditions in them. This tragedy appears to have been due to mismanage­ment rather than barbarism although, at the time, there were those who didn't see it that way. When the peace came, the terms were generous and led to the final agreement in 1906. Within a few days of the war ending, Cecil Rhodes died. Salisbury resigned, and his nephew, Balfour, became Prime Minister.

At the dark point of the conflict, the so-called Black Week, the Queen had stiffened the resolve of her government. 'Please understand,' she had said, 'that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.’ But when the news of final surrender was brought to the monarch, it was brought not to Victoria. The Queen who had come to the throne in the first half of the nineteenth century was dead.

A young Welsh lawyer, by the name of David Lloyd George, joined the minority of radicals who saw the war as an indictment of Britain's Imperialist policies. Six thousand troops had died in action, and 16,000 had died from diseases. More than £220 million had been spent. But there was little to suggest that the public at large supported his view. For example the leaders of the Independent Labour Party, and the trades unions, opposed the war. But they had to accept that predictably, the working class they represented was swept up in the general patriotic atmosphere, especially over Mafeking.

When, for example, the Queen visited Wellington College, news had just arrived that the siege had been lifted. Over the college arch was the slogan, ‘Welcome to the Queen of Mafeking.^’ For Victoria, this was a time to be seen. She wanted the people to see her take her daily drives in her coach. Gone was the reclusive Queen who refused to be the people’s Queen for so mam years after the death of ‘Dearest Albert’. And she made clear that she wanted every dispatch, every military and political report of the war, to be on her desk. It was soon known that although now eighty, her eyesight failing and a tendency to nod off after lunch, Victoria read piles of war reports, questioned her Ministers, wept for her ‘brave soldiers’, knitted them scarves and, in 1899, sent her troops a personal Christmas present -100,000 tins of chocolate, many of which remained unopened and more prized than any campaign medal.

In October 1900, the British Commanders appeared to believe the war was all but over but Victoria did not believe this. She told Lord Salisbury, her Prime Minister, as much. And she said that in the light of her 'great experience' she knew that the British always withdrew too soon and ended up having to send in more troops to sort out the mess.

But Lord Salisbury, encouraged by the advice of the Commander in Chief himself, Lord Roberts, decided to exploit the good news of war and called what became known as the Khaki Election. His Conservative Government was returned with a big majority – the Boer War factor had done for the Conservatives what another conflict was tо do for them eighty years later. But by the end of that year it was clear that the old Queen's health was dramatically failing.

The first page of Queen Victoria's journal for 1901 makes sad reading.

*Another year begun and I am feeling so weak and unwell that I enter upon it sadly.

Victoria had kept a daily journal since the age of fourteen. The last entry is dated 13 January 1901. She refers to two of her children, Princess Beatrice and Princess Helena, whom the family called Lenchen.

*Had a fair night, but was a little wakeful. Got up earlier and had some milk. Lenchen came in and read some papers. Out before one, in the garden chair, Lenchen and Beatrice going with me. Rested a little, had some food, and took a short drive with Lenchen and Beatrice. Rested when I came in, and at five-thirty went down to the drawing room, where a short service was held by Mr Clement Smith, who performed it so well, and it was a great comfort to me. Rested again afterwards, then did some signing, and dictated to Lenchen.

There is, after this last entry, a simple postscript.

*Here on Sunday, January 13, the Queen's Journal, kept for nearly seventy years, ends. On the Monday Her Majesty saw Lord Roberts again for a short while; but within a few days the illness assumed a critical character; and on Saturday [January 19], a bulletin was published, giving her people the first intimation of the impending calamity. It said: ‘The Queen has not lately been in her usual health, and is unable for the present to take her customary drives. The Queen during the past year has had a great strain upon her powers, which has rather told upon Her Majesty's nervous system. It has, therefore, been thought advisable by Her Majesty's physicians that the Queen should be kept perfectly quiet in the house, and should abstain for the present from transacting business.’ The last phase was mercifully short; and at six-thirty pm on Tuesday, January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria, in the words of the final bulletin, 'breathed her last, surrounded by her children and grandchildren'.

She died at Osborne, the country home on the Isle of Wight which had remained just as it was when Albert died in 1861. Victoria had given specific instructions: hers would be a military funeral. Also, the Queen who wore widows' weeds for forty years wanted a white funeral. This was probably an idea she took from Tennyson, who once told her that all funerals should be white. And there were instructions that certain precious articles should be placed in her coffin: Prince Albert's dressing gown, a plaster moulded from his hand, family photographs. But there was one item that few ever knew existed. She had told Sir James Reid, her private physician - and no one else - that he was to place a particular photograph in her hand. Not Albert's, but that of her Scottish retainer John Brown. Reid did so, and then, being a man of great discretion and mindful that some believed Brown and Victoria had been secretly married, placed flowers on top of the photograph.

Her coffin was taken by ship, the Alberta, to the mainland and, close by Nelson's Victory, was borne ashore and thence by train to London and finally to Windsor for the funeral ceremony. The following afternoon she was buried in the mausoleum at Frogmore alongside Albert, for whom she had been in mourning for forty years.

C+She had determined to conduct her life according to the pattern set by the Prince; nor did she waver from her resolution. Nevertheless a great change had gradually overtaken the monarchy. The Sovereign had become the symbol of Empire. At the Queen's Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 India and the colonies had been vividly represented in the State celebrations. The Crown was providing the link between the growing family of nations and races which the former Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, had with foresight christened the Commonwealth. The Queen herself was seized with the greatness of her role. She sent her sons and grandsons on official tours of her ever-increasing dominions, where they were heartily welcomed. She appointed Indian servants to her household, and from them learned Hindustani. Thus she sought by every means within her power to bind her diverse peoples together in loyalty to the British Crown, and her endeavours chimed with the Imperial spirit of the age. One of her last public acts, when she was over eighty years of age, was to visit Ireland. She had never believed in Irish Home Rule, which seemed to her a danger to the unity of the Empire. Prompted by a desire to recognize the gallantry of her Irish soldiers in South Africa, she travelled to Dublin in April 1900, wearing the shamrock on her bonnet and jacket. Her Irish subjects, even the Nationalists among them, gave her a rousing reception. In Ireland a fond of goodwill still flowed for the Throne, on which English Governments sadly failed to draw. When she died she had reigned for nearly sixty-four years. Few of her subjects could remember a time when she had not been their Sovereign.

And so the Victorian age closed. The population of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland was forty-one million. There were six and a half million people living in London and more than 160,000 living in Cardiff. The population of Bolton was 168,000 and in Glasgow, 900.000, When Victoria died there were morе than six million registered voters and more than 1300 unions with over two million members.

Victoria died a Queen and an Empress, the last Hanoverian, and monarch of the most prosperous nation on earth. But before the new decade was out, Edward VII would be dead and the road to the First World War would be opened.(Lee)

A woman's place

'Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity — these three — and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?' This was Florence Nightingale's own indignant cry. Many other women echoed it. But still there were others who agreed with their menfolk that it was not a woman's place to strike boldly out into the world. Queen Victoria admitted that she envied Miss Nightingale for 'being able to do so much good & look after the noble brave heroes', but basically disapproved of ladies in the medical profession — though she herself had been delivered by one — and could hardly have looked with favour on anyone as determined as Elizabeth Garrett, who, after many setbacks, was admitted to the Society of Apothecaries, opened a dispensary in the Euston Road for women and children, and qualified in 1870 as an M.D. in Paris, because of obstructions put in her way in England. On marriage she retained her maiden name in the form of Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and in 1908 became the first elected woman mayor in England — of her native Aldeburgh, in Suffolk.

The struggle to improve women's education in general owed a lot in its early stages to men. Christian Socialists such as Charles Kingsley and J. F. D. Maurice, one of the founders of the Working Men's College in 1854, deplored the makeshift education imparted to boarding-school girls by teachers themselves lacking any formal education, and deplored equally the wretched salaries and treatment doled out to girls whose only hope of 'respectable' employment was the drudgery of becoming governess in some private household. They set up a college which was viewed suspiciously by those who thought an all-female establishment would somehow provoke unladylike conduct, but in which Victoria's interest was sufficiently aroused for her to permit its being called Queen's College for Women.

One of its earliest pupils was Frances Mary Buss, who went on to establish the North London Collegiate School for Ladies in 1850. In 1858 Dorothea Beale, after running a school for the daughters of clergymen, became principal and made an impressive success of Cheltenham Ladies' College. Also in Cheltenham, she opened the first residential training college for women, St Hilda's, and later sponsored St Hilda's Hall of Residence in Oxford. The first true hall for women in either of the two great universities was set up in Cambridge by Anne Jemima Clough in 1871, becoming Newnham College in 1880. In 1872 Hitchin College moved to Cambridge and became Girton. Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville soon followed in Oxford.

Still a woman's place was generally considered to be the home. In her authoritative, not to say authoritarian, Book of Household Management, Mrs Isabelle Beeton quoted Oliver Goldsmith: 'The modest virgin, the prudent wife, and the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens.' She went on to recommend early rising, cleanliness, careful choice of acquaintances, and frugality: 'In marketing, that the best articles are the cheapest, may be laid down as a rule.'

Mrs Beeton also decreed the number and nature of servants which householders of any substance ought to be able to afford. A man earning £1000 a year needed a cook, an upper housemaid, a nursemaid, an under housemaid, and a manservant. On £500 a year he might manage with a cook, a housemaid and a nursemaid. On the lowest rung, between £150 and £200 a year, he should still run to a maid-of-all-work — 'and girl occasionally'.

Pleasure gardens

The respectable middle-class family tended to spend morally uplifting evenings at home. Womenfolk were expected to be proficient in embroidery and sewing, and also in keeping quiet while the head of the household read aloud from some edifying book — or even from some currently best-selling three-volume novel, perhaps borrowed from the circulating library opened by the enterprising Mr Mudie in 1842.

Outside the home there were other diversions, few of them attended by an unaccompanied lady.

Theatre managers and other organisers of public amusements complained at the time of the Great Exhibition that Hyde Park was taking away all their custom. But some took advantage of the influx of visitors. Walter Batty, a circus-owner, set up a Hippodrome opposite Kensington Gardens, in the very month that the Exhibition opened. There were chariot-races, brass bands, and balloon ascents.

Earlier pleasure gardens were not yet extinct. Vauxhall, with its shaded walks and bandstands, where the music of every well-known composer from 1661 onwards had been played, often in first performances, had been showing signs of decline, and was closed in 1859 as a result of persistent rowdyism and immorality. By then much of its custom had been stolen by Cremorne Gardens, which from 1846 offered nightly masquerades, dancing, puppet shows, circus acts, sideshows and cheap suppers.

There were other supper-rooms in London and provincial cities. In addition to food and drink they offered choirs and soloists, and by the end of the evening there was usually community singing from the audience.

In the more ambitious Variety Saloons, the diner would be given a mixture of opera, comedy and music. These came to an end in 1843 when the Theatres Registry Act laid down that drama should be separated from more material refreshment: premises could be operated as music-halls with food and drink but without legitimate drama, or as legitimate theatres but without food and drink. So the saloons developed through 'Concert Rooms' to the boisterous music-halls which over many decades poured out jokes, comic songs and maudlin songs about the rich and the poor, wives and mothers-in-law, and the follies of foreigners.

Explorers

Not all those who penetrated faraway lands did so purely for commercial gain or military aggrandisement. There were keen geographers anxious to add authentic contours to their maps of the world, adventurers who combined scientific research with a longing to find something simply 'because it was there', as climbers were later to say of Mount Everest. Also there were missionaries determined to carry the Gospel to the heathen. Some did considerable damage because of their inability to grasp that followers of other creeds could be as sincere as themselves; but others won the love and respect of those with whom they worked.

In December 1840 a Scottish doctor named David Livingstone was sent by the London Missionary Society to Bechuanaland, where he strove against the evils of disease and slavery. He explored the Zambezi and discovered the Victoria Falls. When he returned to England his reports on his findings and a book he published about his travels encouraged the Royal Geographical Society to finance an expedition under Burton and Speke.

Richard Burton (to become Sir Richard in 1886) fell in love with the East during service in India, studied Oriental languages, and towards the end of his life translated The Arabian Nights. With John Hanning Speke he went deep into Africa and in 1858 discovered Lake Tanganyika. While Burton was ill, Speke reached Victoria Nyanza, one of the long-sought sources of the river Nile.

Livingstone also longed to find out more about the Nile, and in 1865 set out on another journey, during which he mapped further tracts of the interior. For five years the outside world heard nothing of him. The New York Herald sent a Welsh-born reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, to find the great missionary-explorer, and in October 1871 Stanley met him at Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, greeting him with the words: 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

They spend a few months together. Livingstone would not return with Stanley, but continued his explorations for another year, growing weaker from illness. He died in May 1873. His grief-stricken servants buried his heart beside Lake Bangweulu and carried his body, wrapped in bark, over a thousand miles to Zanzibar for transport back to London, where he was buried in Westminster Abbey. (Burke)

Scotland And The Irish

In the 1840s and 1850s the population was swelled by a great influx of Irish from all the provinces of that country. This was the third great movement of people between the two countries, and it brought back to Scotland many of the descendants of the Plantation settlers of the early 1600s. It also brought into Scotland a substantial Catholic population, who were to have an impact on the political scene as well on the religious make-up of the country. Among the Irish were many who were simply taking refuge from desperate poverty and famine. They settled primarily in the Glasgow area since there was work available there and their predecessors had already established bridgeheads of settlement.

By 1841 the Irish made up sixteen per cent of the population in Glasgow. The Irish, whose own union with England in 1801 was more akin to a colonial relationship than the negotiated settlement between Scotland and England of 1707, were no respecters of the English and brought with them a tradition of demand for home rule and the willingness to use violence against what they regarded as a government sustained by military force and by an imported oligarchy of the wealthy. An inevitable part of their baggage was the entrenched antipathy nourished in Ulster between pro-Union Protestants and anti-Union Catholics. The two Irish factions did not intermingle, and the arrival of so many Catholics created some alarm within leading Presbyterian circles and something of a Protestant backlash.

Steps taken in the nineteenth century towards national and municipal order took place against a constant background of official and public fear of violence: the violence of militant Irish nationalism, of revolutionary anarchism and even the potential violence of Scottish working men who were now employed in army strength even in single factories, whose minds might be inflamed by agitators and who showed a disturbing tendency to organise themselves into united groups in order to put pressure on the employers.

A Change Of Identity

What was essentially Scottish was the fictive, shadowy counterpart to political nationalism, the re-invention of the Scottish past. This process had begun with the Ossian poems of James Macpherson in the seventeenth cen­tury but had been largely confined to a literary and antiquarian circle. The rapid growth in the popularity of the poems of Robert Burns after his death, in 1796, saw the early establishment of the Burns cult. The first Burns Club was formed in Greenock in 1801. On 27 January 1816, some of Edinburgh's leading literary men sat down to a Burns Supper, reported by the Edinburgh Evening Courant with the opening words: 'Scotland has long gloried in the fame of her divinest son.' Burns's Scotland was fading fast, along with Burns's language: the new huge printings of his works required glossaries of many Scots terms that were no longer current. Burns's works were appreci­ated by ordinary people for their true emotion, their humour, their frank satire and their democratic fire. But his visions of love in the cornfields, of gentle landscapes and tavern jollity, and his half-whimsical Jacobitism, ca­tered to a growing nostalgia for a more placid, old-time, rural Scotland. One of those who had dined on haggis and neeps in January 1816 was space for artists to display and sell their works. Rural and historical themes were very much the preferred topics. There was no follower of Raeburn in portraiture. The demand was for uncontroversial art; religious scenes, for landscapes and sentimental pictures of cottage life. Artists like Robert Scott Lauder, David Scott and William Dyce, often with great technical skill, sup­plied it. The artist associated by most with Scotland was not a Scot at all. Sir Edwin Landseer was a Londoner who first visited Scotland in 1821. His image of the heroic deer on a wild hillside, The Monarch of the Glen, defined a mid-century view of Scotland.

The Highland Clearances

The Highlands, their past history romanticised by Scott's genius, were actually in a sad way. Kelp and cattle had been the main sources of employment. There had been attempts to develop and diversify an industrial base, such as the west coast fishery settlements of the 1780s and the spinning mill at Spinningdale in Sutherland in 1790. These remained isolated pockets of industry. From 1815 onwards, the kelp industry collapsed, brought down by cheaper Mediterranean imports and by industrial production of alkali. The price of black cattle fell sharply in the early 1820s. Domestic production of yarn and cloth in remoter areas was increasingly uneconomic as factory production increased. The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant that soldiers and sailors from the Highlands were no longer needed. The Highlands had very little to offer. The large population was fed mainly on a monotonous diet of potatoes and oatmeal, which kept families a little above subsistence level. The typical house was still the 'black house', a windowless cottage with a peat fire in the centre and an adjoining cattle byre. When improving minds, like that of the Sutherland factor, James Loch, looked at this vast area they could think only in terms of sheep rearing. The Cheviot breed of sheep could be farmed in large numbers with very little labour. But the sheep runs needed the richer grassland of the valley floors and lower slopes and could not coexist with all the little crofts and settlements in the glens. To the improving mind it was clear – the people had to go.

In the west, lairds had forbidden emigration because of the need to keep workers for kelp-gathering and burning. Now the same lairds were encour­aging and compelling people to leave. Some landowners, like MacKenzie of Assynt, went bankrupt because of the collapse of the kelp industry. The people saw things in a different way. Even now, they still expected support from the chief or landowner, just as they gave it to him. They had an imme­morial attachment to their land. Their patient and resigned attitude was the last sign of the old society of the Highlands. In future decades, they would learn to take action for themselves.

People began to leave the Highlands and Islands in great numbers. From the southern areas it was a relatively short journey to the industrial central belt, although it was an immense step in cultural and linguistic terms. For those farther north, Glasgow or Falkirk seemed almost as remote as Ontario or Otago; in some ways the colonies felt closer because the emigrant ships came direct to West Highland ports and anchorages.

As early as 1814, the clearances began in Sutherland when Strathnaver was turned over to sheep rearing. The inhabitants were forcibly transferred to coastal locations where they were expected to make a living by fishing. With next to no capital or other support and facing hostility from the established Moray coast fishermen, they were doomed to fail. The clearance policy continued in the Highlands without the half-hearted or cosmetic attempts made in Sutherland to alleviate the situation. The potato famine of the 1840s added to the miseries of the people. In the 1850s, emigration societies, including the quaintly named Scottish Patriotic Society, were formed, and emigration became an industry.

Even as communications improved in the Highlands, with long single lines of railway reaching beyond Crianlarich and Inverness, the countryside emptied. Estates that had once been populous clan territories were sold and resold. As the price of wool fell, more and more lands were made into deer forests owned by alien or absentee landlords with no personal or economic stake in the land and a vested interest in keeping people away.

'Ill fall the sheep, a grey-faced nation

That swept our hills with desolation.'

Duncan Ban Madntyre

The Scottish Labour Party

In 1883 the Scottish Labour Party was formed, two years before the Labour Representation Committee in London, and in the same year the first conference of the Home Rule Association took place. The Scottish founders of Labour had home rule very much on their agenda. James Keir Hardie stood for election as the very first of all Labour candidates in his home district of Mid-Lanark in 1888 but was defeated, and was later to represent English and Welsh constituencies. Parliamentary success came very gradually for Labour. In the early years of the twentieth century, it was an amorphous movement made up of a number of local parties and interest groups, which would not finally coalesce until the early 1930s. The era of the monolithic Labour 'machine' was still some way off.

In 1906, the year of an electoral landslide for the Liberals, they took almost fifty-seven per cent of the vote and won fifty-eight parliamentary seats. The comparable figures for Labour were 2.3 per cent of the vote and two parliamentary seats. It was 1922 before Labour won the largest share of the vote and the largest proportion of Scotland's 71 parliamentary seats.

Religion – Revival And Recession

Scotland had by now a large Catholic community, drawn chiefly from the first and second generations of Irish immigrants in the central area. There were long-established Catholic congregations in some of the Hebrides and in the northeast, where Catholic landowners had sheltered the Old Church through centuries of difficulties. The Catholic Church in Scotland had its own hierarchy, appointed in 1878, twenty years after England and not without much ungracious Presbyterian growling.

From 1875 there was a campaign of religious revival, with mass meetings and hymn-singing, led by the evangelists Sankey and Moody. Thousands of people were 're-born'. Scotland largely remained a nation of church-goers in both town and country, but the defenders of strict Sabbatarianism were already fighting a rearguard action. On 3 June 1883 there was a riot at Strome Ferry to prevent the Sunday landing of fish and the running of a special train to take the catch to the east. Commercial interests were far less likely than erring individuals to be cowed by religious outrage. Even so, virtually every business closed on Sundays and fanners did not harvest their crops on Sundays, even if the sun was shining. Such universal observance, however, could not conceal the fact that the role of the Kirk in society was edging steadily back. Throughout the country the ascendancy of the kirk sessions was dwindling rapidly. It no longer seemed appropriate for moral backsliders to be admonished by the elders. There was a more secular spirit abroad in the country.

State-appointed bodies, like the Commissioners in Lunacy, and the elected town and parish councils, had taken over the management of society. Ministers and elders remained highly respected figures, but they had to be elected to councils in order to have influence outside the strictly religious sphere. Many ministers still sought to govern their congregations as completely as Andrew Melville would have liked to govern King James; and a shift in the ministers' emphasis towards social matters was much more apparent in the cities than in the small towns and country parishes, where traditional attitudes lingered on.

The small compromises of family life also meant that each generation of children, however irksome they found the Presbyterian Sunday, achieved a little less restriction than their parents had suffered. Religion still permeated daily life, and although most homes had abandoned family prayers, few would omit to say grace before meals. (D.Ross)

Task 19. Victorian Britain Qizz

1. Why was Britain known as the workshop of the world?

2. What did the Reform Bill introduce?

3. Enumerate some of the colonial wars fought by Britain in the 19^th century.

4. What were the causes and results of the Crimean War?

5. What was displayed at the Great Exhibition in 1851?

6. Who were the most popular leaders of the Liberal and Conservative parties in Victorian Britain?

7. Name some British colonies in the 19^th c.

8. What Royal palaces did Queen Victoria add to the already existing ones?

9. Why was Britain known as the workshop of the world?

10. What institution did Chartists want to reform?

11. What was Prince Albert?

12. What was the Great Exhibition in 1851 devoted to?

13. When did the Labour party appear?

14. What institution did Robert Peele organize in London? Later this practice spread to other big cities.

Unit 12. BRITAIN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Part 1. Edwardian Britain

THE HOUSE OF SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA

Edward VII (1901-10)

Task 20. Read the following text and find out:

1. What was Bertie (Edward VII) like?

2. What were his relations with his parents?

3. What kind of education did Edward get?

4. What were his political views and actions as a prince and as the King of Britain?

The future Edward VII was born on 9 November 1841, the second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria. He was christened Albert Edward, after his father, but to Queen Victoria's undisguised disappointment, 'Bertie' showed from his earliest years that he had little in common with the high-minded Prince Consort.

As a child, Bertie showed more interest in sports and amusements than in books, and his parents feared for his moral character. Prince Albert drew up a rigorous programme of education, intended to equip him for his future role as king, which even his tutors thought too severe. The result of his strict upbringing was to make forbidden pleasures seem the more attractive to the young Prince, and he grew up to be all that Prince Albert and Queen Victoria most deplored – easy-going, self-indulgent and promiscuous.

Yet, in spite of his faults, Bertie had qualities which his parents failed to appreciate. At the age of 18 he was sent on his first state visit, to Canada and the United States; Queen Victoria was most apprehen­sive about sending so irresponsible a young man, as she thought, to represent Britain overseas, but the Prince's trip was a great success. His charm and informality delighted his hosts; in America he tactfully visited George Washington's grave, and his friendly manners were much remarked on. So was his interest in the pretty girls who were introduced to him.

It was this interest which brought him most painfully into conflict with his strait-laced parents, on his return. Bertie was the first heir to the throne to go to university becoming first an Oxford undergraduate, in 1859 and then going up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1861. Though to his regret he was hot allowed to share in the ordinary college routine by 'living in', he enjoyed his taste of normal life, and he was popular with those of his fellow-students who knew him. In the summer of 1861 a further experiment was tried, and the Prince of Wales went to serve with the Grenadier Guards, on manoeuvres in southern Ireland. A group of his brother-officers arranged for a pretty actress to be brought to him, as a surprise; but the joke misfired badly when it came to the notice of the Queen and Prince Albert. They were outraged, and when Prince Albert became ill and died soon after, the Queen harshly laid the blame on her son's misconduct. Her bad opinion of her heir had been confirmed. In spite of her widowhood, and her grief-stricken semi-retirement, she wanted Bertie to have as little part in government as possible, and for the next 37 years he patiently fulfilled the role of an ageing, powerless heir to an empire.

His marriage, in 1863, did much to increase his existing popularity with his mother's subjects. His bride was the 19-year-old Danish Princess Alexandra; she was later to suffer from deafness, but she was beautiful, fashionable and warm-hearted, and their marriage was a notable success, despite the Prince's constant infidelities with a series of mistresses. One of their favourite homes was Sandringham, in Norfolk, where the Prince could indulge his passion for shooting, but they were also leading figures in London society. Apart from his enthusiasm for beautiful women, such as Lily Langtry, the Countess of Warwick and Mrs Keppel, Bertie liked the company of rich, amusing men-friends, with whom he could gamble, dine and go racing. It was a way of life which allowed him to move freely among certain groups of his future subjects, but it took its toll of his constitution and his character: he became vastly fat, and was twice involved in major scandals.

The Mordaunt affair, in 1870, was an unsavoury divorce case, in which the Prince of Wales appeared as a witness. His firm denial of Lady Mordaunt's damaging allegation that he had been one of her lovers was accepted in court, but his association with such a case was highly undesirable. Still worse was the scandal twenty years later, when he was proved both to have taken part in the illegal gambling game of baccarat, and then – as a Field-Marshal – to have breached army Regulations by suppressing accusations that one of his fellow-players, a serving officer, had cheated. The newspapers reflected public opinion in roundly condemning the future king's behaviour.

In other fields, however, the Prince earned widespread approval, both at home and abroad. His gregariousness was one of his most attractive qualities; he liked to meet people of all types and backgrounds, from the Italian guerrilla leader Garibaldi, who visited London in 1864, to the early Trades Union leader Joseph Arch. On a state visit to India In 1875 he was critical of the attitude displayed towards the Indian people by certain colonial officials (though he disapproved of the suggestion that Indians should be allowed to join the ruling Council). As an unofficial roving diplomat, with unique access to the crowned heads and government ministers of the world, he tried sincerely to work for peace, at a time of mounting tensions in Europe.

In 1901 Queen Victoria died, and Bertie became King at last, at the advanced age of 59. His stout, bearded, cigar-smoking figure was often lampooned, but he and Queen Alexandra achieved great popularity, not least through the King's peacemaking efforts. His state visit to France, in 1903, marked the beginning of a new chapter in Anglo-French relations - a situation which did not endear him to his nephew the Kaiser of Germany, though Edward VII frequently visited Berlin too. A meeting with another of his numerous ruling relations, the Tsar of Russia, was strongly citicised by the left wing in Britain; it was a time of political op­pression in Russia, and several MPs spoke out against the visit. But in general the King's own political views were relatively liberal; he had always liked Gladstone, and he far preferred the Liberal Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, to the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour – though the more radical views of the young Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George were not to his liking, in the grave political crisis which arose in the last year of his life, with the rejection of a Liberal budget by the strongly Conservative House of Lords, Edward VII was not in sympathy with either side, but did all he could to bring the opponents together, by arranging discussions between the party leaders.

Over-indulgence in life's pleasures, such as eating and smoking, had weakened the King's constitution, and the strain of this Parliamentary crisis finally proved too much for him. On 6 May 1910, aged 68, he died; and the colourful, high-spirited era to which he had given his name gave way to a grimmer chapter in Britain's history.

(J.Ross)