Britain in an Age of Revolution (1789-1848): 2019

Saturday 23 November 2019

The repeal of the Corn Laws

Sir Robert Peel,
by W. H. Pickersgill
saviour and destroyer of his party.
Public domain

Peel's triumph?

The 1840s should have been a triumphant decade for Peel. He had reformed his party after its defeat of 1832 and won the election of 1841.

There was however, a lurking problem.

The Conservative vote was overwhelmingly agricultural and deeply committed to agricultural protection.
Peel himself was increasingly in favour of free trade on ideological grounds and his conversion exposed a fault-line in the Tory party. Were they agrarian traditionalists or believers in the free market? Throughout the decade, his government's budgets saw a steady reduction in duties, and disgruntled backbenchers came to believe that the Corn Laws would be next.

The Irish famine

It is usually believed that it was the Irish famine that converted Peel to free trade, but it is now clear that this simply provided him with an excuse.

There are posts on this distressing and still controversial subject here and here.

Scene at Skibbereen, Cork, 1847

By the autumn of 1845, with the Europe-wide failure of the potato crop, Ireland was facing the greatest social and humanitarian crisis in its history. On 15 October, Peel wrote to the Lord Lieutenant that the only practical remedy was

the removal of all impediments to the import of all kinds of human food - that is the total and absolute repeal for ever of all duties on all articles of subsistence.

But this was not the real issue. Cheaper bread was not the answer to the immediate problem; the Irish could not afford to buy any bread. The only thing that could save them was food relief on a massive scale. The Corn Laws were therefore an irrelevancy.

A meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League
in London, 1846

This movement achieved a more important place in national life than any previous radical body. Unlike the Chartists, it represented the interests of an urban middle class. Unlike them, too it was well funded and had precise and limited objectives.

The Corn Laws were a generic term for a whole system of legislative protection of agriculture. In 1815 there was a prohibition on the import of foreign agricultural products until the price at home reached a high figure (80s a quarter in the case of wheat). In 1828 this absolute prohibition was replaced by a sliding scale of import duties. This legislation was not solely dictated by class interests – there was also the desire to be independent in time of war.

However there was a strong body of opinion opposed to legislative protection for agriculture. In 1830, Ebenezer Elliott, the Sheffield-based ‘Bard of Free Trade’ published his Corn Law Rhymes.

At first this opposition was local and sporadic, but the situation changed in the depression of the late ‘30s when food prices rose. Elliott declared:

It was born ‘of empty pockets in a respectable neighbourhood’.

Manufacturing free traders could argue that the Corn Laws had damaging effects throughout the economy: British workmen would agitate for higher wages, which would be spent on food rather than on manufactured goods. The only beneficiaries would be the aristocracy.

In the late 1830s the topic of the Corn Laws moved to the top of the agenda, because, with the onset of an acute manufacturing depression, the cause attracted support in the country. It was brought annually before the Commons by Charles Villiers, Radical MP for Wolverhampton. But the Whig government refused to support him. Melbourne was against any more radical change and declared ‘before God’ that to leave the whole agricultural interest without protection was

the wildest and maddest scheme that has ever entered into the mind of man to conceive.

1840s radicalism (1): the Chartists

Chartist meeting on 10 April 1848 at Kennington Common,

by William Edward Kilburn, restored version.

An early daguerreotype.

Public domain

There are some useful web sites on Chartism.

In 1839 Thomas Carlyle’s pamphlet Chartism stated that there was

a feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the working classes is rather ominous at present; that something ought to be said and something ought to be done, in regard to it.

The origins of Chartism

The Chartist movement was the first radical working-class (as opposed to artisan) movement in Britain. It had an ancestry going back to the 1770s, which was reinforced by the French Revolution and the subsequent wars with France. In the post-war period radical agitation once more became a powerful force. In April 1831 the National Union of the Working Classes was founded in April 1831 by the Cornish cabinet-maker, William Lovett, to campaign for manhood suffrage.

Working-class radicals were literate and politically aware. One of their most successful campaigns was the 'war of the unstamped'. From July 1831 the radical printer, Henry Hetherington published the Poor Man’s Guardian, in defiance of the Stamp Act that kept the prices of newspapers beyond the reach of many working people. He was joined by a young Irish lawyer, James Bronterre O'Brien, who edited the paper and rapidly established himself as the foremost theorist of working-class radicalism. In 1835 the stamp was reduced to 1d - an improvement, but still too expensive for working-class pockets. The battle over the stamp led to the setting up of a network of organizations and a chain of command that could be revived when the occasion required it.

The working classes (in the early nineteenth-century they were always referred to in the plural) were the creation of the Industrial Revolution, and they bore the full brunt of the economic and social problems it created. The heartland of Chartism was not London but industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Working-class radicals were angered by what they saw as the ‘great Whig betrayal’. If anything, the 1832 Reform Act reduced the number of working-class voters by replacing the old varied borough franchises with the £10 household franchise. Leading politicians, like the Whig Lord John Russell and the Tory Sir Robert Peel, both declared that the Reform Act was a final settlement - there was to be no revision. Along with this feeling of betrayal went resentment at the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Politics after the Reform Act

Sir Robert Peel, the up-and-coming
politician of the 1830s
by William Henry Pickersgill,
Public domain.

Plus ça change?

The enfranchisement of the great industrial centres was clearly a hugely important potential change brought about by the Reform Act, but the Act did not transform politics. In particular, the aristocracy continued to play a dominant role, and did so until the growth of mass politics at the end of the century. Most Victorian prime ministers were aristocrats and sat in the Lords rather than the Commons.

The Whigs and Reform

The Whig record on reform was mixed. On the one hand, they abolished slavery in 1833 and passed the first Factory Act in the same year. But in 1834 they passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, which forced paupers into workhouses. In 1835 they brought in a radical reform of local government through the Municipal Corporations Act.

The Factory Act, 1833

The chief advocates for factory reform had been Tory paternalists rather than Whigs. Orthodox Whigs did not believe that the government should interfere with market forces, but Tories like Michael Thomas Sadler believed that the government had a duty to the poor. When he failed to win the newly-created seat of Leeds in the 1832 election, the leadership of the reform movement passed to his fellow Evangelical Tory, Lord Ashley, the heir to the earldom of Shaftesbury.

In 1833 a Royal Commission was set up to investigate conditions in factories.The Commission heard harrowing case-studies from hundreds of witnesses.The eventual Report came down on the side of the economic arguments of the manufacturers, but it accepted that children needed protection from those masters who overworked them. The result was the 1833 Factory Act.

The Act was only a partial victory for Ashley and Sadler and it applied only to textile factories. Factory children were declared to be ‘rapidly increasing’, and it was agreed that (unlike adult men) they were not free agents. A case for some state intervention was advanced while the general inadvisability of the state’s interfering with conditions of work was upheld. The terms of the Act were:

The employment of children under nine was prohibited except in silk factories;
Children aged from nine to 12 were to work a maximum of nine hours a day and no more than 48 hours a week;
Youths from 13 to 18 to work a maximum of 12 hours a day and no more than 69 hours a week;
Children from nine to 11 (later raised to 13) were to have two hours of compulsory education every day.

In practice the Act was widely evaded. Little schooling was done in the factories and fines were low and often evaded. Age regulations were also evaded, often with active parental connivance.

Nevertheless, the very operation of the Act brought abuses to light. The state was changing and enlarging its responsibilities. But though children, and later women, were given legal protection, the laws did not apply to adult men, who were assumed to be free agents.

The Great Reform Act (1832)

The House of Commons (engraving 1808)

You can listen here to a discussion of the Reform Act on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme. This especially indebted to the following:

Edward Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, 3rd edn. (Longman, 2001)
Antonia Fraser, Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 (W&N, 2013)
Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford, 2006)
Edward Pearce, Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (Pimlico, 2004)

The pressure for reform

After Catholic emancipation the demand for parliamentary reform, which had been growing since the 1790s became irresistible, among many sections of the middle and working classes. Influential provincial journals like the Manchester Guardian and Leeds Mercury were joined in their advocacy of reform by sections of the former Tory press like the Nottingham Journal. In Birmingham, a city of small-scale units of production, Thomas Attwood founded a ‘General Political Union between the Lower and Middle Classes of the People’ in December 1829. Its main platform - the ‘Brummagen remedy’ - was currency reform - the provision of readier credit and bigger domestic markets for small masters. To the alarm of the king political unions sprang up all over the country, attracting huge crowds to political rallies. The Whig peer Lord Holland feared that:

‘If the great mass of the middle classes are bent upon that method of enforcing their views, there is not in the nature of society any real force that can prevent them.’

The fall of Wellington’s government
The Tories under the Duke of Wellington won the general election of July 1830 - but only just - and then they shot themselves in the foot. On 2 November 1830, the duke, made a disastrous speech in the Lords in which he argued that the state of representation could not be improved, and that the system of electoral representation commanded the ‘entire confidence’ of the nation’. He believed that his uncompromising stand would encourage the forces of Toryism to rally around him, but he had failed to appreciate the depth of the reform movement in the country.

On 15 November the government was defeated on a minor financial motion. Wellington resigned. and on 16 November William IV asked the Whig leader, Charles, 2nd Earl Grey to form a government. The Whigs has been out of power since 1807, and this was now their moment. There was certainly going to be a major change, as the new government was committed to (modest) parliamentary reform.

Charles, 2nd Earl Grey
Prime Minister 1830-4
Public Domain

On 30 December the diarist Charles Greville wrote:

‘I never remember times like these, nor read of such – the terror and the lively expectation which prevail and the way in which people’s minds are turned backwards and forwards, from France to Ireland then range excursively to Poland or Piedmont, and fix again on the burnings, riots and executions here.’

He was referring to the July Revolution in France, continuing unrest in Ireland and Italy, the Polish revolt against Russia, and the Swing Riots in Britain. These were troubled times.

Karl Anton Hickel
William Pitt the Younger addressing the
House of Commons
on the outbreak of war with France (1793)
Wikimedia Commons

All the issues raised in this post can be followed up in the History of Parliament online, which is an exhaustive survey of MPs and constituencies.

1832 saw the first of the great nineteenth-century reforms of Parliament. It is open to debate how thorough-going this reform was to be. It replaced a complicated, centuries-old parliamentary system that by the beginning of the nineteenth century was no longer fit for purpose.

Pre-reform Britain was not a democracy, and the political elites reacted in horror at the very word, which to them meant mob rule. Power rested with the landed elites who controlled Parliament and local government, and a substantial proportion of MPs never faced an election. Between 1784 and 1831, fewer than a third of all elections were contested.

The monarch retained considerable prerogative powers, but by the early nineteenth century, this was changing. George IV's reluctant acceptance of Catholic Emancipation showed that the king was losing his power to veto legislation.

It has been estimated that only one in six of the population had the right to vote, though the many anomalies in the system meant that on some constituencies working men possessed the franchise. But however small the electorate, public opinion could not be ignored. The press was (largely) free and the judiciary was independent. The building-blocks of democracy had been put in place and far more people were politically engaged than were registered to vote.

Party, in the modern sense of the word, was re-emerging in the early nineteenth century, though political alliances were still fluid. The terms 'Whig' and 'Tory' should be used with mental quotation marks around them.

The House of Commons consisted of 558 Members elected by 314 constituencies. The 245 English constituencies (forty counties, 203 boroughs, two universities) returned 489 Members; the twenty-four Welsh constituencies and forty-five Scottish constituencies returned one Member each. In 1801 the addition of 100 Irish Members elected by sixty-six constituencies made an Imperial Parliament of 658 Members

Most of the members of Parliament were landowners, elected either on the county forty-shilling franchise (the possession of freehold property valued for the land tax at forty shillings per annum) or on one of the varied borough franchises.

There were six types of borough franchise

Freeman: vote given to freemen of the town or city
Burgage: franchise attached to property in the borough
Corporation: vote confined to members of the corporation
Scot and lot: voters who paid the poor rate
Household or ‘potwalloper’: all inhabitant male householders not receiving alms or poor relief.
Freeholder: right of voting lay with the freeholders

The size of the constituencies varied hugely. Yorkshire, with 20,000 voters, had the largest electorate, Lyme Regis, one of the smallest boroughs, had an electorate of 200. Old Sarum had seven voters, Dunwich had fewer than forty.

Old Sarum: the constituency with
seven voters.
My photograph

By contrast the rapidly growing centres of industrialisation - Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham - had no MPs. Cornwall was grossly overrepresented, sending forty-four members to Westminster - only one more MP than the whole of Scotland. Lancashire sent just fourteen.

Voters wrote their names in poll books, which were subsequently published. Poll books trace their origins to a 1696 act of Parliament designed to curb disputed election results and fraud. They continued to be used for various elections until the secret ballot was introduced in 1872. Many poll books are now online. This site explains their nature and gives many links.

Poll book for Newcastle for the general
election of 1780
Public domain

By 1830 the unreformed parliamentary system was coming under considerable strain. The population was rising and its distribution changing dramatically. It was becoming better educated and more critical of the anomalies in the structure of politics. The largely peaceful struggle over Catholic Emancipation was about to pave the way for further changes.

Friday 25 October 2019

The 1820s (2): Daniel O'Connell and Catholic Emancipation

Daniel O'Connell

by Bernard Mulrenin

National Portrait Gallery

Public domain

The Catholic question

This question was a running sore in the politics of the late teens and early 1820s. It involved a range of important problems:

the royal prerogative
the nature of civil rights
the place of religion in the constitution
the government of Ireland.

On 9 May 1817 the Commons debated a motion to open up all government posts to Catholics, except for that of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Peel, at that time the Chief Secretary for Ireland, was the main speaker on the Protestant side. He argued that Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign power and that he was not prepared to allow the pope to be a 'fourth estate of the realm'. Thanks in part to his eloquence, the motion was defeated 221/245. ‘Orange’ Peel was now the head of the Protestant party and as a reward he was offered the seat of Oxford University, the most Anglican in the country.

A further attempt was defeated in 1819. However in 1821 , the Commons had given a small but decisive majority for a bill by the Dublin University MP, William Plunket, to relieve Catholic disabilities. The Lords threw it out.

While the Commons might be moving towards Emancipation, George IV was deeply hostile, backtracking on his days as a Foxite Whig. When he became king he told Castlereagh (a supporter of Emancipation) that ‘once I take that oath I am for ever a Protestant King, a Protestant upholder, a Protestant adherent’.

George IV in 1821, no longer glamorous.
He had abandoned his earlier
support for Catholic Emancipation

But the balance of opinion in the cabinet was shifting. When Sir Francis Burdett's bill passed its third reading by twenty-one votes in May 1825, the cabinet nearly fell apart. Peel offered to resign, but he was told that his resignation would bring Lord Liverpool's government down. Ministers were saved when the Lords rejected the bill, but for how long could the Lords be allowed to frustrate the wishes of the Commons?

There would have been less of a problem if the question had been confined to England where Catholics were a tiny minority, socially isolated and politically passive. Both Peel and Liverpool supported moves to enfranchise them. But the question involved Ireland and the nature of its relationship with Britain.

The Catholic Association

The position of Irish Catholics was especially anomalous. In 1793 Pitt's government had given the Catholic Irish forty- shilling freeholders. But they could only vote for Protestants.

In 1823, the Catholic barrister, Daniel O'Connell, set up the Catholic Association. The Association campaigned for Catholic emancipation and also for reform of the Church of Ireland, for tenants' rights, and economic development. It was funded by ‘the Catholic rent’, membership dues of one penny per month. The subscription was highly successful, and the Association raised a large sum of money in its first year.

Sir Robert Peel
Home Secretary from 1822
by Sir Henry William Pickersgill
Public domain

Liberal Toryism?

Lord Liverpool’s administration has traditionally been divided into two unequal periods:

a reactionary phase 1812-1820 symbolised by Sidmouth and the Six Acts
a shorter ‘liberal’ phase associated with the ‘second-wave’ ministers: William Huskisson, Frederick Robinson, Robert Peel.

This is now seen as an over-simplification. But there can be little doubt that the nation was changing. In March 1820 Robert Peel wrote to a friend:

‘Do you not think that there is a feeling becoming daily more general and more confirmed in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country?’

The Whig politician, Henry Brougham, said

‘the schoolmaster had been abroad in the land’.

The Manchester Mechanics' Institute,
founded 1825

The Mechanics Institute movement, the brainchild of two Glasgow professors, John Anderson and George Birkbeck spread education among working men. Henry Brougham’s Practical Observations upon the Education of the People sold 50,000 copies in a few weeks and quickly went through twenty editions. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (founded by Brougham in 1826) provided them with cheap information.

Free trade
The government was inexorably, if inconsistently, moving towards a policy of free trade. As far back as 1812, Lord Liverpool had said,

‘the less commerce and manufactures were meddled with the more likely they were to prosper’.

On 26 May 1820 he delivered a speech extolling the virtues of free trade and in 1824-5 Frederick Robinson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, lowered excise duties on a wide range of consumer goods.

The liberalisation of the economy threw into stark relief the anomaly of the Corn Laws, but the power of the landed interest was such that it could not be attacked frontally. The first important modification of the Corn Laws did not occur until 1828 - this was a clumsy sliding-scale of duties which tapered to nominal rates when wheat prices reached 73s – the sum agreed on was a compromise.

The Peterloo Massacre

This post owes a great deal to Robert Poole's brilliant article, '"By the Law or the Sword": Peterloo Revisited', History, 91 (2006): 254-276. The Wikipedia article on Peterloo is also extremely good and takes account of modern research including Poole's article. There is a more recent study of the background to Peterloo in this blog from the History of Parliament website. See also the account here, which gives special prominence to the female reformers.

There is an interesting discussion of Peterloo in Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' programme on Radio 4.

In 1819 radical reformers made serious attempts to stage a series of mass demonstrations.

In January there was a parliamentary reform meeting of about 10,000 at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester at which Henry Hunt was the principal speaker. Banners bearing the mottoes ‘Rights of Man’, ‘Universal Suffrage’ and ‘No Corn Laws’ were displayed.

The authorities were deeply alarmed. On 2 March, following reports that radical leaders were arming themselves with pikes, Henry Hobhouse, the permanent under secretary at the Home Office, wrote to the Oldham magistrates that the evidence confirmed the Home Secretary, Sidmouth’s, opinion that

‘your Country will not be tranquillized, until Blood shall have been shed either by the Law or the Sword.’ (Quoted Poole, 265).

In June there were a series of meetings in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands and the west of Scotland. These peaceful meetings pounded the same theme: the sufferings of the people were due to the inadequacies and extravagance of government, and the remedy lay in annual parliaments and manhood suffrage.

Problems of the peace

The radical, Samuel Bamford wrote:

While the laurels were yet cool on the brows of our victorious soldiers ... the elements of convulsion were at work among the masses of our labouring population.

Samuel Bamford in his respectable old age
Public domain

The immediate post-war years, 1815-21, saw unemployment and high bread prices coincide with renewed political discontent.

Adjustments had to be made in line with reduced demand for products associated with the war effort: provisions, timber, clothing, iron, leather, canvas, rope.
During the wars the armed forces of Britain had been increased to 400,000 men (with as many again in the reserves) compared with about 60,000 in 1791. Rapid demobilisation put nearly a third of a million ex-servicemen on the already glutted labour market. This depressed wage levels, added to unemployment, increased the burden of local taxation and ensured that the discontented would be led by those with military experience.
Added to this came the strains of technological redundancy. The number of shearing frames in Yorkshire had increased in the past decade from under a hundred to over 1,400 and in October 1817, 3,625 croppers petitioned Parliament for help. In Lancashire the number of handloom weavers continued to rise while their wages continued to fall.

The Corn Law

Even before Napoleon’s final defeat, the government of Lord Liverpool had bowed to massive agricultural pressure. In 1813 an abundant harvest sent prices tumbling. Peace in 1814 brought foreign grain imports with the promise of more to come. The government came under strong pressure from the landed interest , which argued that a Corn Law was justified in the interests of national security and domestic stability:

Britain might once again need to maximise the domestic supply of foodstuffs to counteract the effects of blockade.
Agriculture was the largest single employer of labour and was already subject to rural depopulation.

In February 1815 a parliament overwhelmingly dominated by the landed interest passed a law allowing the free importation of foreign corn only when the price of home-grown corn had reached the price of 80s. a quarter. This decision -together with a run of bad harvests - helped ensure that the average price of corn was higher in the years 1810-19 than at any other time during the whole of the nineteenth century.

Radicalism and the end of the war

Whigs, Tories and radicals

The death first of Pitt and then of Fox in 1806 helped transformed politics. The ‘friends of Mr Pitt’ formed an embryonic Tory party. The ‘friends of Mr Fox’ grouped round Charles, 2nd Earl Grey.

The Whigs agreed on two issues: the need to reduce the power of the Crown and the need to settle the Catholic question. But they were embarrassed by radical elements within the party, who mounted frequent criticisms of the government’s war policy. There were also radicals outside the party, such as the radical baronet, Sir Francis Burdett, and the journalist, William Cobbett. They demanded a radical reform of taxation and manhood suffrage.

From 1810 onwards, although the Tories were firmly in power, the country itself was becoming more unsettled. 1811 and 1812 were crisis years: a time of economic hardship, disillusionment at the Regent’s failure to dismiss his Tory ministers, war with the United States. In May 1812 the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons.

This is the background to the Luddite disturbances.

Luddism

The word Luddite has entered the vocabulary to denote an attitude of stubborn resistance to change an innovation. But the original Luddites were not ignorant, indiscriminate despoilers. They were skilled men who attacked specific targets. Nor was machine-breaking a new phenomenon. Spinning jennies, water-frames and carding engines were all attacked in Lancashire in the 1770s. Gig mills and shearing frames were attacked at the same time by ‘croppers’ or ‘shearmen’ (who raised and cut level the nap of woollen cloth) in the west of England. (In 1804 French weavers attacked the Jacquard loom in Lyons.)

The Treaty of Amiens

Pitt’s resignation came at a time when the nation was war-weary. Taxation was high, prices were rising and there was no immediate hope of military success. It was a crucial point in the war when Napoleon seemed to have Europe within his grasp, and Britain was without allies. The demand for peace was irresistible.

On 1 October 1801 the peace preliminaries were signed and accepted by Parliament with comparatively little opposition. In a Commons speech Pitt strongly endorsed the peace. The Treaty of Amiens was signed on 27 March 1802. The terms were not advantageous to Britain, who finally acknowledged French hegemony in Europe, and took no account of recent British victories. Britain handed back the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch and Trinidad to Spain. It recognised French dominance of northern Italy. However, the treaty’s popularity was confirmed by a comfortable win for Addington’s government in the general election of 1802.

James Gillray, The First Kiss
Library of Congress
Public domain

In the interval of peace, there was a spate of British visitors to France, including Fox, who travelled to France in the autumn of 1802 with Mrs Armistead. On 2 November he finally met First Consul Bonaparte, and was deeply disillusioned to learn that he was a dictator!

Addington did not believe that the peace was permanent. He did not withdraw troops from the West Indies and made only moderate cuts to the army and navy. Meanwhile the French invaded and occupied Switzerland. By the spring of 1803 Britain’s defences were sufficiently good for Addington to take the initiative, declare war on 18 May and take Bonaparte by surprise.

Ireland 1798: 'the Year of the French'

This post owes a great deal to R.R.Foster's classic Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (Penguin, 1988) and to Marianne Elliott's Wolfe Tone. Prophet of Irish Independence (Yale, 1989).

The Protestant Ascendancy

In 1800 the population of Ireland comprised:

Roman Catholic Irish (3.1 million)
Protestant Anglo-Irish (450,000)
Presbyterians (900,000).

The eighteenth century was the period of the Protestant Ascendancy, buttressed by harsh penal laws. The mouthpiece of the Protestant ascendancy was the Irish Parliament in Dublin.

The Parliament House, Dublin
Public domain

The British government was represented by the Lord Lieutenant. The parliament was dominated by the Anglo-Irish, an exclusive group that monopolised political power and saw themselves as both English and Irish. Deprived of a political role, with land-owning made increasingly difficult, the Catholic gentry tended to go into trade. The largest grievance of the population as a whole was the poverty of the rural labourers (except in Ulster where there was a flourishing linen industry).

The Ulster Presbyterians had fewer grievances than Catholics, but until 1780 they were excluded from corporations, and though not legally barred from Parliament, only a few members were ever elected.

In the later eighteenth century the harshness of the penal laws was toned down. Catholic chapels were built and the land tenure laws were liberalised. It was relatively easy to soften the penal laws - harder to resolve Ireland's underlying economic problems.

The Volunteer Movement

One issue that united most Irish people was a desire for greater independence from Westminster. This case was taken up in the Irish Parliament by two MPs, Henry Grattan and Henry Flood. During the American War many Ulster Presbyterians enthusiastically took up the cause of the colonists; like them, they were angered by the taxation policy of the Westminster Parliament. In 1778, with French entry into the war, the Volunteer Movement began in Ulster and spread over the whole country. It was not a militia under government control but a national volunteer army, and exclusively Protestant. In 1779 the Volunteers paraded in Dublin with a decorated brass cannon with the placard: ‘Free trade - or else’. In response the British Parliament passed acts removing the restrictions on Irish trade and allowing Presbyterians to take up local appointments. In February 1782 a convention in Dungannon, addressed by Grattan and Flood, called for independence for the Irish Parliament. A new constitution was granted by the reluctant Rockingham government, giving more rights for Catholics and greater legislative independence for the Irish Parliament.

The period of ‘Grattan's Parliament’ was the greatest period of independence Ireland ever knew under British rule. It was a fitting end to the eighteenth century and coincided with an upsurge in national pride - the setting up of the Bank of Ireland, the continuing transformation of Dublin into a showcase Georgian city. But it was a very partial independence. Catholics were still not allowed to vote or to stand for Parliament and the liberalising measures only served to emphasize their disabilities.

The United Irishmen

Theobald Wolfe Tone
Public domain.

The French Revolution had a profound effect on Ireland. In the 1790s the Volunteer movement revived, but support was now concentrated among shopkeepers and skilled urban workers - exactly the same classes as the corresponding societies in England and Scotland. In 1790-1, the Catholic Committee, a movement of members of the Irish Catholic middle class, began to campaign for the abolition of the penal laws. On 18 October 1791 the Belfast Society of United Irishmen was founded. Among the founders was Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), a young Protestant lawyer from Dublin. For Tone radical political reform and nationalist identity went hand in hand, with no place for sectarian divisions. The first resolutions of the United Irishmen asserted

That the weight of English influence in the Government in this country is so great, as to require a cordial union, among ALL THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND. ... No reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which does not include Irishmen or every religious persuasion.

In his posthumously published autobiography, written in 1796, Tone described his aim as

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connexion with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means.

His biographer, Marianne Elliott describes this as 'the most quoted passage of Irish history'.

The United Irishmen sought to forge a new political alliance between the middle-class politically-aware Presbyterians of Belfast and Dublin and the rural Catholic majority, though these two groups - the one non-sectarian, the other devoutly religious - were largely incompatible.

A nation at war: poverty, politics, finance

Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tract,
'The Riot',
published in 1795

Wartime hardship

The summer of 1794 was one of prolonged drought and intense heat, and the result was a disappointing though not a disastrous harvest. This was followed by a severe winter, creating a grain shortage in early 1795. The spring saw rapid price rises. Shortages intensified in the summer, with garrison and naval towns suffering particularly. Bread rioters set fire to mills, sometimes they attacked those whom they believed to be hoarders or selling short measure; at other times they tried to prevent grain from leaving an area. At other times they commandeered goods and sold them at what they regarded as a fair price. This was not thuggery, but what the historian, E. P. Thompson, described as 'moral economy': a traditionalist attempt to rectify what were seen as injustices in the pricing and sale of goods.

Women were prominent in these riots. They felt so strongly because they were trying to feed their families under difficult conditions. They also benefited from the law which regarded married women as acting under the direction of their husbands - could they therefore be punished as independent agents?

Solutions to poverty?

The newspapers recommended recipes such as rice or potato bread. The rich were urged to stew their meat rather than roast it. The royal family tried to give a lead by reducing its consumption of white bread and eating more brown bread. The poor were urged to cook rice puddings - but the problem was that they did not have the ovens to cook them. They were also encouraged to eat potatoes rather than bread, but proved resistant.

The imposition of excise duty on hair powder (with a £20 fine for those caught breaking the law) was designed to lessen the use of flour. Legislation forbade the use of wheat in distilling and in making starch. It is not clear that anyone starved to death during the shortage - but it must have had a devastating effect on health.

One solution to rural poverty was found by the magistrates of Speenhamland in Berkshire in May 1795. This provided variable amounts of relief according to the size of a labourers’ family and the prevailing price of bread. It was bitterly attacked by political economists as encouraging large families and encouraging farmers to pay the lowest possible wage. It was also criticised for failing to discriminate between the idle and the industrious worker. However the system was quite widely adopted in the southern counties.

Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger,
by Thomas Gainsborough
Burrell Collection, Glasgow
Public domain

The 'schoolboy prime minister'

William Pitt was born in 1759, the fourth child and second son of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham. His early talents clearly destined him for political life. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His father died in 1778, encumbered with debts, leaving his younger son with lifelong money problems. In January 1781 he entered Parliament for Sir James Lowther’s pocket borough of Appleby, where he attached himself to the followers of the Earl of Shelburne. In July 1782, at the age of 23, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Earl of Shelburne’s short-lived government, but he resigned in March 1783 on the formation of the Fox-North coalition. In December 1783, the king dismissed the coalition and Pitt became prime minister. There was much mockery of the 'schoolboy prime minister' and many observers believed that his administration could not last.

However, in the general election of the following year, he was returned with a majority of 120, having gained about seventy seats. He was thus that rare eighteenth-century creature – a prime minister returned to power in a landslide election victory.

Political principles

Pitt was always to insist that he was not a party man and his description of himself as an ‘independent Whig’ was simply an assertion of his support for the principles of the Glorious Revolution. It was only retrospectively that he was seen as a Tory.

Free trade: Influenced by the ideas of Adam Smith, he signed a modest free-trade treaty with France in 1786. Until destroyed by war, the treaty allowed French wines to enter Britain at preferential rates while the French market was open to British manufactured goods in a general tariff reduction. Through the Nootka Sound dispute with Spain in 1789–90, he secured British whaling interests in the Pacific Ocean and opportunities also for trade with Asia.

A nation at war: the military dimension

A soldier in the
Derbyshire Militia, 1780

The long war

The Revolutionary Wars, which became the Napoleonic Wars after 1799, turned out to be the greatest and most costly conflict Britain had ever fought. Pitt saw it as a war against an expansionist France that was breaking treaties and destroying the peace of Europe, and also as a war against home-grown subversion. Most believed that the war would be short. In fact, it lasted for twenty-three years.

During this long war, Britain was France’s most consistent enemy. It was a war described by Napoleon as the war of the elephant and the whale: France could not defeat Britain at sea, but the British could only defeat the French on land by coalition-building, an expensive and frequently unreliable strategy. It took six coalitions to bring about the final defeat of France.

Britain entered the war from a position of weakness. Pitt had rehabilitated the national finances partly at the expense of military expenditure. In particular, the army was too small – 15,000 men in the British Isles with perhaps twice as many again deployed to India and the West Indies.

Pitt as war leader

This raises the question: was Pitt a good war-time Prime Minister? Arguably not. Britain entered the war unprepared and undermanned. The strategy was ill thought out, and Fox was right to pick out the confusion of war aims. Furthermore, Pitt's financial measures rested on his mistaken assumption that the war would be short. He underestimated French fighting capability and France’s sense of patriotic identity. However, he has acquired a reputation as a great war-time leader because Britain was not defeated and because his allies after his death praised him as ‘the pilot who weathered the storm’.

Britain’s attempt to defeat revolutionary France in the 1790s rested on three strategic pillars:

supporting the European allies with cash and troops;
using the navy to pick off French colonies, especially in the Caribbean;
offering practical aid to opponents of the Revolution within France.

1 and 2 had been the policy followed by Pitt’s father in the Seven Years' War. However, the new war refused to follow this pattern - in the short term at least.