Another splendid piece of work done by the ministry of Lord Grey was the final abolition of slavery in the English colonies. Though the slave-trade had long been prohibited, yet slavery itself still subsisted, and the West Indian planters were a body strong and wealthy enough to offer a vigorous opposition to the enfranchisement of their negroes. Many of the old Tories were narrow and misguided enough to lend them aid in Parliament, but the bill was carried. Twenty million pounds were set aside to compensate the owners, and on August 1, 1834, all the slaves became free, though they were bound to work as apprentices to their late masters for seven years—a period afterwards shortened to three.
The Municipal Corporations Act.
A third useful measure was the reform of the municipal corporations of England, of which many had hitherto been wholly unrepresentative bodies, not chosen by the people, but co-opting each other, and often worked by small and corrupt party or family rings. For this absurd arrangement the Act of 1835 substituted a popular and elective constitution, to the enormous improvement of the purity and respectability of the municipal bodies.
Palmerston's foreign policy,—France.
The European policy of the Whigs was in the hands of the brisk and self-reliant Lord Palmerston, who directed the foreign relations of England for nearly thirty years, with a few intervals of retirement from office. He had left the Tories because he disliked their policy of non-intervention in continental affairs, and because he nourished an active dislike for the despotic monarchies of the Holy Alliance. His end was to raise up a league in Western Europe which should support national liberties and constitutional government in each country, against the autocratic and reactionary powers of Central and Eastern Europe. He therefore allied himself with Louis Philippe of Orleans, the new King of France, who had been set up by the Liberal party in that country as a constitutional king after the expulsion of Charles X.
Spain and Portugal.
He actively assisted the parties in Spain and Portugal who were fighting for limited monarchy and the nation's right to choose its own sovereign. In each of those countries there was a civil war in progress between the Liberal party, backing a young queen with a parliamentary title to the crown, and the reactionary party, supported by the priesthood, and upholding a prince who claimed the throne under the Salic law, and appealed to the divine hereditary right of kings. Palmerston supported both Donna Maria in Portugal and Donna Isabella in Spain against their uncles Don Miguel and Don Carlos, by every means short of the actual sending of British troops to the Peninsula. But many officers were allowed to volunteer into the Portuguese and Spanish service, and the struggle was largely settled by their aid. The designs of Don Miguel in Portugal were finally frustrated by the defeat of his fleet by Admiral Napier, who commanded the young queen's ships (1831). In Spain the fighting lasted much longer, and the efforts of Sir De Lacy Evans' "British Legion" against the Carlists were not altogether successful (1835-38), but the war ultimately came to an end in the favour of Queen Isabella in 1840.
Holland and Belgium.
Palmerston also lent his support to the national party in a struggle nearer home. Holland and Belgium had been united into a single kingdom by the treaty of Vienna, and placed under the House of Orange, the old Stadtholders of the United Provinces. But the Belgians much disliked the arrangement; they were divided by religion from their northern kinsfolk, and had no national sympathy with them, or loyalty to their Dutch king. In 1830 they rose in arms and declared their independence; William I. of Holland endeavoured to subdue them, and perhaps might have succeeded but for the interference of England and of Louis Philippe, the new King of France. When the Dutch refused to come to terms, a French army entered Belgium and expelled the garrison of Antwerp, while an English fleet blockaded the Scheldt. On this pressure being applied, the Dutch yielded, and the kingdom of Belgium was established, its first sovereign being a prince well known in England, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of the much-lamented Princess Charlotte. [60]
Thus when France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium were in the hands of governments professing liberal principles and opposed to despotism, the reactionary monarchs of the Holy Alliance ceased to appear such a danger to the existence of constitutional monarchy in Europe.