A history of England

by Charles Oman

The successor of King William was his niece Victoria, daughter of Edward Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. She was a young girl of eighteen, who had been brought up very quietly at Kensington Palace by her widowed mother, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. Little was known of her by the nation at large, and some of the baser spirits among the Tories whispered at first that she would prove a party-sovereign and a mere tool of the Whigs. But it was not long before the world discovered that the young queen was likely to be a model for constitutional monarchs. She was simple, straightforward, filled with a deep consciousness of the responsibility of her position, and anxious to discharge her duties with all possible regard for the well-being of her subjects. The more she was known, the more was she liked and respected, and there was accordingly a general feeling of relief that the throne had not gone to the next heir, the queen's unpopular uncle, Ernest Duke of Cumberland. That prince, moreover, now became ruler of Hanover, where the Salic law prevailed, and the kingdom was finally separated from England after a hundred and twenty-three years of union. Thus England was freed from all necessity for interfering in the internal politics of Germany.

The Queen and Lord Melbourne.

Lord Melbourne, behind an air of studied levity, possessed a strong will and a conscientious desire to do well by his country. He determined to place his experience at the disposal of the young queen, and to teach her the ways of constitutional monarchy. Until her marriage he acted as her private secretary, using his position for no party purpose. In the language of the Duke of Wellington, he "taught her to preside over the destinies of this great country."

The Government and the Radicals.

The Melbourne cabinet lasted till September, 1841, much vexed in its later years by social troubles in England, the result of the growing discontent among the working classes at the failure of the Reform Bill to bring about a golden age. They had thought that the creation of a representative House of Commons would be followed by all manner of Radical reforms, and were now complaining that the new government was little better than the old. "The Tories scourged us with whips, but the Whigs use scorpions," complained Cobbett, the Radical pamphleteer, while Lord Grey was still in power. There was this amount of truth in the complaint, that the Tories were always trying to interfere in social matters, and believed in "paternal government" and the duty of the State to care for the individual citizen; but the Whigs, under the influence of the rules of strict political economy, held that the State must not meddle with private men, that the rule of laissez faire, or non-intervention, was right, and that free competition between man and man was the true order of life. Now, Tory interference with social matters had generally been wrong-headed and disastrous, but Whig indifference and abstention was quite as exasperating to the masses.

The People's Charter.

The old delusion that men can be made happy by legislation and grants of political rights, was still universally prevalent, and the discontent of the labouring classes took shape—now, as in the last generation—in a demand for Parliamentary Reform. The new agitation got its name from the document called "the People's Charter," which was put forward as the programme of the movement. It contained five claims—(1) for manhood suffrage, (2) for the vote by ballot at elections, (3) for annual Parliaments, (4) for the payment of members, (5) for the throwing open of seats in the House of Commons to all men by the abolition of the property qualification, which was still required, in theory, to be possessed by members. It is curious to reflect how entirely useless all these five demands would have been to cure the social discontents of the day. The second and fifth clauses of the charter have long been granted, the first is practically conceded, and the fourth may be so ere long, yet the ills against which the Chartists were protesting are still with us. For the real end of the agitation was in truth purely social; it was much the same as the cry for the so-called "living wage" that is heard among us to-day. "The principle of the People's Charter," said one of its advocates in 1838, "is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. It means that every working man in the land has a right to a good coat, a good hat, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty." The demagogues—honest or dishonest—who led the Chartist movement insisted that the golden age would follow the introduction of universal suffrage and their other demands, though it is difficult to see how they can have been so simple as to hold such a view. But they were, for the most part, mere windy orators, with no grasp of the means or ends that they needed; the most prominent man of the whole band being Feargus O'Connor, an Irishman with an enormous flow of words and an ill-balanced brain, who ended his days in a lunatic asylum. Riotous public meetings, where threats of physical force were freely used, were rife all through the years 1838-42, and gave the Whig ministry no small trouble. But the movement was never so dangerous to law and order as the troubles of the years 1816-32 had been, for the Chartists were backed by neither of the great political parties, had no competent leaders, and were detested for their noisy turbulence by the whole of the middle classes, Whig and Tory alike. Parliament refused to take them seriously, even when they kept sending up monster petitions to the House of Commons, purporting to contain a million and a half or even three million signatures. One of these documents, as large in circumference as a cart-wheel, had to be carried by sixteen men, and stuck in the door of the House, so that it had to be cut up in order to allow it to enter. But petitions, riots, and wild talk had none of them any practical effect.

The Opium War.

There was little that was eventful in the foreign policy of the later years of the Melbourne cabinet. The only events of importance were our first war with China, and our interference in the Levant to prevent the break-up of the Turkish empire. The Chinese quarrel—the Opium War, as it was often called—arose from the destruction of a quantity of that drug belonging to English merchants by the mandarins of Canton, who had resolved not to allow it to be imported into their country. In consequence, an army was sent out to the far East, which, after some desultory fighting, compelled the Chinese to sue for peace, pay an indemnity of 21,000,000 dollars, and cede the island of Hong-Kong, which, in British hands, has since become one of the greatest ports of the world (1839-41).

England and Mehemet Ali.