A history of England

by Charles Oman

The Chartist agitation.

The Melbourne cabinet had left the task of dealing with two troublesome agitations as a legacy to their successors. The Chartists were still thundering away at monster meetings, and bombarding Parliament with gigantic petitions. One sent to the House of Commons in 1842 purported to be signed by 3,000,000 persons, and was actually signed by, perhaps, a third of that number. It was couched in such seditious terms that the government refused to receive it, and were supported by a majority of 238, when certain Radical members pressed them to a division. But Peel's hand was known to be firm, and it was obvious that there was no chance of intimidating him; so the Chartist agitation, though it continued to simmer all through his time, never boiled up into any dangerous effervescence.

The "Young Ireland Party."

In Ireland matters seemed for a time more serious. Daniel O'Connell was still pressing on his campaign for Repeal. He was the master of the greater part of the Irish people, and had his well-disciplined "Tail" to follow him in the Commons. But as long as both Conservatives and Whigs refused to buy his aid at the price of granting his demands for Home Rule, he could do no more than bluster and declaim at public meetings. But O'Connell was joined, in the year 1842, by a body of recruits who refused to be fettered by his command to refrain from the use of physical force. A band of ardent young politicians, the political heirs of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Robert Emmet, bound themselves together to strive for Repeal by the old method of armed rebellion—when "England's extremity should be Ireland's opportunity." They called themselves the "Young Ireland Party," revived the old watchwords of the United Irishmen, and gloried in the principles of '98. The chiefs of this faction were Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and Gavan Duffy. O'Connell was afraid of their rashness, and the priesthood, who acted as O'Connell's agents all over Ireland, viewed them with suspicion as possible republicans and atheists; but they gained considerable influence in the land.

O'Connell's influence declines.

The Repeal agitation came to a head in 1843, when O'Connell gathered several hundred thousand people together at a meeting at Tara, the old seat of the Kings of Ireland, and addressed them in an excited strain, promising them "a Parliament of their own on College Green within the year." But Peel had him and his chief lieutenants arrested, and tried for sedition. The whole agitation seemed to collapse when the government made a show of force, and, though O'Connell was ultimately acquitted, his hold on the Irish people was much shaken by the obvious uselessness for any practical end of all his meetings and harangues. The majority of his followers fell back into apathy, the minority resolved to join the "Young Irelanders," and to plot armed treason at some convenient date in the future. Meanwhile Repeal was dead, and O'Connell died a few years later, just before the miserable years 1846-7 revived the troubles of Ireland.

England and the United States.

English foreign policy in Peel's day continued on the good lines on which Palmerston had placed it, for the new Conservative party were vigilant to defend our interests abroad, and to resent the aggression of our neighbours. A very threatening dispute with the United States about the south-western boundaries of British America was settled in 1842, by a satisfactory treaty which gave England Vancouver's Island and all the coast north of the Straits of Juan da Fuca, taking the forty-ninth degree of latitude as the dividing-line from the Pacific to the end of Lake Superior. The Americans had claimed, but had to give up, the whole western shore of North America, up to the Russian province of Alaska.

England and France.

Twice England appeared likely to engage in war with France—in 1844 and 1846—while Peel was in power. The first quarrel was about the annexation of the island of Tahiti, in the Pacific, where a French admiral arrested the English consul, and seized the island in the most arbitrary way from its queen. But Louis Philippe did not wish for war with the only power in Europe that looked kindly on a constitutional monarchy in France, and forced his ministers to apologize to England and abandon Tahiti. In the second quarrel, the crafty and intriguing old king was himself to blame. He had formed a design for securing Spain for his younger son Anthony, Duke of Montpensier, by means of a marriage. The crown of that country was now worn by the young Queen Isabella, whose heiress was her still younger sister Louisa. Louis Philippe secured the marriage of the younger princess with his own son. At the same time, by disreputable intrigues with the Spanish queen-mother, Christina of Naples, and the factious parties in the Cortes, he got the unfortunate queen married to her cousin, Don Francisco, Duke of Cadiz, a wretched weakling, who—as he thought—was certain to die without heirs, so that the crown must ultimately fall to the Montpensiers (1846). This scheme reproduced the old danger that had brought about the war of the Spanish succession in the days of William III. and Anne,—the chance that the crowns of Spain and France might be united. The English government and people were bitterly provoked, high words passed between London and Paris, and there appeared for some time a danger that a rupture might ensue. But external events intervened to prevent such a misfortune. Peel's government lost office in 1846, and Louis Philippe was dethroned in 1848, after which the Spanish marriages ceased to have any importance.