Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

As a progressive ministry in England did not come into power until 1830, the struggles of the people were rewarded with little success during many years after the Battle of Waterloo. During the childhood and boyhood of Browning the events which from time to time marked the determination of the downtrodden Englishman to secure a larger measure of justice for himself were exciting enough to have made a strong impression upon the precocious mind of the incipient poet even in the seclusion of his father’s library at Camberwell.

The artificial prosperity which had buoyed up the workman during the war with France suddenly collapsed with the advent of peace after the Battle of Waterloo. Everything seemed to combine to make the affairs of the workingman desperate. Public business had been blunderingly administered, and while a fatuous Cabinet was congratulating the nation upon the flourishing state of the country, trade was actually almost at a standstill, and failures in business were the order of the day. To make matters worse, a wet summer and early frosts interfered with farming, and the result was that laborers and workmen could not find employment. A not unusual percentage of paupers in any given district was four fifths of the whole population. Thinking the farmers were to blame for the high price of bread, these starving people wreaked their vengeance on them by burning farm buildings, and machinery, and even stacks of corn and hay.

Cardinal Wiseman

Instead of giving sympathy to these men in their desperate condition, a conservative government saw in them only rioters, and took the most stringent measures against them. They were tried by a special commission, and thirty-four of them were condemned to death, though it is recorded that only five of them were executed. The miners of Cornwall and Wales, the lace makers of Nottingham, and the iron workers of the Black Country, next broke out and the smashing of machinery continued. Finally there was a meeting of the artisans of London, Westminster, and Southwick in Spa Fields, Clerkenwall, which had been called by Harry Hunt, a man of property and education, who was known as a supporter of extreme measures, and the leader of the Radicals of that day. They met for the legitimate purpose, one would think, of considering the propriety of petitioning the Prince Regent and Parliament to adopt means of relieving the existing distress. One of the speakers, however, a poor doctor by the name of Watson, was of a more belligerent disposition. He made an inflammatory speech which ended by his seizing a tri-colored flag and marching toward the city followed by the turbulent rabble. On their way they seized the contents of a gunsmith’s shop on Snow Hill, murdered a man, and finally were met opposite the Mansion House by the Lord Mayor, who, assisted by a strong body of police, arrested some of the leaders and dispersed the rest. The arrested persons were brought to trial and indicted for high treason by the Attorney General, but the jury, evidently thinking the indictment had taken too exaggerated a form, acquitted Watson, and the others were dismissed.

The conservative Parliament was, however, so alarmed by these proceedings that, instead of seeking some way of removing the cause of the difficulties, it thought only of making restrictions for the protection of the person of the Regent, of the more effective prevention of seditious meetings and of surer punishment. And what were some of these measures? Debating societies, lecture halls and reading rooms were shut up. Even lectures on medicine, surgery and chemistry were prohibited. Though there was a possibility of getting a license to lecture from the magistrate, the law was interpreted in the narrowest spirit.

Parliamentary reform began to be spoken of in 1819, when a resolution pledging the House of Commons to the consideration of the state of representation was rejected by a vote of one hundred and fifty-three to fifty-eight. This decision stirred up the reform spirit, and large meetings in favor of it were held. The people attending these meetings received military drilling and marched to their meetings in orderly processions, a fact naturally very disturbing to the government. When a great meeting was arranged at Manchester on the 16th of August, troops were accordingly sent to Manchester. The cavalry was ordered to charge the crowd, and although they used the flat side of their swords, the charge resulted in the killing of six persons and the wounding of some hundreds. The clash did not end here, for to offset the ministerial approval of the action of the magistrates and their decision that the meeting was illegal, the Common Council of London passed a resolution by a large majority declaring that the meeting was legal. A number of Whig noblemen also were on the side of the London Council and made similar motions. But the ministers, unmoved by these signs of the times, introduced bills in Parliament for the repression of disorder and the further restraining of public liberty. The bills, it is true, were strenuously opposed in both houses, but the eloquence expended against them was all to no purpose, the bills were passed, and reform for the time being was nipped in the bud.

Although after this laws were gradually introduced by the ministers which tended very much to the betterment of conditions, the fire of reform did not burst out again with full fury until the time of the Revolution of July, in France, which it will be remembered was directed against the despotic King Charles X, and ended in his being deposed, when his crown was given to his distant cousin Louis Philippe. The success of the French in their stand against despotism caused a general revolutionary stir in several European countries, while in England the spirit of revolution showed itself in incendiary fires from one end of the country to the other.

With Parliament itself full of believers in reform, the chief of the Cabinet, the Duke of Wellington, announced that the House of Commons did not need reform and that he would resist all proposals for a change. So great was the popular excitement at this announcement that the Duke could not venture to go forth to dine at the Guildhall for fear that he might be attacked.

Such were the chief episodes in the forward advance of the people up to the time of the presentation of the Reform Bill in Parliament. This important measure has been described as the greatest organic change in the British Constitution that had taken place since the revolution of 1688. When this bill was finally passed it meant a transference of governmental control from the upper classes to the middle classes, and was the inauguration of a policy which has constantly added to the prosperity and well-being of the English people. The agitation upon this bill, introduced in the House by Lord John Russell, under the Premiership of Earl Grey, and a ministry favorable to reform, was filling the attention of all Englishmen to the exclusion of every other subject just at the time when Browning was emerging into manhood, 1831 and 1832, and though he has not commemorated in his poetry this great step in the political progress of his own century, his first play, written in 1837, takes up a period of English history in which a momentous struggle for liberty on the part of the people was in progress.