SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER

1815-1898

GREAT BRITAIN was one of the Pentarchy of European Powers which divided up the Napoleonic plunder after the battle of Waterloo; but the great Corsican had taken no territory from her, and she left the Continental nations to rearrange the map. Her share of the spoils was Napoleon himself, whom she imprisoned for life in St. Helena; and peace, which she sorely needed, after a hundred years of war, and the expenditure of nine hundred millions of pounds sterling, interest on which had to be paid annually. The Duke of Wellington was prominent in the negotiations which resulted in the restoration of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne (thereby extinguishing Spain's last hope of political freedom), and at the Peace of Paris. These matters having been settled, England had leisure to turn from the affairs of others to her own.

From that time till the present day, the history of England has been mainly the history of reforms, tending to give ever increased power and influence to the mass of her people. Reforms always imply a previous condition which had long been almost intolerable; and a struggle to improve that condition which demanded the utmost and most invincible efforts of the wronged to right themselves. When we contemplate the state of things in England only fourscore years ago, we are amazed that flesh and blood could endure it; and we marvel that Anglo-Saxon patience and respect for law have been so profound that the changes which have produced the England of today were accomplished. without overt revolution and bloodshed. The relief which William of Orange brought to the country was relatively great; yet what contented the nation then would be deemed unendurable now. And during the reign of the first three Georges, many new abuses were established, or old ones were restored; so that in 1815 oppression, corruption, ignorance and injustice were omnipresent and apparently impregnable. The aristocracy and nobility, the officers of the nation and of the municipalities, the owners of estates, gave the law to England, and the idea of sharing their powers and rewards with the common people never entered their minds. Nor would they ever have admitted it, had the appeal been simply on the ground of abstract right; for popular government seemed to them the same as anarchy. But the abuses resulted in national calamities which affected the rich as well as the poor, and compelled an inquiry into the causes of them; and slowly, against their will, and fighting for every step, the upper classes conceded point after point to the proletariat. This resistance had one good effect : it made the results that were attained permanent. In America, changes and so-called reforms are readily effected, and therefore they are often ill-advised, and have to be modified or recalled. But whatever is done in England in the way of improvement had been found necessary long before, and its roots are from the first planted so deep that they can never again be torn away. The government of England, so far as its inner principles are concerned, is the most stable in the world, because it is the offspring of experience and conflict. The era of nominal kings and queens may be limited; but the English constitution is perennial, and can only undergo a gradual perfecting, in harmony with the increasing enlightenment of years.

George III., as we have seen, lost his reason four years before the battle of Waterloo, and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was made Regent. Five years after the battle, the insane king died, and George IV. was seated on his throne. He was the most worthless of his line, and one of the most selfish and dishonorable men in Europe. He had early in life contracted an illegal marriage with handsome Mrs. Fitzherbert, and had later been forced into a legal union with his foolish and flighty cousin, Caroline of Brunswick. His treatment of her was heartless and brutal; and after inflicting every insult upon her, and striving in vain to convict her of infidelity in order to get a divorce from her, he completed her humiliation and broke her poor, ill-regulated heart by denying her admission to his coronation. The king himself was destitute of affection as he was of honor; his mind was that of a fop or a tailor, and his only aim was to spend the money of his subjects in riotous living. His debts were enormous, and his accession to the throne did not diminish his extravagance. He was actually crowned in borrowed jewels, and after the ceremony he refused to return them to their owners. He had originally affected Whig principles, and cultivated the friendship of Fox, not by reason of intellectual convictions, for he had none, but to spite his father, who was a Tory. Later, he became a Tory himself, and chose for his minister the stupidest man in England, Lord Liverpool, who had been a commoner. Food sold at prohibitive prices, trade was depressed; the citizens of large towns, which were unrepresented in Parliament, assembled to protest, and were crushed by military force; many so-called ringleaders were hanged. But the movement toward reform could not be stopped, and in 1828 the Duke of Wellington, who was then Prime Minister, and who, as a Tory, was in sympathy with the king, repealed the old Corporation Act, which had kept Dissenters out of office, and the Test Act, which excluded both Catholics and Dissenters from civil and military positions. The following year the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed, enabling Catholics to sit in Parliament. But as an offset to it, another act was passed, denying the franchise to a large class of Irish landholders, on the plea that their votes were influenced by priests and landlords. Daniel O'Connell took his seat in the House, but his eloquent efforts to get a repeal of the act uniting Ireland with England were ineffective. In 1830 the king died, lamented by none, with the possible exception of Sir Walter Scott, who said he was a good-natured man. He could be externally affable when it suited his purposes; but between such "'good nature;" and goodness of nature, there is a gulf as wide as that between truth and falsehood.

His reign shows how the people, in spite of the opposition of the men in power, had contrived to have their way in certain important matters; and this success was the augury of more. It was also during this reign that Sir Robert Peel instituted the present policemen " peelers," as they were termed by the vulgar to replace the former worthless constables who had served as the sport of the young men of fashion. Since then, there has been order in London streets, to which before they had been strangers; they had already been lighted with gas at night; and a citizen could now walk abroad after nightfall without danger of being robbed by footpads or outraged by young bloods and other licensed libertines, as heretofore.

William IV. was crowned the day after George's death. He had spent most of his life at sea or on ships, and was a rough-mannered curmudgeon, who yet was thought to have honest qualities under the surface. He was the late king's brother, the latter having died without legitimate male offspring. He was, of course, utterly incompetent to the duties of his position; but nothing else was expected of an English sovereign in those days. But there were men in England who had ideas; and one of the foremost of these was William Cobbett, who in the columns of his "Political Register" persistently demanded a just and uniform system of representation. Lord Russell finally brought in a bill to secure this reform, and to do away with rotten boroughs. The lords, bishops, and Tories of the House, opposed it, as did likewise the Duke of Wellington; and when it was brought to the vote, the House of Lords rejected it. Riots followed, and the duke had his windows smashed by the mob. The next year the bill was again brought up, and again rejected by the lords. But William was now forced to order the creation of new peers to pass the bill over the heads of the opposition; and in 1832 it became the law. It abolished rotten boroughs boroughs owned by a handful of corrupt or irresponsible persons, and containing often hardly any inhabitants, or those who were not truly represented: and it gave representation to large towns which had been created by the growth of industries, and had sent no members to Parliament. Half a million voters were thus added to the list, and the outrages which had prevailed at elections were stopped. The new Parliament, thus elected, divided under the names of Conservative and Liberal, and reflected to some extent the popular will. In 1833, Wilberforce, Brougham and others brought in a bill to free negro slaves throughout the British colonies, giving twenty million pounds' compensation to their owners; and acts were passed forbidding the employment in factories of young children and women. George Stephenson perfected his invention of the locomotive engine, and railroads were established; and the ridicule and incredulity with which the project had at first been received was changed into reckless speculation in railway stocks, resulting in panics and disasters. The friction match was also invented before the end of William's reign; and upon the whole, during those seven years, the country had made a long stride forward in progress.

In default of heirs male, the daughter of William's brother, Edward, Duke of Kent, succeeded him on the throne. Alexandrina Victoria was at that time eighteen years old: she had been fortunate in her bringing up; for her father died early, and she was educated by her mother and by the Duchess of Northumberland, who caused her to be instructed in the ordinary "branches," and enforced upon her what was far more important in the then corrupt state of court life the most rigid seclusion. She grew up pure-minded and upright, her mind was naturally just and sensible; she had a fitting sense of her dignity and responsibility, and her womanliness and simplicity endeared her to those with whom she came in contact. No one knew anything about her character when she became queen, but all they saw pleased and encouraged them. The name Alexandrine had been given her in compliment to the Czar Alexander of Russia; but she laid it aside on putting on the crown, and this act of independence and good sense greatly gratified her subjects. It was also a matter of rejoicing that her accession put an end to the connection of England with the petty kingdom of Hanover, which was liable to be a source of trouble in Continental complications. The title to it lapsed upon the absence of heirs male to the English throne. Fears had been expressed lest Victoria be unseated by intrigues in one or another quarter; but there was little ground for such apprehensions, and they soon died away, after having afforded opportunity to various loyal persons to avow their undying fidelity to the queen's person. Thus, under smiling auspices, in 1837, the famous Victorian era began.