as Lord Byron. William Huskisson at the Board of Trade cut tariffs and
eased international trade. Robert Peel, the home secretary, reformed the
criminal law and instituted a modern police force in London in 1829.
Barriers to labor union organization were also reduced during this time.
Despite an early 19th-century religious revival, especially among
Methodists and other non-Anglican Protestants, Tory ministries remained
reluctant to challenge religious and political fundamentals. In 1828
Parliament agreed, however, to end political restrictions on Protestant
dissenters, and one year later the government of the duke of Wellington was
challenged in Ireland by a mass movement called the Catholic Association.
Wellington bought peace in Ireland by granting Roman Catholics the right to
become members of Parliament and to hold public office, but in so doing
split the Tory Party. In November 1830, after the election prompted by the
death of George IV and the accession of his brother, William IV, a
predominantly Whig ministry headed by the 2nd Earl Grey took over.
Reforms of the 1830s
The great political issue of 1831 and 1832 was the Whig Reform Bill. After
much debate in and out of the House of Commons and after a threat to swamp
a reluctant House of Lords with new and sympathetic peers, the measure
became law in June 1832. It provided for a redistribution of seats in favor
of the growing industrial cities and a single property test that gave the
vote to all middle-class men and some artisans. In England and Wales the
electorate grew by 50 percent. In Ireland it more than doubled, and in
Scotland it increased by 15 times. The bill set up a system of registration
that encouraged political party organization, both locally and nationally.
The measure weakened the influence of the monarch and the House of Lords.
Other reforms followed. The Factory Act of 1833 limited the working hours
of women and children and provided for central inspectors. Slavery was
abolished in the same year, and the controversial New Poor Law, enacted a
year later, also involved supervision by a central board. The Municipal
Corporations Act (1835) provided for elected representative town councils.
An Ecclesiastical Commission was set up in 1836 to reform the established
church, and a separate statute placed the registration of births, deaths,
and marriages in the hands of the state rather than the church.
In 1837 the elderly William IV was succeeded as monarch by his 18-year-old
niece, Victoria. She and her husband, Albert, came to symbolize many
virtues: a close-knit family life, a sense of public duty, integrity, and
respectability. These beliefs and attitudes, which are often known as
“Victorian,” were also molded by the revival of evangelical religion and by
utilitarian notions of efficiency and good business practice.
Chartists and Corn Law Reformers
The Whig reform spirit ebbed during the ministry of Lord Melbourne, and an
economic depression in 1837 brought to public attention two powerful
protest organizations. The Chartists urged the immediate adoption of the
People’s Charter, which would have transformed Britain into a political
democracy (with universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, and
secret ballot) and which was somehow expected to improve living standards
as well. Millions of workers signed Charter petitions in 1839, 1842, and
1848, and some Chartist demonstrations turned into riots. Parliament
repeatedly rejected the People’s Charter, but it proved more receptive to
the creed of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League. League leaders such
as Richard Cobden expected the repeal of tariffs on imported food to
advance the welfare of manufacturers and workers alike, while promoting
international trade and peace among nations. Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative
ministry succeeded Melbourne, and became active in reducing Britain’s
tariffs but brought back the income tax to make up for lost revenue. In the
winter of 1845 and 1846, spurred by an Irish potato blight and consequent
famine, Peel proposed the complete repeal of the Corn Laws. With Whig aid
the measure passed, but two-thirds of Peel’s fellow Conservatives condemned
the action as a sellout of the party’s agricultural supporters. The
Conservatives divided between Peelites and protectionists, and the Whigs
returned to power under Lord John Russell in 1846.
During the Peel and Russell years the trend toward free trade continued,
aided by the 1849 repeal of the Navigation Acts, and a system of
administrative regulation was gradually established. Women and children
were barred from underground work in mines and limited to 10-hour working
days in factories. Regulations were also imposed on urban sanitation
facilities and passenger-carrying railroads, and commissions were set up to
oversee prisons, insane asylums, merchant shipping, and private charities.
Attempts to subsidize elementary education, however, were hampered by
conflict over the church’s role in running schools.
Mid-Victorian Prosperity
From the late 1840s until the late 1860s, Britons were less concerned with
domestic conflict than with an economic boom occasionally affected by wars
and threats of war on the Continent and overseas. The Great Exhibition of
1851 in London symbolized Britain’s industrial supremacy. The 10,600-km
(6600-mi) railroad network of 1850 more than doubled during the mid-
Victorian years, and the number of passengers carried annually went up by
seven times. The telegraph provided instant communication. Inexpensive
steel was made possible by Henry Bessemer’s process, developed in 1856, and
a boom in steamship building began in the 1860s. The value of British
exports tripled, and overseas capital investments quadrupled. Working-class
living standards improved also, and the growth of trade unionism among
engineers, carpenters, and others led to the founding of the Trades Union
Congress in 1868. In the aftermath of the Continental revolutions of 1848,
a Britain governed by the Peelite-Liberal coalition of Lord Aberdeen
drifted into war with an autocratic, expansionist Russia. In alliance with
the France of Napoleon III, Britain entered the Crimean War in 1854.
Parliamentary criticism of army mismanagement, however, caused the downfall
of Aberdeen. He was replaced by Lord Palmerston, a staunch English
nationalist and champion of European liberalism, who saw the war to its
conclusion—a limited Anglo-French victory in 1856. In 1857 and 1858, the
Sepoy Mutiny was suppressed, and Britain abolished the East India Company,
making British India a crown colony. In contrast, domestic self-government
was encouraged in Britain’s settlement colonies: Canada (federated under
the British North America Act of 1867), Australia, New Zealand, and Cape
Colony (South Africa). Britain maintained a difficult neutrality during the
American Civil War (1861-1865). It encouraged the unification of Italy, but
witnessed with apprehension Prince Otto von Bismarck’s creation of a German
Empire under Prussian domination.
The Gladstone-Disraeli Rivalry
During the 16 years after Palmerston’s death in 1865, the rivalry of
William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli dominated British politics. Both
had begun as Tories, but in 1846 Gladstone had become a Peelite and had
thereafter gradually moved toward liberalism. As Palmerston’s chancellor of
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up with the Reform Bill of 1867, which Disraeli successfully piloted
through the House of Commons. The measure enfranchised most urban workers.
It almost doubled the English and Welsh electorates and more than doubled
the Scottish. It also launched the era of mass political organization and
of increasingly polarized and disciplined parliamentary parties.
Disraeli succeeded Derby as prime minister early in 1868, but a Liberal
election victory in December of that year gave the post to Gladstone.
Gladstone’s first cabinet was responsible for numerous reforms: the
disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; the creation of a national
system of elementary education; the full admission of religious dissenters
to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; a merit-based civil service;
the secret ballot; and judicial and army reform. During the Disraeli
ministry that followed, the Conservatives passed legislation advancing
“Tory democracy”—trade union legalization, slum clearance, and public
health—but Disraeli became more concerned with upholding the British Empire
in Africa and Asia and scoring a diplomatic triumph at the Congress of
Berlin (1878).
A whistle-stop campaign by Gladstone in 1879 and 1880 restored him to the
prime ministership. His second cabinet curbed electoral corruption and,
with the Reform Act of 1884, extended the vote to almost all males who
owned or rented housing. The measure made the single-member parliamentary
district the general rule. Gladstone became increasingly concerned with
bringing peace and land reform to Ireland, which was represented in
Parliament by the Irish Nationalist Party of Charles Stewart Parnell. When
Gladstone became a convert to the cause of home rule—the creation of a semi-
independent Irish legislature and cabinet—he divided the Liberal Party and
led his brief third ministry to defeat in 1886. A second effort to enact
home rule during Gladstone’s fourth ministry, which lasted from 1892 to
1894, was blocked by the House of Lords.
