The Political History of England – Vol XI

Even before the allied armies entered Paris Wellington considered it necessary to induce Louis XVIII. to make advances to certain politicians of the revolution so as to inspire national confidence in him, and to anticipate the risk of a "White Terror," or a continuance of the war. Fouché was accordingly summoned to power, and he had sufficient influence to prevent any national opposition to the Bourbon restoration. Napoleon remained at large for three weeks after his abdication, that is, for eight days after the allied troops had entered Paris, and the fear of a future Bonapartist revolution inclined the British government under Liverpool to entertain favourably the demand of Prussia for the cession of Alsace, Lorraine, and the northern fortresses. When, however, Napoleon had placed himself on board the Bellerophon, the situation changed. A contented France seemed preferable to an impotent France, and Wellington argued that the Bourbon restoration could not last, if French opinion connected it with the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. The tsar took this line from the first, and Wellington won for it the adhesion first of his own government and then of Austria. Prussia had finally to be contented with a provision for the cession of the outlying districts, which the treaty of Paris of 1814 had left to France. The second treaty of Paris, which embodied this stipulation, also provided for an indemnity of £40,000,000 to be paid by France to the allies, and for the temporary occupation of Northern France by the allied armies. On the same day Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia signed a treaty pledging themselves to act together in case fresh revolution and usurpation in France should endanger the repose of other states, and providing for frequent meetings of congresses to preserve the peace of Europe.

In addition to the formal treaties of alliance signed at Chaumont, Vienna, and Paris, an attempt was made by the Tsar Alexander to bind together the European sovereigns in an union based on the principles of Christian brotherhood. A form of treaty was accordingly drawn up which gave expression to these motives, dealt with all Christians as one nation, and committed their sovereigns to mutual affection and reciprocal service. This treaty of the holy alliance was signed on September 26, by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. All European princes except the sultan were invited to adhere to it, and all except the pope and the sultan ultimately either accepted it or expressed their sympathy with its principles. But in England there was hardly a statesman who regarded the treaty seriously, Wellington avowed his distrust of it, the prince regent declined to join it, and its effective value in promoting the subsequent concert of the powers was less than nothing. Still, however visionary and extravagantly worded, it remains as an unique record embodying the deliberate adoption of the principle of international brotherhood, and the sacrifice of separate national interests for the sake of European peace.

NAPOLEON AT ST. HELENA.

It is remarkable that so little public discussion took place on two questions which have since been so hotly debated – the legal status of Napoleon after he surrendered himself, and the moral right of Great Britain to banish him to St. Helena. One reason for this apparent indifference to the fate of one who had overawed all Europe may be found in the fact that parliament was not sitting when the decision of the government was taken, and that, when it met on February 1, 1816, that decision was virtually irrevocable. We know, however, that the first question was fully considered by the allied powers and the British ministry before his place of exile was fixed, and Great Britain undertook the custody of his person. The view which prevailed was that, after his escape from Elba, he could neither be treated as an independent sovereign nor as a subject of the French king, but must be regarded as a public enemy who had fallen into the hands of one among several allied powers. Accordingly, it was by their joint mandate that he remained the prisoner of Great Britain, and was to be under the joint inspection of commissioners appointed by the other powers. Still the minds of Liverpool, Ellenborough, and Sir William Scott, judge of the court of admiralty, were not altogether easy on the legal aspect of the case, which Eldon reviewed in an elaborate and exhaustive memorandum. His conclusion was that Napoleon's position was quite exceptional, that he could not rightly be made over to France as a French rebel, but was a prisoner of war at the disposal of the British government, both on the broad principles of international law, and under the express terms of his surrender, as reported officially by Captain Maitland of the Bellerophon.

It was thought expedient, however, to pass an act of parliament in the session of 1816 for the purpose of setting at rest any objections which might afterwards be raised. This measure was introduced on March 17 by Lord Castlereagh, who defended it on grounds of national justice and national policy. It met with no opposition in the house of commons, but Lords Holland and Lauderdale criticised it in the house of lords, not as sanctioning a wrong to Napoleon, but as implicitly admitting the right of other powers to join in arrangements for his custody. Little attention was then bestowed by parliament or the public on the moral aspect of his life-long detention at St. Helena, the restrictions to be there imposed upon his liberty, or the provision to be made for his comfort. Yet these subjects have ever since exercised the minds of myriads both in England and France, and have given birth to a copious literature for more than three generations.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FIRST YEARS OF PEACE

When Parliament met on February 1, 1816, after a recess of unusual length, Castlereagh was received with loud acclamations from all parts of the house as the chief actor in the pacification of Europe. There was, of course, a full debate upon the treaties, but the opposition dwelt less upon the arbitrary partition of Europe than upon their alleged tendency to guarantee sovereigns against the assertion of popular rights and upon the manifest intention of the government to "raise the country into a military power". From this moment dates the whig and radical watchword of "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform". The nation was, in fact, entering upon a period of unprecedented depression and discontent, which lasted through the last four years of George III.'s reign. At the close of 1815, however, the whole horizon was apparently bright. Great Britain had saved Europe by her example, and, however small her army in comparison with those of continental states, she stood foremost among the powers which had crushed the rule of Napoleon. Her national debt, it is true, had reached the prodigious total of £861,039,049, and the interest on it amounted £32,645,618, but the expansion of our national resources had kept pace with it. In spite of the continental system, the orders in council, and the American war, the imports and exports had enormously increased, chiefly by means of an organised contraband traffic; the carrying trade of the world had passed into the hands of British shipowners; British manufactures were largely fostered by warlike expenditure at home and the suspension of many industries abroad; while population, stimulated by a vicious poor law, was rapidly on the increase. In this last element, then considered as a sure sign of prosperity, really consisted one of the chief national dangers.

So long as the war lasted, low as the rate of wages might be, there was generally employment enough in the fields or in the factories for nearly all the hands willing to labour. When the inflated war prices came to an end, and wheat fell below 80s. or even 70s. a quarter, until it reached 52s. 6d. early in 1816, labourers were turned off and wages cut down still further; bread was not proportionately cheapened, and agrarian outrages sprang up. The continent, impoverished by the war, no longer required British goods for military purposes, and, as its own domestic industries revived, ceased to absorb British products, flung in profusion on its markets. Hence came a reduction of 16 per cent. in the export trade, and of nearly 20 per cent. in the import trade, which resulted in bankruptcies and the dismissal of workpeople. If we add to these causes of distress, the influence of over-speculation, the accession of disbanded soldiers to the ranks of the unemployed, and the substitution of the factory system with machinery for domestic manufactures with hand labour, we can partly understand why Great Britain, never harried by invading armies, should have suffered more than France itself from popular misery and disaffection for several years after the restoration of peace.

VANSITTART'S FINANCE.

The history of these years is mainly a history of social unrest, and attempts to cure social evils by legislation or coercion. Liverpool and his colleagues, with the possible exception of Eldon, were not bigoted tories, and it is sometimes forgotten that among them, together with Sidmouth, Castlereagh, and Vansittart, were Canning, Palmerston, and Peel. One of the first parliamentary struggles was on the proposal of the government to reduce the income tax from 10 to 5 per cent., and to apply this half of it, producing about £7,500,000, towards the expense of maintaining an army of 150,000 men. Since the income tax has become a favourite of democratic economists, as pressing specially upon the rich, we may be surprised to find that its total repeal was successfully advocated by Henry Brougham, the leading democrat of that day – a man whose noble services to progress and to humanity in the earlier part of his career have been obscured by the inordinate vanity and unprincipled egotism which he displayed in the later phases of his long public life. He had entered parliament in 1810, and rapidly became the most active of the opposition speakers. He now employed without scruple all the arts of agitation, petition-framing, and parliamentary obstruction to achieve his object, and succeeded, by the aid of bankers and country-gentlemen, in defeating the government by a majority of thirty-seven. This vote might be justified, more or less, on the principle laid down by Pitt, that the income tax should be held in reserve as a war tax only, or on the ground that it was equally wasteful and mischievous to keep up so large a peace-establishment, especially if it might be used to bolster up despotism abroad. It was also unfortunate that Castlereagh, ignoring the heroic efforts made by the people of England for more than twenty years, should have deprecated "an ignorant impatience to be relieved from the pressure of taxation". Still, it is remarkable that friends of the people and the ultra-liberal corporation of London, as it then was, should have concentrated their indignant protests against the financial policy of the government, not on the corn laws, or any other indirect tax, but on the income tax.

Public confidence in the economic wisdom of the ministers was further weakened by the gratuitous abandonment of the malt tax, apparently in a fit of petulance, on the ground, explicitly stated, that, if another war tax must be raised, two or three millions more or less would make little difference. By a temporary suspension of the sinking fund, a deficit might be converted into a surplus; Vansittart, however, neglected to take advantage of this simple expedient, and raised £11,500,000 by loan. His waning reputation was almost shattered by this absurd proceeding. Finally, the excessive and irregular expenditure upon the civil list provoked a searching inquiry into its abuses, prefaced by a scathing attack from Brougham upon the character of the prince regent. His character was, in fact, indefensible, and had justly forfeited the respect of the nation. He was a debauchee and gambler, a disobedient son, a cruel husband, a heartless father, an ungrateful and treacherous friend, and a burden to the ministries which had to act in his name and palliate his misdoings. That of Liverpool carried a measure for the better regulation of the civil list, upon which, swollen as it was by the wrongful appropriation of other public funds, many official salaries had been charged hitherto. For these parliament now made a separate provision. The house of commons, which properly grudged the prince regent the means of reckless luxury and self-indulgence, was unanimous in voting £60,000 for outfit and £60,000 a year to the Princess Charlotte on her marriage, on May 2, to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, looking forward to a reign under which virtue and a sense of public duty would again be the attributes of royalty. In this session, too, it conferred a boon upon Ireland, which earned little gratitude, by the consolidation of the British and Irish exchequers. Ireland was virtually insolvent before this measure was passed. With the union of the exchequers the union of the countries was completed. The administration, discredited by its financial policy, was strengthened in June by the acquisition of Canning, who succeeded Buckinghamshire as president of the board of control. In September, 1814, Wellesley Pole, a brother of the Marquis Wellesley and the Duke of Wellington, had been admitted to the cabinet as master of the mint, so that with Castlereagh, Vansittart, and Bragge-Bathurst, there were now five members of the cabinet in the lower house.

INDUSTRIAL RIOTS.

The disturbances which broke out again and again during the years 1816-19 were partly the outcome of sheer destitution among the working classes, and partly of a growing demand for reform, whether constitutional or revolutionary. The statesmen of the regency must not be too severely judged if they often confounded these causes of seditious movements, and failed to distinguish between the moderate and violent sections of reformers. Those who remembered the bloodthirsty orgies of the French revolution, ushered in by quixotic visions of liberty, equality, and fraternity, may perhaps be excused for distrusting the moderate professions of demagogues who deliberately inflamed the passions of ignorant mobs. Moreover, the whigs and moderate reformers, who privately condemned the excesses of their violent followers, made light of these in their public utterances, and reserved all their censures for the repressive policy of the government. Bread riots had begun before the harvest, which proved a total failure. The price of wheat, which was as low as 52s. 6d. a quarter in January, 1816, rose to 103s. 1d. in January, 1817, and to 111s. 6d. in June, 1817. And when rickburning set in as a consequence of agricultural depression, tumultuary processions as a consequence of enforced idleness in the coal districts, and a revival of Luddism as a consequence of stagnation in the various textile industries, itself due to a glut of British goods on the continent, the reform party, now raising its head, was held responsible by the government for a great part of these disorders.64 The writings of Cobbett, especially his Weekly Register, certainly had a wide influence in stirring up discontent against existing institutions, but it must be admitted that he condemned the use of physical force, and pointed to parliamentary reform as the legitimate cure for all social evils. Reform, however, in Cobbett's meaning included universal suffrage with annual parliaments, and the Hampden clubs, all over the country, agitated for the same objects in less guarded language. Still, looking back at these democratic agencies by the light of later experience, we can hardly adopt the opinion expressed by a secret committee of the house of commons that their avowed objects were "nothing short of a revolution".

It was on December 2, 1816, that the extreme section of reformers, now for the first time known as radicals, in alliance with a body of socialists called Spenceans, first came into open collision with the forces of the law. A meeting was announced to be held on that day in Spa Fields, Bermondsey, and was to be addressed by "Orator" Hunt, Major Cartwright, the two Watsons, and other demagogues. Hunt was a gentleman of Somerset, and had stood for Bristol in 1812. Though a prominent speaker, he in no sense directed the movement. Burdett and Cochrane, the orthodox leaders of London reformers, were not concerned in this demonstration, which, according to an informer who gave evidence, was to be the signal for an attack upon the Tower and other acts of atrocity. As it was, before Hunt chose to appear, the mob, headed by the younger Watson, broke into gunsmiths' shops, not without bloodshed, and marched through the Royal Exchange, but were courageously met by the lord mayor, with a few assistants, and very soon dispersed. The alarm produced in the whole nation by this riotous fiasco was quite out of proportion to its real importance, and was reawakened by an insult offered to the prince regent on his return from opening parliament on January 28, 1817. Even Canning, a life-long opponent of reform, did not scruple to magnify these and similar evidences of popular restlessness into proofs of a deep-laid plot against the constitution, and committees of both houses urged the necessity of drastic measures to put down a conspiracy against public order and private property. These measures took the form of bills for the suppression of seditious meetings, and for the suspension until July 1 of the habeas corpus act, which had been uninterruptedly in force since its suspension by Pitt had expired in 1801. This last bill was passed on March 3, and, before the other became law, the so-called march of the Blanketeers took place at Manchester. The march was the ridiculous sequel of a very large meeting got up for the purpose of carrying a petition to London, and presenting it to the prince regent in person. The meeting was dispersed by the soldiers and police, after the riot act had been read, and a straggling crowd of some three hundred who began their pilgrimage, carrying blankets or overcoats, melted away by degrees before they had got far southward.

SIDMOUTH'S UNPOPULARITY.

A far more serious outbreak at Manchester seems to have been clumsily planned soon afterwards, but it ended in nothing, and the enemies of the government freely attributed this and other projects of mob violence to the instigation of an agent-provocateur, well known as "Oliver the Spy". This man was also credited with the authorship of "the Derbyshire insurrection," for which three men were executed and many others transported. Here there can be no doubt that a formidable gang, armed with pikes, terrorised a large district, pressing operatives to join them in overt defiance of the law, and killing one who held back. Being confronted by a Nottinghamshire magistrate named Rolleston, with a small body of soldiers, they fled across the fields, and the bubble of rebellion burst at a touch. Whether they were legally guilty of high treason, for which they were unwisely tried, may perhaps be doubted, but it would certainly be no palliation of their crime if it could be shown, as it never was shown, that Oliver had led them to rely on a jacobin revolution in London. What does appear very clearly is that Sidmouth was greatly alarmed by the reports of his agents on the disturbed state of the country, but that he was highly conscientious in his instructions and in the use of his own powers. The great majority of those imprisoned for political offences at this time were liberated or acquitted, but the suspension of the habeas corpus act was renewed at the beginning of July.

Moreover, a circular was addressed by Sidmouth to the lords-lieutenant of counties, for the information of the magistrates, intimating that, in the opinion of the law officers, persons charged on oath with seditious libel might be apprehended and held to bail. No act of Sidmouth called forth such an outburst of reprobation as this; yet it is not self-evident that instigations to outrage, being criminal offences, should be treated by magistrates differently from other offences for which bail may be required, with the alternative of imprisonment. On the other hand, it is hardly becoming for a home secretary to interpret the law, and, since the forensic triumphs of Erskine, it had been declared by an act of parliament that in cases of libel, as distinct from all other criminal trials, both the law and the fact were within the province of the jury. At all events, William Cobbett, feeling himself to be at the mercy of informers and the crown, took refuge in America in December, 1817. Hone, an antiquarian bookseller, was thrice prosecuted for blasphemous libels, in which the ministers had been held up to contempt. All these ill-judged, if not vindictive, prosecutions ended in signal failure. Ellenborough, the chief justice, before whom the two last trials were held, strained his judicial authority to procure a conviction of Hone, but the prisoner, with a spirit worthy of a martyr, defied the intimidation of the court, and thrice carried the sympathies of the jury with him. His triple acquittal led to Ellenborough's resignation, and perceptibly shook the prestige of the government.

In the year 1818 there was a temporary improvement in the economic condition of the country. The depression of the preceding year was followed in this year by a rapid increase of revenue. The importance the ministry attached to finance was emphasised by the admission to the cabinet in January of Frederick John Robinson, afterwards prime minister as Lord Goderich, who had been appointed president of the board of trade and treasurer of the navy. The chancellor of the exchequer and the master of the mint were already members of the cabinet. The suspension of the habeas corpus act having expired, the reform agitation revived, but assumed a less dangerous character, and no serious outbreak occurred. A bill of indemnity was passed to cover any excesses of jurisdiction in arresting suspected persons or in suppressing tumultuous assemblies. A parliamentary inquiry showed both that the disorders of the previous year had been exaggerated, and that, after all, the extraordinary powers of the home office had been used with moderation. Nevertheless, the early part of the session was largely occupied by party debates on these questions, the employment of spies, and apprehensions for libel. Parliament was dissolved in June, and the general election which followed resulted in a gain of several seats to the opposition.65 The ministry was strengthened in January, 1819, by the appointment of Wellington to be master-general of the ordnance, in succession to Mulgrave, who remained in the cabinet without office.

THE "MANCHESTER MASSACRE".

Before the end of the year 1818, a strike of Manchester cotton-spinners was attended by the usual incidents of brutal violence towards workmen who refused to join in it, but a few shots from the soldiers, one of which killed a rioter, proved effectual in quelling lawlessness. Manchester, however, remained the centre of agitation, and during the summer of 1819 a series of reform meetings held in other great towns culminated in a monster meeting originally convened for August 9, but postponed until the 16th. The history of this meeting ending in the so-called "Manchester" or "Peterloo massacre," has been strongly coloured by party spirit and sympathy with the victims of reckless demagogy no less than of blundering officialism. It is certain that drilling had been going on for some time among the multitudes invited to attend the meeting of the 9th; that its avowed object was to choose a "legislatorial representative," as Birmingham had already done, and that, on its being declared illegal by the municipal authorities, who declined to summon it on their own initiative, its organisers deliberately resolved to hold it a week later, whether it were legal or not.

The contingents, which poured in by thousands from neighbouring towns, seem to have carried no arms but sticks, and to have conducted themselves peaceably when they arrived at St. Peter's Fields, where Orator Hunt, puffed up with silly vanity, was voted into the chair on a hustings. Unfortunately, instead of attempting to prevent the meeting, the county magistrates decided to let the great masses of people assemble, and then to arrest the leaders in the midst of them. They had at their disposal several companies of infantry, six troops of the 15th hussars, and a body of yeomanry, besides special constables. The chief constable, being ordered to arrest Hunt and his colleagues, declared that he could not do so without military aid, whereupon a small force of yeomanry advanced but soon became wedged up and enclosed by the densely packed crowd. One of the magistrates, fancying the yeomanry to be in imminent danger, of which there is no proof, called upon Colonel L'Estrange, who was in command of the soldiers, to rescue them and disperse the mob. Four troops of the hussars then made a dashing charge, supported by a few of the yeomanry; the people fled in wild confusion before them; some were cut down, more were trampled down, and an eye-witness describes "several mounds of human beings" as lying where they had fallen. Happily, the actual loss of life did not exceed five or six, but a much larger number was more or less wounded, the real havoc and bloodshed were inevitably exaggerated by rumour, and a bitter sense of resentment was implanted in the breasts of myriads, innocent of the slightest complicity with sedition, but impatient of oligarchical rule, and disgusted with so ruthless an interference with the right of public meeting.