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  The Anti-Corn Law League grew out of an earlier Anti-Corn Law Association, formed in Manchester in September 1838 by seven middle-class men. Finding that some of their fellows in the Anti-Corn Law Association were less militant than they were, some of the men took over the town council, then the mayoralty, and finally the chamber of commerce. The purpose was to put pressure on MPs to have them agitate in the Commons for reform. To this end, the Anti-Corn Law League was formed in March 1839, resolving to become a national, and not merely a Mancunian, campaign. The League’s eventual success would realign British politics for all time. This would be the most far-reaching consequence of the campaign, even above the freedom of trade that would secure Britain’s prosperity until the economic downturn of the mid-1870s. By making the country richer it would provide the resources to fund massive social improvement during the middle of the century, notably in the funding of municipalities such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham that helped provide schools, libraries and basic public health.

  Its two leading lights, Richard Cobden and John Bright, were both successful industrialists. Cobden, who was born in 1804 and one of eleven children, was a Sussex farmer’s son. His father suffered difficulties typical of many in the economic upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars. First his farm failed, then a shop he opened. Richard worked as a clerk and then a commercial traveller for his uncle’s warehousing business after his father’s farm had failed. When his uncle’s business failed too he joined his uncle’s former partner, and they made a successful calico-printing business. By 1836 the business, which had moved to Manchester in 1832, was turning over £150,000 a year with a profit of £23,000. Cobden became rich enough to concentrate on politics – fundamental to which was a belief in free trade and liberal economics, forged not least by a close study of Adam Smith. He was also a campaigner for schools and the spread of education. He was emblematic of the self-reliant but compassionate strand in the middle classes that so many found hard to credit.

  Bright had had a similar background. Born in Rochdale in 1811, into a large Quaker family, his father was the bookkeeper to a firm of cotton spinners, but in 1823 set up his own cotton business, which flourished. Bright joined the firm when he left school in 1827 and took over the running of it jointly with his brothers in 1839. By that time he had become immersed in local politics, as well as helping to found a temperance society and the Literary and Philosophical Society in Rochdale. He travelled widely in the 1830s, through much of Europe and as far as Egypt. At home he became committed to the cause of further reform but, of more immediate significance, to the repeal of the Corn Laws. He met Cobden in 1837, at a meeting about the importance of education for the lower classes. Bright’s reputation in Rochdale rose further when he led the campaign against dissenters having to pay church rates. The town was a highly politically conscious and active place, and was where in 1844 the Co-operative movement began.

  But it was Bright’s stand against the Corn Laws that defined his politics during his thirties. He had become treasurer of the Rochdale branch of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1840, and until his wife fell ill with tuberculosis had regularly appeared on platforms calling for repeal. She died in 1841, and he was stricken by grief: Cobden urged him into political campaigning as a means of putting his loss behind him. As Bright told the story, Cobden went to see him after his bereavement and said: ‘There are thousands of homes in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest till the Corn Law is repealed.’36 Cobden suggested that the best use of the long recess in the autumn of 1841 was agitation, and Bright took him at his word. The two men found themselves caricatured as extremists and wreckers by the Tories and their mouthpieces in the press. As well as arguing for the positive effects on economic growth that repeal would have, Cobden claimed the end of protection would make agriculture more competitive and cause an improvement in agricultural methods. In this he was, as in his economic arguments, prophetic.

  Cobden arrived in the House of Commons in 1841 preceded by his reputation as principal spokesman of the Anti-Corn Law League. As conditions in Lancashire and other manufacturing districts had worsened in 1842, a decline directly attributable to the effects of protection, Bright widened his militancy, calling for parliamentary reform and opposing the reintroduction of income tax. He found himself opposed to the violent methods of some of the Chartists, and opposed too to their campaign of strikes, which he argued would end only in destitution for those involved. As an employer, he had his own reasons for arguing against strikes. At the Rochdale meeting in 1839 he had encountered a difficulty that divided the working classes: the crowd who came to hear him turned out to be mainly Chartist, and argued for the adoption of the Charter as an essential prelude to repealing the Corn Laws. It occurred to no one that repeal might come at the initiative of a Tory prime minister.

  Bright gave a new dynamism to the League’s campaign, not least by attracting to it a large body of dissenters: and he was not interested in the possibilities of defeat. He embodied one of the enduring realities of the campaign: the ‘enormous but disorganised mass’ of poor people could not hope to campaign successfully for repeal without the leadership of the middle class. That repeal was a largely middle-class movement, and the Chartists felt a suspicion and dislike of the middle class, was a fracture in the opposition that the Tories ruthlessly exploited. In 1843 Bright took the fight into parliament, being elected for the City of Durham in July that year. He had fought the seat in April and lost, but had the victor, Lord Dungannon, unseated for bribery. He quickly made a reputation for launching ad hominem attacks on his opponents, which made him unpopular. His skin was thick, however, thickened by his profound belief in the righteousness of his cause.

  Cobden had swung the capitalists of Manchester, then the great manufacturing town in England, behind the League for reasons spelled out by Bright when he addressed a rally in Rochdale in February 1839: ‘The Corn Laws have had the effect of crippling the commerce and manufactures of the country, have raised up rival manufactories in foreign countries, have been most injurious and oppressive in their operation with the great bulk of our population, and the working classes have been grievously injured by this monopoly of the landed proprietors.’37 Feeding the poor was only part of the argument for free trade, but as the economy turned down in the early 1840s it became the main one. The Corn Laws effectively stopped the importation of food: and it had only been the revenues from exporting food that had enabled many European countries to buy British manufactured goods. Hence the aspirational classes, already at odds with the aristocracy after the incomplete enfranchisement of 1832, resented further the landlordism that cut the markets for their goods. For the working classes, already hard pressed, it caused a further drop in the demand for their labour.

  In his maiden speech in August 1841, Cobden took issue with part of the received wisdom; namely, that the recent election had not been a test of public opinion ‘as to the monopolies that were complained of, that it was merely a question of confidence in the ministry.’38 That, indeed, had been Peel’s opinion. Cobden referred also to the notion that the speech on the address was neither the time nor the place to discuss repeal of the Corn Laws. He said that just because the Tories had, so far, ignored the idea of repeal, he did not see any real need to follow suit.

  ‘What’, he asked, ‘was this bread tax – this tax upon food and tax upon meat? It was a tax upon the great body of the people; and hon gentlemen opposite, who had such sympathy for the poor, when they had made them paupers, should not refuse to give a calm, a marked, and a prominent consideration to this question, as affecting the working classes.’39 He said that ‘20 millions in these realms’ depended on wages for their subsistence, and a million poor lived off ‘public alms’; he claimed the working classes were paying 40 per cent more for their bread than if there were free trade. A working man’s family, if they worked
at hand looms, earned on average 10s a week. The family spent an average of 5s on bread, 2s of which was the ‘bread tax’: 20 per cent of the family’s income. The richer a family, the lower the percentage of tax: 10 per cent at 20s a week, 5 per cent at 40s. A millionaire landowner whose income was protected by the Corn Laws, who might make £200,000 a year, paid a halfpenny in every £100 for his bread tax, whereas the hand-loom weaver paid the equivalent of £20 in every £100. If an income tax were introduced at such a rate, he argued, the House would never accept it: so why had it accepted this?

  Cobden rebutted the argument that the end of protection would mean lower wages. It would mean more trade, and more demand for British goods; and that would increase the demand for labour, and therefore the price of labour. He referred to a recent meeting in Manchester of ministers of religion of many denominations. They had reported, about the ‘condition of the labouring classes’, that ‘the condition of the great body of her Majesty’s labouring population had deteriorated woefully within the last ten years, and more especially within the last three years, and that in proportion as the price of food increased, in the same proportion the comforts of the working classes had diminished.’40 Cobden said he spoke not in a ‘party spirit’, not as a Whig or a Tory, but as a ‘free trader’.

  It would be the first of many such appeals to economic and social reason he would make on this increasingly divisive question over the next five years: and he would be vindicated. What even he might not have realised, however, was that the dire situation to which he had referred would become progressively worse. Men in factories could earn between 16s and £1 a week: but only for a relentless week of fourteen-hour days. Women would earn between 10s and 12s. Hand-loom weavers who worked in their own homes, without the benefit of the latest machinery, toiled even longer for perhaps 8s a week. Agricultural labourers earned between 6s and 9s a week. In 1842 a total of 128,000 emigrated and almost a tenth of the English population – 1,429,089 – were paupers.41

  Answering a debate in May 1843, Gladstone gave an unequivocal ‘no’ to the demand for repeal.42 Yet Peel had been shown the inevitability of repeal by his most ruthless colleague, Sir James Graham. He had written to Peel in December 1842 to say that ‘in truth it is a matter of time. The next change in the Corn Laws must be to an open trade; and if our population increase for two or three years at the rate of three hundred thousand per annum, you may throw open the ports and agriculture will not suffer. But the next change must be the last.’43 The rulers realised the game was up, but Tory MPs and peers remained implacable, some even until 1852 when even Disraeli threw in the towel on protection. However, throughout 1844 both Peel and Gladstone adopted increasingly strong positions in favour of free trade, notably on sugar duties. In March 1844 Bright warned that the Anti-Corn Law League had over £100,000 in its coffers, and meant business.44 By the time of repeal in 1846, the funds had reached £250,000.

  IV

  Carlyle, who had argued for repeal for years, had written with his customary perceptiveness to the Anti-Corn Law Leaguer Thomas Ballantyne in January 1840 to speak of his certainty that protection would go, but also – with his customary pessimism – to warn that it would, in his view, give only temporary respite. He felt the cause was of more importance to the ‘Middle Classes and manufacturing capitalists’ than to the lower classes, since an end to protection would open up more overseas markets for British-made goods.45 He believed most of the leading agitators for reform had a ‘profound insensibility to the condition of the poor, and indeed to the condition of anything but their own interests and self conceit’. This, in turn, made him feel there was ‘no hope’.

  He affirmed that ‘abolition of the Corn-Law is as sure to my mind, as six o’clock is when five has struck out of all the clocks and steeples. Abolition of the Corn-Law will very probably, as I compute, enlarge to a great extent the field of manufacturing industry for England; create, we shall hope, an additional demand for labour, raise the economic condition of the labourer – for a certain number of years.’ Yet, as always with Carlyle, lasting happiness would require proper leadership from the classes ordained to provide it: ‘That surely, even for the labourer’s sake, is most important; during that number of years, how much, by a Government, an Aristocracy, aware of its task, might be done for the labourer! But by a Government not aware of its task nothing will be done.’ He echoed these views in Past and Present, in which he also warned the government about the effect of the laws: ‘Do you count what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you in every just English heart?’46 He did not reflect in any detail on them: ‘We write no Chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place; the Corn-Laws are too mad to have a Chapter . . . the Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go: would we were all as sure of the Millennium as they are of going!’47

  Some in the governing class were aware of at least the preliminaries of this argument. A call for abolition was debated in the House again in June 1844, with the proposer, Charles Villiers, the MP for Wolverhampton, claiming the rapid rise in the population and the restriction on the supply of corn meant that ‘a large proportion of Her Majesty’s subjects are insufficiently provided with the first necessaries of life’.48 It again fell to Gladstone to urge the House to reject the proposal, which it did.

  But a gulf opened up between Peel and Gladstone on another, more abstruse matter: the increase of a government grant to the Maynooth Catholic seminary near Dublin from £9,000 to £26,000 a year. Peel championed the increase to placate the Irish; but an England in which Protestantism was still dominant and in which Catholic emancipation had been established for just sixteen years was reluctant to increase the grant. Gladstone took this view. He voted for the grant but then resigned from the government, leaving Peel confused. ‘I really have great difficulty sometimes in exactly comprehending what Gladstone means,’ he wrote to Graham in January 1845.49 With the Church of England at this time riven by doctrinal controversy between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, this was another example of the scope internecine conflict between Christians had to inflict difficulties on the body politic, which had so many more practical problems to deal with.

  Cobden had been absent from Parliament for much of 1844, travelling the country preaching repeal. Like Bright, he concentrated especially on swaying opinion in the agricultural districts, seeking to persuade agricultural labourers that they were being cheated and their prosperity undermined just as much as any manufacturer or operative was. Even when agricultural workers began to see the point of the League they counted for little, since they lacked the industrial muscle of operatives in mills and factories.

  Cobden introduced a motion in the Commons in 1845 arguing that if the purpose of the Corn Laws was to protect farmers it was failing. He claimed that half of the smaller farmers in Devon were insolvent, and that many in Norfolk were paying their rents out of capital rather than income.50 The tone of the debate became angrier each time, with Cobden accusing landlords of perpetuating a fraud on their tenants by exacting such high rents, given the commercial climate they had conspired to create. The Commons debated the Corn Laws again in June 1845, and the motion to repeal was defeated by 254 votes to 122, with Peel arguing that to repeal would be to throw many agricultural labourers out of work, as cheap corn would flood Britain. But these arguments, in defence of the landed interest, were threadbare.

  The country was in deep crisis. It was by no means the first Peel had faced, and he did not lack the wit or resolve to deal with it. He was a man of immense personal distinction. At Harrow he had befriended Byron and was accomplished at his lessons. He took a double first at Oxford and, thanks to his father’s clout as an immensely wealthy textile manufacturer and Tory MP, found a seat in the Commons – the Irish rotten borough of Cashel – shortly after his twenty-first birthday in 1809. Within a few months Lord Liverpool, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, had Peel appointed his under-secretary; and since Liverpool sat in the Lords, Peel answered for the War and Colonial offi
ces in the Commons. By his mid-twenties he was, rather like Pitt the Younger before him, seen as a political force. He was made Chief Secretary for Ireland at the age of twenty-four, holding the post for six years. Peel’s career was distinguished by two profound, and equally courageous, changes of mind. The most famous was on the question of the Corn Laws; but scarcely less significant was his conversion to Catholic emancipation by 1829, following his recognition that the Protestant ascendancy could not control Ireland. As an Irish MP and Irish Secretary he lectured often on the impossibility of Catholics having political rights, since they had a loyalty to a foreign power. Inevitably, he became known as ‘Orange Peel’. When he left Ireland in 1818 he left office, despite entreaties from Liverpool (by then Prime Minister) to join the Cabinet. Eventually he relented, and became Home Secretary in 1822, a post he held (with one short break in 1827–8) until 1830. His great achievement was the creation of a police force: but he also rationalised and consolidated the criminal law of England and Wales. Peel had opposed the Reform Act of 1832 but accepted the outcome; and in the aftermath founded a new Conservative party that included moderate Whigs. In 1834 his Tamworth Manifesto – named after the town near which he held his estate and that he represented in parliament – enshrined his relatively progressive outlook by promising institutional reform and the redress of grievances. He was well aware of the horrors concealed within industrial England: he once conceded to Ashley that colliery apprenticeships were ‘slavery disguised’.51