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  Hansard describes the spectacle: ‘A Petition from the working classes throughout the kingdom, of the presentation of which Mr. Thomas Duncombe had previously given notice, was brought down to the House, by a procession consisting of a vast multitude. Its bulk was so great, that the doors were not wide enough to admit it, and it was necessary to unroll it, to carry it into the House. When unrolled, it spread over a great part of the floor, and rose above the level of the Table.’23 Duncombe, the MP for Finsbury, introducing the petition, said that it had been signed by ‘3,315,752 of the industrious classes of this country’. He quoted their plea to be heard at the bar of the House, and explained why they felt it necessary:

  That they cannot within the limits of this their petition, set forth even a tithe of the many grievances of which they may justly complain; but should your honourable House be pleased to grant your petitioners a hearing, by representatives at the Bar of your honourable House, your petitioners will be enabled to unfold a tale of wrong and suffering—of intolerable injustice—which will create utter astonishment in the minds of all benevolent and good men, that the people of Great Britain and Ireland, have so long quietly endured their wretched condition, brought upon them, as it has been, by unjust exclusion from political authority, and by the manifold corruptions of class legislation.24

  Apart from London and its suburbs, which had provided 200,000 signatures, the most names had come from Manchester (99,680) and Newcastle (92,000).

  The petition also stated:

  that in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, thousands of people are dying from actual want; and your petitioners, whilst sensible that poverty is the great exciting cause of crime, view with mingled astonishment and alarm the ill provision made for the poor, the aged, and infirm; and likewise perceive, with feelings of indignation, the determination of your honourable House to continue the Poor Law Bill in operation, notwithstanding the many proofs which have been afforded by sad experience of the unconstitutional principal of that bill, of its unchristian character, and of the cruel and murderous effects produced upon the wages of working men, and the lives of the subjects of this realm.25

  The lack of deference to the Royal Family was apparent from two claims in the petition: ‘whilst your petitioners have learned that her Majesty receives daily for her private use the sum of £164 17s 10d, they have also ascertained that many thousands of the families of the labourers are only in the receipt of 3¾d per head per day;’ and ‘that your petitioners have also learned that his royal Highness Prince Albert receives each day the sum of £104 2s, whilst thousands have to exist upon 3d per head per day.’

  Nor was it just the royal house that had a shot across its bows, four weeks before John Francis would try to kill the Queen: the Church was in the petitioners’ sights as well.

  Upwards of nine millions of pounds per annum are unjustly abstracted . . . to maintain a church establishment, from which they principally dissent; and beg to call the attention of your honourable House to the fact, that this enormous sum is equal to, if it does not exceed, the cost of upholding Christianity in all parts of the world beside. Your petitioners complain that it is unjust, and not in accordance with the Christian religion, to enforce compulsory support of religious creeds, and expensive church establishments, with which the people do not agree . . . Your petitioners believe all men have a right to worship God as may appear best to their consciences, and that no legislative enactments should interfere between man and his Creator . . . your petitioners direct the attention of your honourable House to the enormous revenue annually swallowed up by the bishops and the clergy, and entreat you to contrast their deeds with the conduct of the founder of the Christian religion, who denounced worshippers of Mammon, and taught charity, meekness, and brotherly love.26

  The tone of class warfare in this was understandable. Earlier in the year the Duke of Norfolk had suggested, in trying to be helpful, that the working classes should take an occasional glass of water with a pinch of curry powder in it to ward off feelings of hunger. It provided an ideal example for Chartist and Anti-Corn Law Leaguers to use from their public platforms, and increased the discomfort of the government in a land where trade was already on its knees.

  The House debated the petition the next day. Duncombe claimed the Chartists were not wild revolutionaries, but merely advocating measures that had been suggested before by ‘many eminent men, both of this House and of the other House of parliament’27. He cited examples of distress from several parts of the Kingdom, starting with Sheffield, 27,200 of whose people had signed the petition. ‘The number of inmates in Sheffield poor-house alone up to April 23 numbered 574 . . . For the last five weeks the number of new applicants for relief have averaged 200 weekly . . . it is said that the trades societies are about to break up, unable longer to keep up their funds: if this should be the case, hundreds, perhaps thousands, will be added to the ranks of the pauperised and destitute. Sheffield is tranquil at present; that it will remain so for any length of time, with starvation and misery increasing daily, is very doubtful.’28

  Talking of the West Midlands, he said that ‘The whole of this district is in an alarming state of agitation. Chartism is rapidly progressing. Towns and villages, where even the name of Chartism a short time ago was unknown, now have their Chartist association; and, unless some effective measures are speedily adopted for the removal of the present alarming distresses of the toiling sons of industry, the consequences are likely to be most serious.’ A correspondent in Burnley had told him: ‘All are in a feverish state of excitement. I never, in the course of my life, saw this part of Lancashire in such a state . . . Meetings—large meetings—consisting of thousands, are being held almost daily.’ He continued: ‘Yesterday, on Marsden-height, there was another, of at least 7,000. Today 10,000 have met at Colne, and at each of these meetings there is but one opinion, and that is, that the Charter must become the law of this land before any permanent good can be effected for the working-classes.’29

  Sir James Graham opposed the petitioners being heard; for while everyone accepted there was distress, the Chartists’ pleas were revolutionary. However, conscious of the state of feeling, he admitted that ‘the distress was great’ and the complaints were ‘founded in fact’.30 However, he was convinced that ‘the subversion of all our great institutions must inevitably result from the granting of the prayer of the petition—a result which he thought would in itself tend more directly to lead to the increase of the sufferings of the people than any other cause.’31 Macaulay followed him, attacking universal suffrage, and showing precisely the want of sympathy with the petitioners that Graham, on behalf of the government, had sought to avoid. Lord John Russell, by contrast, said he was ‘expressing my respect for the petitioners, and at the same time, declaring my abhorrence of the doctrines set forth in the petition.’32 This, he explained, was because he believed that to grant their wishes would be to ‘shake property’, and to ‘unhinge that constitution of society which, complicated and intricate as it is, has produced so many blessings to this country.’33 Peel deplored the ‘most invidious comparison between the expenses of the Sovereign and those of a labourer’.34 Like Russell, he believed the whole basis of the constitution was threatened. He did not believe constitutional monarchy could survive universal suffrage.35

  The motion to accept the petition was defeated by 287 votes to 49. It was Chartism’s latest failure: the temper of the people remained against revolution, helped perhaps by the lengths to which the State was going to provide basic poor relief, supplemented by private charity. Yet the evidence of massive decay was clear. In Stockport, represented by Cobden, thirty-seven spinning firms had closed in the previous six years; 3,000 dwellings were closed up and 70,000 people were in receipt of relief. It was even worse in Manchester, where 116 mills were idle, 681 shops and offices without tenants, 5,492 homes closed up, and the numbers in prison doubled. This was the damage done by protection and the absence of free trade.

  Nevertheles
s, during 1844 and 1845 the heat had gone out of the problem of the condition of the poor. Railway mania was at its height, and a capital outlay of around an extra £10 million a year provided work for many more labourers, notably emigrants from Ireland. Funds used under the Poor Law for relief fell by 20 per cent in 1844 compared with 1843. The fall in the crime figures also suggested an improvement in the conditions of the poor. Graham told the Commons in May 1845 that between 1842, at the height of the distress, and 1844 commitments for trial had fallen from 31,309 to 26,542, or 15.25 per cent. In 1843 the courts had sentenced 97 people to death, and 4,813 to transportation. In 1844 those numbers had fallen to 57 and 3,320 respectively, declines of 26 and 23 per cent.36 Emigration to the colonies had been 128,344 in 1842, but only 70,686 in 1844. The figures for the first quarter of 1845 were considerably lower, running at an annualised rate of 54,000.37

  In 1848, a year of Europe-wide uprisings, the Chartists resolved to remind the government that their grievances remained unanswered. They asked their sympathisers to gather on Kennington Common, a short walk from Westminster, on Monday 10 April. Both sides viewed the event with a mixture of fear, panic and determination. The prospect of perhaps hundreds of thousands of agitators marching on London was worrying enough: that the crowds might cross Westminster Bridge and besiege Parliament terrified the ruling class. There had been a rash of disturbances in northern England during the late winter, and in early March several days of rioting in Glasgow, put down by soldiers and police. No one underestimated the possibility of trouble.

  However, the aristocracy, gentry and middle classes met the threat with a solidarity of which Marx would have been proud. Russell, by then Prime Minister, ordered 8,000 soldiers to be in the capital, and 150,000 special constables. Greville, in his diary on the eve of the demonstration, described the precautions as ‘so much that it is either very sublime or very ridiculous.’38 He wrote how all the government service clerks were pressed as special constables, constituting themselves into garrisons. ‘We are to take a warlike attitude,’ he noted. ‘Every gentleman in London is become a constable, and there is an organisation of some sort in every district.’39 When the day came the protest was a damp squib. The press mocked a claim that 300,000 attended, putting numbers at between 20,000 and 50,000. Although Chartist publications would appear for some years, and in some places Chartist meetings and associations would be considered with suspicion well into the 1850s, the failure of the protest of 1848 began the end of the movement.

  That the fires of revolution did not spread to England was not merely a result of the 1832 Reform Act: it was also a sign that the worst of the hungry forties had passed, and prosperity was slowly returning. The Left of British politics did not disappear: but their aspirations became more focused upon the radical movement, and upon the nascent trades union movement in particular, which stepped up its efforts to recruit working men. Both movements abjured the threat of violence that had accompanied Chartism, and had given it a revolutionary aspect. It would be against this background that those minded to improve the British people, and to enhance what passed for their civilisation, would have some conspicuous success over the following quarter-century.

  IV

  Because of the paternalism still inherent in much of the aristocracy there were plenty from the upper reaches of society who sympathised with what the Chartists sought to do to improve the rights and conditions of working people, though not with their methods, which they saw as a threat to the established order. We have seen how Ashley led the charge on this question; but the man who would become most significant in leading the ruling class’s campaign to improve the lot of the lower orders and to extend the boundaries of civilisation was Prince Albert, the Queen’s husband. Albert lacked Ashley’s evangelical motivation to do good works among the poor, but appears to have been motivated by three things: his genuinely princely sense of noblesse oblige, which caused him to want to help improve the poor; his restless intellectual curiosity; and his search for a role.

  However, before Albert could embark upon his cultural and educational campaign to transform and elevate Britain, and to engage all classes in that transformation, the sting had to be taken out of the Chartist scorpion. Albert remained, in private, finely tuned to politics, and notably to the renewed agitation by the Chartists after the repeal of the Corn Laws. His concern about working-class agitation, and the nature of his response to it, are unusual only in that he was the Queen’s husband; otherwise he shared many of the feelings and thoughts of the enlightened, and sometimes frightened, aristocracy. His own file in the Royal Archives about the troubles of 1848 includes in its title a reference to the ‘Chartist conspiracies’.40 He followed it closely, making clippings from The Times of parliamentary debates on the issue. He corresponded with Wellington, the Commander-in-Chief, about the problem. Wellington also advised Russell and the Cabinet, causing Russell to write to the Prince on the eve of the Kennington demonstration to assert that ‘If . . . the Chartists fire and draw their swords and use their daggers the Military are to be called out. I have no doubt of their easy triumph over a London mob.’41

  On the morning of 10 April Albert told Russell that ‘today the strength of the Chartists and all evil disposed people in the country will be brought to the test against the force of the law, the Govt and the good sense of the country.’42 He suggested the solution was ‘work for the suffering and unemployed, maintenance of order by police arrangements, and prosecution of the agitators.’43 He lamented the recent growth in the numbers of unemployed, which he felt were the result of the Commons’ demand to save money on public works. He regretted, specifically, that work had been suspended on building Battersea Park – ‘surely this is not the moment for the tax payers to economise upon the working classes!’ He reminded Russell that he felt ‘the Govt is bound, to do what it can, to help the working classes over the present moment of distress’.

  The Queen headed for Osborne two days before Kennington, with Albert and her children. This flight provoked gossip in London, in aristocratic drawing rooms and elsewhere, but unfairly. She had given birth just three weeks earlier to Princess Louise, her sixth child in eight years, and was still recovering from a very unpleasant confinement. On 10 April she received a telegraphic message, relayed via HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour, saying that ‘the meeting at Kennington Common has dispersed quietly – the procession has been given up – the petition will be brought to the House of Commons without any display. No disturbance of any kind has taken place and not a soldier has been seen – The Government have taken possession of the electric telegraph to prevent false reports spreading in the country.’44

  As Russell told the Queen, the meeting was ‘a complete failure’.45 He added: ‘the mob was in good humour’. Matthew Arnold, who was in Westminster, told Arthur Hugh Clough that ‘the Chartists gave up at once in the greatest fright at seeing the preparations: braggarts as they are.’46 London was soon ‘perfectly quiet’, as another signal sent from Buckingham Palace later in the day by Colonel Charles Grey, the Queen’s equerry, via Victory told the Queen.47 The disappointing turnout, and the sight of the great petition being delivered to Westminster in three cabs – and bearing ‘signatures’ of luminaries including the Queen herself, various of her ministers, and even Colonel Sibthorp, the most reactionary man in the Commons – made the event a subject for the English sense of humour.

  There had been demonstrations and disturbances in the provinces, but Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, wrote to Albert at Osborne on 13 April to say that ‘accounts received from all parts of the country are satisfactory’.48 Albert’s papers include two arresting photographs of the Kennington meeting, reflecting his intense curiosity about the occasion: he had agonised over whether to go to Osborne with the Queen, for it seems he would have wished to be a fly on the wall at the protests. There had not, though, been much to see. Of the smaller than expected numbers, some went home quickly. Greville noted that it all passed off ‘with surprising
quiet’.49 He also observed, more to the point, that the massive display of potential force by the authorities, and the determination of the moneyed classes to defend themselves, made an impression: ‘The Chartist movement was contemptible; but everybody rejoices that the defensive demonstration was made, for it has given a great and memorable lesson which will not be thrown away, either on the disaffected and mischievous, or the loyal and peaceful.’ During May there were minor demonstrations in east and north London, but they passed without incident. In early June five agitators were arrested for sedition. However, as Greville implied, the peace had been settled, and society could advance with the cooperation of all classes.

  Soon after Kennington, Ashley wrote to Albert inviting him to address a meeting at Exeter Hall of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes. Albert wanted to do it; but was advised by both Russell and Grey not to in case the floor was hijacked by Chartist militants. Albert told Ashley that ‘I sincerely regret it, as it will be difficult to find another becoming opportunity for expressing the sincere interest which the Queen and myself feel for the welfare and comfort of the working classes’.50 He asked Ashley to pass this on; and suggested a means be found for the working classes to have more responsibility for improving their lot. He became president of the Servants’ Provident and Benevolent Society, and took a keen interest in regulating savings banks, to encourage thrift and self-reliance. He had professed his shock at discovering that in London ‘the greater part of the inmates of our workhouses are domestic servants’.51

  Albert then had second thoughts: by late April he wrote to the Prime Minister to protest that ‘I conceive that one has moreover a Duty to perform among the great mass of the working classes (and particularly at this moment) which will not allow one’s yielding to the fear for some possible inconvenience.’ This prompted Russell to say that ‘if Your Royal Highness feels it to be a duty to preside at the meeting in Exeter Hall I have not a word more to say. I may likewise have taken too unfavourable a view of the present sentiment.’52 However, he enclosed a pamphlet containing attacks on the Royal Family, giving Albert an idea of what might await him. Albert was unshaken, telling Russell of his conviction that he should not ‘neglect doing what one can in showing one’s interest and sympathy for the lower orders’.53 He said he would ask Grey to see Ashley and settle security arrangements with the police; and he discounted the threat from militant Chartists. As for the minatory pamphlet Russell had sent, Albert said it ‘rather furnishes me with a reason more for attending the meeting.’ He felt more determined than ever to show that the Royal Family cared for ‘the poor labourers’ and ‘are anxious about their welfare and ready to co-operate in any scheme for the amelioration of their condition.’ He continued: ‘We may possess these feelings and still the mass of the people may be ignorant of it because they have never heard it expressed to them or seen any tangible proof of it.’ He concluded: ‘I am President of this society and it might be asked: “Why does the President stay away? Is he afraid of meeting us or does he not care for us?”’