High Minds Page 6
The failed assassin was twenty-year-old John Francis, just three years younger than the Queen, ‘his height five feet five inches [and] his person somewhat corpulent’. It was, in fact, Francis’s second attempt to murder the Queen in two days. On Sunday 29 May he had been seen to draw a pistol as she passed on her way back from the Chapel Royal. Prince Albert had been alarmed, and sent for Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, to discuss what could be done to prevent such an outrage on his wife. As a result the royal party had gone out the following afternoon surrounded by soldiers and policemen. It had made no difference: the Queen’s life was saved not by bodyguards, but by Francis’s poor aim. The news of the attempt, and of the Queen’s escape, was promulgated around London. To reach a large audience quickly, details were sent to West End theatres. Stage managers told shocked and relieved patrons the news of the ‘fiendish attempt’ on the Sovereign’s life, and there was much singing of the national anthem. The next day Parliament gave thanks for the Queen’s deliverance.
Two years earlier, on 10 June 1840, a man called Edward Oxford had tried to shoot the Queen at the same place on Constitution Hill. He had been tried for high treason but acquitted by reason of insanity, and was now in Bethlem Hospital. The Queen and her husband were keen an example should be made of her assailant. Oxford’s acquittal had, they felt, encouraged the disaffected to take pot shots at her. When she read in her newspaper on 1 June that a warrant charged ‘John Francis with shooting at our sovereign Lady Victoria the Queen, with a pistol loaded with powder and ball’ she fired off an immediate letter to Peel to say that ‘the crime was shooting at the Queen, and not whether it was with Ball or anything else’: her point being that if the offending ball could not be found it would prejudice the case.2 Within a month Francis was tried for high treason too, convicted, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to transportation for life, not entirely to the royal couple’s satisfaction. They seemed to have a point. Two days later, on 3 July 1842, another aggrieved subject, John Bean, shot at the Queen. His pistol seems to have been loaded with tobacco, and he received just eighteen months in prison.
It appears that mental instability, or attention-seeking, or simply a quest for celebrity were behind the first three of Victoria’s potential assassins (there would be four more). Yet the attempts of 1842 seem in retrospect emblematic, coming as they did at a time of grave civil unrest in a Britain ravaged by poverty. Rapid industrialisation over the preceding half-century, and the appeal of the higher wages paid by manufacturing, had lured hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers to the towns. A collapse in demand in the early 1840s saw many of these people – and their families – thrown out of work, without the feudal structures of rural society to rescue them. The basic institutions designed to alleviate industrial poverty – notably the workhouses, established under the 1834 Poor Law – were being proved inadequate. Millions in the industrial districts were hungry, angry and agitating. There were fears the whole social order could break down, and trying to kill the Queen, shocking though that was, seemed in tune with the mood of many of her subjects.
Peel recommended to the Queen, via Prince Albert, that the death sentence on Francis be ‘commuted into a sentence of transportation for life to the most penal settlement’.3 The Queen agreed: but Albert was ‘very anxious’ to see Peel about the implications for the law of high treason, which judges deemed unsatisfactory for a case such as this. He told Peel he considered ‘the life of the Sovereign is the most valuable and important in the community . . . is more exposed than the life of any other individual . . . that that liability to be injured is increased, when the Sovereign is a female’ and that ‘the increase of democratical and republican notions, with the licentiousness of the Press in our days must render people more prone to crimes of that kind.’4 Judges had said it was not treason unless Francis had intended to kill, but the powder in his pistol had been inadequate for that task. ‘I cannot say that the present statute affords that protection to the person of the Sovereign which my acknowledged premises require’, Albert concluded.
Peel sent a memorandum to the Cabinet advising that the law of treason be revised to protect the Queen more – assault, when directed at ‘the person of the Sovereign’ should carry ‘heavier penalties than at present’.5 However, Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary and normally a hard man, warned him to calm things down. He felt transportation already seemed ‘disproportionate to the crime’ and that anything stronger for such a minor assault ‘would violate public opinion’.6 Having consulted the Cabinet, Peel wrote to Albert to say that a bill would go through Parliament proposing transportation for seven years ‘with the alternative of fine and imprisonment with or without hard labour and with or without corporal punishment at the discretion of the court’ for an assault against the Sovereign or an attempt to wound her.7
Albert was grateful, but split hairs over the word ‘wound’, wondering whether it was ‘comprehensive enough for all the possible injuries and their moral and physical consequences, which may arise out of attempts made upon the Sovereign’s person?’8 He also argued that ‘temporary transportation or imprisonment etc etc are calculated to exasperate the feelings of the miscreant and that he will soon be at liberty, considering the Sovereign the cause of his past suffering’ and ‘seek revenge upon her person.’ This thinly disguised plea for severe retribution was rejected by Peel, who wrote back to the Prince on 12 July to point out that any measures should not ‘run counter to the public feeling and temper of the times in respect to penal inflictions. If the law were in public opinion one of undue severity it would have less effect in deterring from the commission of the crime against which it was directed than if it had the moral weight and authority of that opinion in favour.’9 A week earlier Thomas Carlyle had written to his mother of this indication of ‘strange times’: ‘The people are sick of their misgovernment, and the blackguards among them shoot at the poor Queen . . . all men are becoming alarmed at the state of the country – as I think they well may.’10
II
The Establishment was alert to the problem of civil unrest, not least because of the constant fear that rioting operatives would wreck property and foment revolution. On 7 May 1842 Peel had convened a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and Sir James Graham, to discuss ‘the destitute condition of the labouring classes in some districts of the country, particularly in the neighbourhood of Paisley, and in some of the manufacturing towns and villages in Lancashire.’ Peel wrote that ‘the privations and suffering in these parts of the country have been during the winter and continue very great – the patience and submission with which they have been weathered have been exemplary in the highest sense. The local funds for the charitable support of the sufferers are in some cases nearly exhausted, and great apprehension is entertained by the magistrates and others as to the consequences of a complete exhaustion of these funds.’11 He advised the Queen to write a public letter to her prelates, to be displayed in churches around Britain, soliciting contributions for the destitute. ‘This was done on former occasions in the case of distress in Ireland, and also in the case of distress in the manufacturing districts of Britain.’ He concluded by lauding in anticipation ‘the moral effect of a demonstration of general sympathy with the distressed and of approval of their peaceable conduct and submission to the law’ as ‘advantageous’. On 20 May he further told the Queen that ‘it appears advisable to YM [Your Majesty’s] servants to open a subscription in aid of the distressed manufacturers in certain districts of Scotland and the North of England, the proceeds of which subscription to be applied for their relief together with the sum which may be raised in consequence of the issue of YM letter to the Archbishops and Bishops.’12
Such was the urgency, however, that Peel decided that ‘in order to provide immediate relief, to give a certain sum from the Treasury without delay, such sum to be repaid from the produce of further subscriptions.’ He suggested £500 from the Royal Bounty to go at th
e head of the subscription. Carlyle had travelled through the north earlier that month and told his friend Thomas Story Spedding that, on arrival at Manchester, ‘the most tragic circumstance I noted there was the want of smoke; Manchester was never in my time third part as clear’.13 There was no smoke because so many factories were closed. Shortly afterwards there were riots in Manchester, whipped up by the Anti-Corn Law League, the movement agitating for the removal of tariffs on imported corn, with the consequent lowering of the price of bread. The Poor Law system was breaking down under the strain in areas as diverse as Leeds, London, Scotland and the Potteries.14
In Paisley alone 17,000 people had thrown themselves on the Poor Law in February 1842, and money had run out. The previous month there had been £510 weekly available for what were then 14,817 unemployed, which worked out at eightpence-farthing each. The town produced almost only one commodity, a mixture of cotton and silk. Its main export market was America, where demand had collapsed. Banks in Scotland had then called in loans, leading to bankruptcies. Carlyle had been told that ‘two thousand men and women assembled the other Saturday night before the provost’s door in Paisley, and stood, without tumult, indeed almost in silence: when questioned as to their purposes, they said they had no money, no food nor fuel, they were Fathers and Mothers, working men and women, and had come out there to see whether they could not be saved alive.’15 There was no violence, but soldiers were nearby to deter a riot.
A petition from Paisley was presented to the House of Lords on 30 June, signed by 6,000 inhabitants, complaining about how funds for the relief of the poor had been distributed. They had originally been given money-tickets, a form of legal tender usable at any shop in the town, but now were being paid in kind – which meant just bread, meal and potatoes. To make matters worse, this was more expensive than the previous system.16 The petitioners claimed the local Poor Law commissioner had deliberately decided to distribute relief in kind ‘to render the position of the labourers as disagreeable as possible, in order to induce them to emigrate to other parts of the country.’ Graham, the Home Secretary, repudiated this suggestion forcefully.17
The people wanted relief distributed by magistrates or ministers, trusted members of their own community; and wanted, rather than charity, something done to improve the market for their goods, so they could live by their own labours. The weaving on which Paisley had built its prosperity had been a cottage industry until the 1820s, when the process became industrialised, attracting many more into the locality: a slump in demand had therefore had a catastrophic and concentrated effect. A complacent reply by the Duke of Wellington, on behalf of the government, when the petition was submitted created the belief in Paisley that the government had ‘shuffled out’ of taking responsibility and that for want of a ‘great effort’ to find enough provisions ‘Parliament will be adjourned, and they will be allowed to starve and die’.18 Each individual was given an allowance of 1s 2d a week, or, as Robert Wallace, the MP for Greenock put it, ‘less than one-half of the allowances being given to common felons in prison.’19
In Leeds money had run out too, and only an appeal that raised £6,000 had kept people fed the previous winter. The number of families helped by the Workhouse Board had doubled since 1838; it was estimated that in the first quarter of 1842 one-fifth of the total population of 80,000 was dependent on the workhouse, with the cost of outdoor relief 23 per cent higher than a year earlier. Meanwhile, links between the Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartists – political agitators seeking the implementation of a six-point People’s Charter of democratic rights – became ever closer, and the government began to fear a coalition of the lower and middle classes against aristocratic rule. Middle-class establishment figures in depressed towns, notably several mayors, were league members and were pressing the administration to accede to demands for reform. By early June 12,000 people in Glasgow were in receipt of relief because of a slump in trade, and there were rations of food for only about 4,250 people daily.20 The police were breaking up gatherings of the unemployed in the city, for fear of what they might lead to. The Liberals, led by Lord John Russell, joined in demands for the repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel said there had been prosperity at times when there was no free import of corn.21 This ignored a fact Peel himself would see within four years, that when times were not prosperous alleviation could be given by scrapping the duty.
III
The 1840s should have been a time of great social improvement. The coming of the railways improved mobility of labour, opened up new markets, and brought a wave of prosperity to Britain. However, the country contained seething discontents and vast inequalities, economic and political. One of the roots of the problem was the rapid rise in population in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. In England it had climbed from 8,308,000 in 1801 to 12,993,000 in 1831, according to the official censuses, growing as much in thirty years as in the previous two hundred. People had migrated from the countryside to towns in search of a better standard of living and for a time they found one. Children could go out to work not very long after they had learned to walk, and were for many families a commercial property; hence the growth in the size of those families. Although this caused overcrowding and sanitary problems, life was just about sustainable so long as the economy was doing well. If order books became empty, as they did after the downturn of the early 1840s, disaster beckoned.
Such periods of high unemployment made it imperative for the government to have a successful strategy for managing the poor at such times. The first Poor Law had been enacted at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I and placed an obligation on the pauper’s parish to provide basic support for him and his family. By the 1830s this system was breaking down because of the high concentrations of people who had now moved in to previously nearly empty areas and who threw themselves on the charity of the parish, funded by a local poor rate that was entirely inadequate to the new levels of demand. The Poor Law Act of 1834 was designed to rectify this problem, but outraged not merely those whom it strove to protect but also the educated classes. The idea behind the 1834 Act was that the most obvious means was to deter people from becoming paupers by making pauperism dreadful. It operated on the utilitarian precept that there would be idleness if it was remunerated, and therefore relief should be contingent upon work. The environment in workhouses was made more unpleasant than that outside them, as a deterrent. As well as inmates having to do long hours of soul-destroying, menial tasks, such as breaking stones, crushing bones or picking oakum, families were separated. The inmates were made to wear uniforms of coarse material, and a single gate was guarded to regulate the comings and goings. They were like prisons, and poverty appeared to have been criminalised. Carlyle called workhouses ‘Poor-Law Bastilles’.22 Oliver Twist, written by Charles Dickens in 1837, was a propaganda exercise against the Act, and gave a relatively accurate depiction of pauperism.
In 1843 John Walter, proprietor of The Times and an MP, listed the humiliations, indignities and degradations inflicted on those who threw themselves on the parish, and the effect of these in destroying their fitness for work. He quoted a correspondent who visited workhouses regularly and who had told him that
it is a demoralising system, tending to connect poverty with licentiousness, and to generate pauperism and crime. I only state to you what I know to be literally true, when I say that in union houses supposed to be administered as well as the system will permit, the work of demoralisation has been going on in every ward except those of sickness and old age. Among the poor unhappy children, among the adults of either sex, among the able-bodied, this propagation of evil has gone on. To particularise and classify its forms would be a revolting task. It would comprehend the recital of some of the most disgusting practices of licentiousness and many acts of crime. Persons well known to me have avowed, that many as were the temptations to sin without these walls, those within were far more mischievous and dangerous.23
So successful was the deterrent aspect of the Ac
t in rural areas, where the agricultural way of life was increasingly depressed and uncertain, that it drove agricultural labourers and their families to urban areas where there was more chance of finding manual work and, they thought, of avoiding the workhouse. The commissioners behind the legislation intended this; and it had been accepted by a Whig majority in the first House of Commons to sit after the 1832 Reform Act, in which middle-class utilitarian principles began to assert themselves more than the old feudal paternalism of the aristocracy.
However, a population that had struggled to make a living in the countryside found that in moving to the towns it had exchanged the unpleasantness of the state’s rural workhouse for that of capitalism’s urban one. In a downturn, the workhouse was sometimes the only option to avoid starvation. The urban parishes to which distressed rural workers migrated found their poor rates rising steeply, to help bear the new burdens. The working class, as it encountered long-term hardship and sank into disappointment, had every incentive to join in the growing political agitation of the 1830s. The economy, at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign in June 1837, was undergoing a fundamental restructuring, and one that the exponential growth of railways in the following decade would make almost revolutionary. As with all such restructurings, there were casualties; the effects of poverty shocked the concerned middle classes, provoking a philanthropic social movement to campaign for their alleviation.