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The final instalment in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1950–1999. The debacle in North Africa confirmed the fact that Britain was no longer a main player on the world stage, says Pat Thane, while at home Angry Young Men challenged the old order…
We can’t isolate British history in the second half of the 20th century from world events. The year 1956 began with signs that the Cold War was thawing. In January, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, admitted and denounced Stalin’s crimes. In April Khrushchev and the Soviet premier, Bulganin, made the first visit to Britain of Soviet leaders since 1917. They aroused popular curiosity and the concern of the security services who, apparently unknown to the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, sent a frogman, Lionel “Buster” Crabb, to inspect their ship. He did not return and his headless body was later found floating along the coast near Portsmouth. Doubts over how much Soviet attitudes really had softened were justified in October, when the Hungarian uprising against Russian domination was brutally suppressed. The disastrous attempted invasion of Suez signified that Britain was no longer a first-rank power. In July President Nasser of Egypt nationalised the company which owned the Suez canal, which was jointly owned by the British and French governments. Nasser was desperate to avenge the USA and Britain’s refusal to offer Egypt financial support following its decision to sign an arms deal with the USSR – and seizing control of the most direct route to Britain’s colonies in the east appeared to be the best way of going about it. Tension was also fanned by British concerns over Egyptian support for insurgents in Aden and Nasser’s support of the Algerians’ bloody battle for independence from France. 1956 in context With unemployment down and improved standards of living, Britain was enjoying times of stability – but it was not to last The period between 1945 and the mid-1970s was an unprecedented “Golden Age” of near-full employment and rising living standards, though the benefits were not universal: there was periodic unemployment in regions such as Clydeside and Merseyside, and regional inequalities in income and health. Pay and work conditions improved, notably in the large, key industries nationalised by the post-war Attlee government: coal, iron, steel and railways. Almost everyone had two weeks’ annual holiday with pay. For the first time, retirement at 60 or 65 became normal, providing an unprecedented period of leisure in later life. Women had access to a wider range of jobs, but were still limited in pay and had fewer opportunities for promotion and training. This caused growing protest in the 1960s and 70s, leading to the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. Inequalities diminished but remained significant to the end of the century. This was the heyday of the long, stable marriage, with life expectancy rising and divorce hard to obtain. Most women married and had children at earlier ages than before. Families remained small – averaging 2.5 – and most women expected to return to work as their children grew. The Attlee government did much to reconstruct the post-war economy and made a brave but incomplete attempt to construct a “Welfare State”. However, by the mid-1950s it was clear that much poverty remained. The Labour governments of 1964–70 attempted to carry forward the Attlee legacy, introducing comprehensive education. The next 25 years were quite different. Following the “oil shock” of 1973 and growing international economic stability, unemployment rose, remaining high for over 20 years and fuelling fears that the British economy was failing to compete in Europe, the US, and increasingly Asia. In response, the Conservative governments of the 1980s sought to reconstruct the economy. As a result, the manufacturing industry declined causing growing unemployment and cultural dislocation in industrial areas. The 25 years between 1975 and 2000 saw significant demographic changes too. The birth-rate declined, divorce soared, fewer people married and co-habitation became socially acceptable. By the end of the 1980s one-third of babies were born to unmarried, often co-habiting partners. The unified British state was also breaking up. Conflict in Northern Ireland between Roman Catholic Nationalists who sought a unified Ireland and Protestant Unionists raged from 1968 until the end of the century. Nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland led to the election in 1999 of devolved assemblies, with considerable control over domestic affairs. Eden’s ignominious exit What followed was a shattering blow to British prestige. Following international attempts at mediation, in October, Israel, who feared Nasser’s growing strength, attacked Egypt in secret collusion with France and Britain. When Nasser refused to back down, British and French forces bombed and invaded Egypt. There was an international outcry, strong opposition in all political parties in Britain and France, condemnation from the UN and, most strongly, from the USA. The value of sterling collapsed, the invaders were forced to withdraw ignominiously and Eden resigned, being replaced by Harold Macmillan. Britain was fighting several other conflicts in its dwindling colonies. In Malaya a communist-led insurgency began in 1948 and ended with independence in 1957. In Cyprus, Greek nationalist violence led to their spiritual leader Archbishop Makarios’s deportation to the Seychelles in March 1956. After the Suez Crisis, Macmillan began to negotiate independence for Cyprus, achieved in 1960. Kenyan nationalism led to Mau Mau guerrilla terrorism between 1952–57. The British army failed to quell the uprising and Kenya gained independence in 1960. In September 1956, Britain agreed to independence for the Gold Coast, now Ghana. A “wind of change” was indeed blowing through Africa, as Macmillan put it in 1960 – though not in South Africa where he coined the phrase. In 1956, Reverend Trevor Huddleston left the country, following the publication of his bestselling exposé of hardening apartheid, Naught for Your Country. For the next 35 years he was a leader of the British anti-apartheid movement. Meanwhile six European countries moved towards signing the Treaties of Rome (March 1957). Yet Britain held aloof, giving priority to its ties with the Commonwealth and the US. We never had it so good The mid-1950s saw important transformations within Britain, with unprecedented improvements in living standards and consumption. More houses were built, though in 1961 3.2 million people in England and Wales still did not have a fixed bath or shower. More people took holidays, some of them abroad. More owned vacuum cleaners, washing machines and television sets. Commercial television had been introduced in 1955, so there was now a choice of two channels. Recognising that more people could save, the 1956 Budget introduced Premium Bonds, described by the future Labour leader, Harold Wilson, as a “squalid raffle”. Leisure patterns changed: attendance at cinemas, spectator sports and religious services fell, while “do-it-yourself” and gardening grew. Recorded crime also grew, but so did the efficiency of detection and recording. Full employment and prosperity encouraged immigration from poorer Commonwealth countries. But immigrants from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan often faced hostility. Serious racial violence in Notting Hill and Nottingham led to legislation to restrict immigration in 1958. In general, prosperity bred contentedness – as Harold Macmillan put it in 1957: “Let us be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good” – but also the confidence to criticise. Easter 1956 saw the first protest against Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, leading to the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. The nuclear issue exacerbated splits in the Labour Party, which was going through a bout of internecine struggle that rendered it unelectable in the 1950s. The Conservative governments of the 1950s, sometimes reluctantly, sustained the Welfare State. They feared that its most popular feature, the National Health Service, was wastefully expensive. However, the Guillebaud Committee, established to examine this proposition, reported in 1956 that there was no “widespread extravagance” in the NHS and no need for change. The Conservatives did most for health with the Clean Air Act 1956, which reduced air pollution – a major cause of death, notably during the great London “smog” of 1952. They also achieved a massive increase in local authority house building. Clement Attlee’s governments had built relatively little, mainly due to their determination to build to high standards. But the council houses built in the 1950s were of poorer quality, creating the “sink estates” that Conservatives later condemned. Middle-class benefits The inadequacies of the post-war Welfare State were becoming obvious even to some of its strongest sympathisers. Richard Titmuss, Labour Party welfare policy adviser, demonstrated that the middle classes gained most from the Welfare State and that much poverty remained. In 1957, JE Floud, AH Halsey and FM Martin published Social Class and Educational Opportunity, establishing that the 1944 Education Act had not greatly improved the educational opportunities of the working class. The main beneficiaries of the 11-plus examination and grammar school education were middle-class boys. In fact, girls of all classes fared worst. There were fewer grammar school places for them, so they had to score better than boys in the 11-plus. The great majority of children who left the lower-status secondary modern schools at 15 had few or no formal qualifications. The numbers in higher education were far fewer than in other high-income countries. These findings led to the introduction of comprehensive education by a Labour government in the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, work and relative prosperity gave working-class youth greater independence. Youth culture was reinvented, breeding moral panics about “juvenile delinquency”, stimulated by shock at the Teddy Boy style of young men with long hair, sideburns, Edwardian-style draped jackets and narrow trousers. The film Blackboard Jungle did little to quell the fears of Middle England. Released in Britain in 1956, it portrayed violence in US High Schools, accompanied by a soundtrack by the first major rock ’n’ roll phenomenon, Bill Haley and His Comets. In 1957 Haley and His Comets toured Britain to a frenzied reception. Despite these concerns over the moral fibre of young men, most spent two years in National Service, sometimes dying in the post-colonial wars. The rest spent most of their time in work or education and married in larger numbers than ever. There were low levels of “illegitimacy” in an atmosphere of strong social disapproval of sex before marriage. An assault on accepted conventions Older, more celebrated and more disaffected were the “Angry Young Men” of the arts. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, published in 1956, was an anguished, if often obscure, assault on contemporary society. It appeared in the same week as the first performance of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, a more overt assault on accepted conventions. Noel Coward’s wholly conventional Nude with Violin, first performed shortly after, attracted bigger, if less intellectual, audiences. Angry young women were fewer, or anyway less visible and celebrated. Women’s campaigning for equality was weaker than in the 1920s and 1930s, but it had not disappeared. In 1955 women in the civil service, local government and teaching gained equal pay for which they had campaigned for decades. Hopes that the private sector would follow were not fulfilled. In Women’s Two Roles (1956) Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein showed that women lacked equal work opportunities. They demanded more training for older women returning to paid work, extended maternity leave, better child care and shorter working hours for both parents – foreshadowing the Women’s Liberation campaigns after 1968. It seems that the 1950s was not quite the dull, grey decade often depicted. History facts: 1950–1999 Average life expectancy at birth: 1950, 73 (male), 80 (female); 2000, 83 (male), 87 (female) Unemployment: 1950 1.5%; 1970 3.0%; 1982 13.0%; 1990 6.7 %; 2000 4.0% Percentage of 18–21 year olds in higher education: 1954 5.8; 1970 13.0; 1990 17.0; 2000 35.0 Cinema admissions: 1950 1,396m; 1970 193m; 1990 79m; 1999 134m Housing (% owner occupied): 1951 29.6; 1971 50.1; 2000 67.8 Housing (% local authority rental): 1952 18.6; 1972 30.4; 2000 16.5 Key years : other important events in the second half of the 20th century 1960 – ‘Supermac’ visits South Africa. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan tells the South African parliament that “a wind of change is blowing through the continent” and Reverend Trevor Huddleston establishes the British anti-apartheid movement, yet this doesn’t stop police killing 67 Africans at an anti-apartheid meeting at Sharpeville. The dawn of the 1960s also saw an increase in Cold War tensions, partly due to the shooting down of a US U2 spy plane over the USSR. That same year, in the face of a growing anti-nuclear movement, Britain got its first Polaris missile base. 1964 – Wilson wins the General Election. After 13 long years in the wilderness Labour, led by Harold Wilson, returned to government with a majority of just four seats. Yet it wasn’t all plain sailing for Wilson. Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker was defeated in Smethwick in an election campaign dogged by allegations of racism. In fact, the battle for the Smethwick seat was so bitter that Wilson described the eventual victor Peter Griffiths as a “parliamentary leper”. Elsewhere, United States aircraft attacked North Vietnam, beginning the Vietnam War. 1968 – Anti-war marches spark violence. Four years of increasingly bloody conflict in Vietnam led to a series of huge anti-war demonstrations in cities across the world. London’s march centred around the home of the US ambassador to Britain on Grosvenor Square, and culminated in clashes between the protesters and police. Catholic demonstrations for civil rights in Derry, Northern Ireland, also descended into violence when the protesters were attacked by police. The incident marked the beginning of sectarian conflict in the province. 1973 – Britain joins the EEC. Prime Minister Edward Heath finally took Britain into Europe after two previous applications to join (in 1963 and 1967) were rejected by the French president De Gaulle. There was bloodshed in London at that time as the IRA bombed the city centre. These attacks accompanied the first elections for the new Northern Ireland assembly. Meanwhile, an increase in petrol prices sparked an international economic crisis, bringing the “Golden Age” to an end. 1979 – Economic gloom descends. As the decade neared its end, Britain found itself in the grip of the “Winter of discontent”, marked by crippling strikes, the “Three-day week” and growing unemployment. This spelt disaster for Jim Callaghan’s Labour government, and he was replaced by Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. 1982 – The Falklands War. On 2 April 1982, Britain was rocked by the news that Argentinian forces had seized the Falkland Islands, ending 150 years of British rule. A task force of over 100 ships and 27,000 personnel was hastily dispatched and wrestled control of the island from Argentinian dictator General Galtieri in a conflict that cost hundreds of lives. Hostilities formally ceased on 20 June, by which time Galtieri had resigned. 1989 – The end of the Cold War. The USSR’s policy of glasnost (openness) inspired risings against Communist leadership in Eastern Europe. Mass movements through the Iron Curtain culminated in Berliners destroying the wall that had divided the city since 1961. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie alleging anti-Islamic blasphemy in his Satanic Verses. British Muslims demonstrated against Rushdie. High unemployment and a growing AIDS crisis afflicted Britain. 1997 – Tony Blair wins by a landslide. The Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, ended 18 years of Conservative rule with victory in the general election. One of Blair’s first acts as prime minister was to join forces with US President Clinton to persuade the IRA to act as a political party rather than a fighting force. Blair’s first few months in office were also marked by the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris. Diana’s death caused a remarkable outpouring of national grief. Blair went on to be Labour’s longest-serving prime minister. 1999 – First elections for Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are held. Also, the minimum wage was introduced this year. The Metropolitan Police was accused of institutional racism in an enquiry into the 1983 death of Stephen Lawrence. In politics, the number of hereditary peers allowed to participate in the work of the House of Lords was reduced to 92. Abroad, British forces entered Kosovo as part of a NATO force. More turning points in British history Go back: 1916: The long march to modernity <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/TP-Images-with-overlay19-c02fec4.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part nineteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1900–1949. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part nineteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1900–1949. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Pat Thane is professor of contemporary British history, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary British History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Her books include The Foundations of the Welfare State, published by Longman (1996) Further reading: Twentieth Century British Political Facts, 1900–2000 by David Butler and Gareth Butler (Macmillan, 2000); Twentieth Century British Social Trends by AH Halsey and Josephine Webb eds (Macmillan, 2000); Cassell’s Companion to Twentieth Century Britain by Pat Thane (Cassell, 2001); Land of Hope and Glory. Britain, 1900–1990 by Peter Clarke (Penguin, 1996); One World Divisible: a Global History since 1945 by David Reynolds (Penguin History, 2000) This article was first published in the November 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part nineteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1900–1949. Gerard DeGroot chooses 1916 as a key year, as the acceleration of the First World War, coupled with huge social and political changes at home, marked the birth of modern Britain…
The British, it is often said, went to war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon. While the aphorism seems to encapsulate the evolution of national consciousness from the naïve patriotism of 1914 to the bitterness of 1918, it is too simplistic to explain the change that came over Britain as a result of the First World War. That change manifested itself most profoundly in 1916 – a pivotal year that neatly divides old Britain from the modern nation of today. Poets are seldom accurate barometers of national temper. The average British soldier did not romanticise, like Brooke, the idea of dying in some foreign field that would be forever England. The millions who volunteered in the first two years of the war did so for various reasons, many of them more mundane then we might think. Patriotism was undoubtedly a big factor, with most displaying a dispassionate willingness to serve their country in its hour of need. Others volunteered for less sublime reasons like pressure from employers or girlfriends, the lure of masculine adventure or simply the need for a job. Read more: 5 influential WW1 poets you should know about Most soldiers did not mirror Brooke’s romanticism, so they didn’t suffer Sassoon’s bitterness. That feeling arose because of the deep chasm between expectation and experience – what Sassoon’s friend Wilfred Owen called “the old lie”. The war poets discovered that it was not “sweet” to die for one’s country and their poems reflect the sense of betrayal that came with that discovery. The common soldier, in contrast, discovered something different, namely that service implied citizenship. War experience was for them an entry in the balance sheet of life, to be compensated by peacetime recognition. The millions who volunteered in the first year of the war were ready for battle in 1916. They were the soldiers of the Somme who walked into German machine gun fire on 1 July. On that day, the British Army experienced the worst losses in its history – 57,000 casualties, of whom 19,000 were dead. The scale of death inspired a long, bitter post-mortem. For the past 90 years, the British have argued over alternatives and desperately sought scapegoats. In truth, however, long casualty lists were the inevitable result of the conjunction of industrialised war with democratised service. By 1916, Europe had millions willing to fight and the industrial capacity to kill them. War became a machine of death for which human beings were the fuel. 1916 in context Going from world banker to borrower, Britain was on its knees after the wars and in need of extensive reform to help its people The half-century from 1900 to 1949 brought the First and Second World Wars and the Depression. Those three calamities left Britain devastated. In 1900, she was a great power, in control of a massive empire and the largest navy in the world. By 1949, she was a second rate power, helpless to stop the inevitable tide of decolonisation. Once the world’s banker, she had become a major borrower, dependent upon foreign loans to keep the economy afloat. These great developments are undoubtedly important to an understanding of Britain during the period, but perhaps not as important as the motor car, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the cinema. Real life is shaped by trivialities. Great events fill newspapers and history books precisely because they are extraordinary and, as such, a far cry from the mundane lives most people lead. The rituals of everyday life hold society together and provide stability in a threatening world. Despite the wars, depression and political upheaval of the period between 1900–49, most British people got on with life and even prospered. Much can be learned from studying changes in the British diet. During the First World War, the bread ration was limited to seven pounds per man per week. Bread, eaten with a bit of dripping, was the staple food for the working class. Meat was a rare treat, and vegetables even rarer. Oranges were given at Christmas precisely because they were so rare. No wonder that only 34 per cent of the British male population was technically fit for frontline service in 1914. War, ironically, was good for the health of the British population. The shock of the Boer War, when Britain struggled to gather together an army healthy enough to fight, inspired the Liberal welfare reforms of 1908–14. Similar concern was shown after the First World War, though the scale of reform was limited by financial crisis. The Second World War inspired the creation of the welfare state, with its aim of care from cradle to grave. At the same time that health improved, so too did quality of life. The washing machine and the vacuum cleaner relieved some of the drudgery of housework, while improving hygiene in the home. By 1939, there were more than one million cars on the road. That, combined with improvements in rail services, made travel around the country much more common. So, too, did the increased provision of paid holidays. Meanwhile, cinemas and dance halls provided escapist excitement for those otherwise trapped in monotony. In the interwar period, one-third of the British population went to the cinema at least once a week. By 1949, it was difficult to define what was “great” about Britain. A half-century of war and depression rendered her weak and destitute. The average citizen, however, was better educated, healthier, and lived an altogether richer life mid-century than his or her ancestors in 1900. The decline of a nation did not, in other words, mean the decline of a people. Britain’s women go to work The scale of death forced Britain to become a nation at war. The millions who took up arms had left factories, fields, docks and offices. Their place was taken by the old, the young, the infirm and, notably, by women. Much has been made of the influx of women in the workplace, and the emancipation that supposedly led from it. In truth, however, the idea of women working was nothing new, though never before had British women performed work so important. Its importance lies not so much in the effect it had upon the women themselves, but rather in the implications it had for the nation as a whole. In ways seldom recognised, Britain was rescued by her women. By 1916, it was clear that victory would be achieved not on the battlefield but in the factories and farms. Success would go to the nation best able to mobilise its population for the single purpose of sustaining the war effort. The army congregated in France and Belgium was Britain’s largest city, bar London. Like any city, it needed food, clothing, transport, a legal system, medical and pastoral care. Unlike any other city, it consumed a prodigious supply of munitions and produced nothing except death. All of its needs had to be provided by those back at home, from a workforce diminishing in numbers and skill. Mobilisation demanded organisation and a heretofore unthinkable degree of government intervention. Britain began the war under the misguided assumption that it would be short and profitable, and that those at home would not feel its pain. Indeed, the phrase “home front” was seldom used before 1914. It was invented to describe a peculiar implication of industrialised war which became blindingly evident in 1916. “Business as usual” gave way to a comprehensive system of government control. Regulations affected nearly every aspect of life, including where a person lived and worked, what he or she earned and bought, the food they ate and the beer they drank. These controls spelled the death of liberalism. That philosophy was based on the sanctity of individual freedom, yet it was clear that the rights of the individual could not withstand the demands of war. The most important symbol of sacrifice came in January 1916 with the passage of the Military Service Act, which imposed conscription on all men aged between 18 and 41. The right to choose whether to fight for one’s country, arguably the most sacred individual freedom, was cast aside with surprisingly little dissent. Conscription, it should be noted, was not just a way to supply soldiers for the Army, but it was also a way to control the workforce at home. The demise of liberalism The assault upon liberalism had dire consequences for the Liberal Party. The party’s demise was apparent virtually from the start of the war, but was dramatically confirmed by the formation, on 6 December 1916, of a new coalition led by David Lloyd George. The previous coalition, formed by Herbert Asquith in 1915, had brought the Tories and (significantly) Labour into the government, but was essentially a desperate attempt to preserve liberalism by other means. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2007/10/GettyImages-466257273-9964a36.jpg" width="5155" height="3458" alt="Married Conscripts" title="A group of married men on their conscription into the British Army, Britain, World War I, 1st June 1916. One man is accompanied by his wife and child. Conscription in Britain was extended to married men in May 1916. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Asquith had sought to improvise his way to victory, intervening in the economy only when disaster threatened. The futility of that was revealed by the Somme offensive, which lasted for three months and resulted in 400,000 British casualties, in the process putting huge pressure on the British economy. Lloyd George used the issue of war management to shove Asquith aside. The party was cleaved by the coup, the purists following Asquith, the realists Lloyd George. A new prime minister meant a new, more presidential, style. Asquith had desperately tried to preserve the ideal of cabinet government, even though it was ill-suited to wartime centralisation. Lloyd George, despite his liberal sympathies, was authoritarian – the type of leader perfectly suited to the conduct of war. He brought to Downing Street the same dynamism, creativity and determination that he had earlier exhibited at the Ministry of Munitions and the War Office. This implied a willingness to slaughter sacred cows – nothing was allowed to stand in the way of victory. Centralisation brought homogenisation. Britain became a single nation driven by single purpose. While much local pride was invested in, for instance, the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Scots Guards, in truth regional differences were smothered by wartime unity and the democracy of death. War fostered a genuine sense of Britishness. The one notable exception was, of course, Ireland, where nationalists turned wartime calamity into opportunity. The Easter Rising of 1916 never had a hope of achieving its immediate aim of separation, but did change the face of Irish politics for ever. The sacrifice of youth first manifested on the Somme in 1916 continues to haunt Britain. That loss has, over the years, obscured a death at least as profound, namely the demise of the liberal ethos. Liberalism would survive the war but would no longer be the guiding principle of government. Wartime intervention carried the undeniable accolade of success – mobilisation had won the war. In time, the lessons of war would be applied to the problems of peace, with the accompanying expectation that every calamity affecting society demanded governmental response. The welfare of the collective would be promoted at the cost of individual freedom. Remember the trenches One of the most striking lessons of 1916 was the ability of the nation to withstand massive loss. Ubiquitous death did not, as in Russia, inspire revolution, but rather brought out a stoical determination to persevere. The soldiers who survived wanted afterwards to join the system, not to destroy it. For them, wartime service came to imply the right to a political voice, increasingly expressed through the Labour Party. “Remember the Trenches” a Labour poster enjoined in 1923. In a similar but less pronounced way, the women who once filled shells in the munitions factories were not radicalised by their experience, but they did gain a sense of service which was a step on the road to full citizenship. “I think of you the same and always shall,” wrote Marian Allen in homage to her lover who died in the First World War. That sentiment seems appropriate not just to her loss, but also to the entire generation that died in 1916. The soldiers in khaki are frozen in time, forever young, forever innocent. The Britain they once inhabited, however, travelled resolutely forward, on rails laid in 1916. The nation they had volunteered to protect was never restored. Today, the world of Asquith seems quaint, that of Lloyd George utterly familiar. History facts: 1900–1949 Population of Great Britain: 1901, 41.5 million; 1951, 53.2 million Death rate (England and Wales) per 1,000 population: 1901, 16.1; 1950, 11.8 Percentage of 15- to 18-year-olds in school: 1901, 0.3 per cent; 1951, 12.5 per cent Life expectancy: 1901, 45 (males), 48.7 (females); 1949, 65.5 (males), 69.8 (females) Key years: other events in the first half of the 20th century 1901 – The death of Queen Victoria. This provided a symbolic end to an era. Meanwhile, the continued difficulties the British Army was experiencing in taming Boer Forces in South Africa raised serious doubts about the defence of the British empire. After the war, Britain would forge alliances of a sort with France, Russia and Japan in order to protect her colonies in Asia and Africa. Meanwhile, the poor quality of army recruits focused attention on the need for social welfare reforms, or what became known as “national efficiency”. 1908 – Campbell-Bannerman’s resignation. The Liberal Prime Minister’s departure brought Herbert Asquith to Downing Street and David Lloyd George to the Exchequer. The change ushered in the phase of “New Liberalism” inspired by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The government embarked upon the most radical programme of reform since 1870, eventually introducing legislation covering employment, housing, pensions and health – all financed by a revolutionary “People’s Budget”. 1924 – The first Labour administration. After an election in December 1923 resulted in a hung parliament, the first ever Labour government took office in January, with Ramsay MacDonald as its leader. His government was too weak to achieve anything of substance, but did demonstrate, by its very existence, that Labour had supplanted the Liberals as the party of the left. A second election in October returned the Tories to power and further crippled the Liberal party. 1929 – World depression. A general election in May resulted in Labour winning the most seats, though not a clear majority. MacDonald returned to Downing Street. The new government’s plans for social reform were rendered moot by the Wall Street Crash in October, which ushered in worldwide economic depression. Unemployment steadily rose, reaching 2.5 million by the following year. 1931 – Formation of the national government. The worsening economic crisis and steadily rising unemployment figures placed enormous pressure upon the Labour government. With Britain on the verge of bankruptcy, the May Committee advised cuts in unemployment benefits. In August, the government broke up over the question of these cuts. A national government was formed which was essentially conservative, though MacDonald remained Prime Minister. 1940 – Chamberlain’s resignation. A succession of military defeats, combined with accumulated disillusionment over the failure of appeasement, resulted in the resignation of Neville Chamberlain. Winston Churchill formed a coalition government notable for Labour’s enthusiastic support. Labour was rewarded with a number of important domestic ministries, in particular the appointment of Ernest Bevin as minister of labour. British cities were bombarded by the Luftwaffe. 1942 – The Beveridge Report. The stunning defeat of the German Wehrmacht at El Alamein by British forces in November 1942 was followed by the publication of Social Insurance and Allied Services, commonly known as the Beveridge Report. It laid the foundation for the welfare state and was hugely popular among all classes in wartime Britain. 1945 – Labour landslide. The end of war in Europe was immediately followed by a general election which resulted in the shock defeat of Churchill’s Conservative Party. The landslide victory of the Labour Party further solidified support for the programme of reform that was recommended in the Beveridge Report. The election, which was surprising at the time, now seems the understandable expression of the collectivist sympathies encouraged during the war. 1946 – Creation of the National Health Service. At the peak of its popularity, the Labour government under Clement Attlee pushed through a series of social welfare reforms, including, most notably, the National Health Service Act. On another front, the government embarked upon a comprehensive programme of nationalisation of key industries, including steel and coal. To fund the reforms, the government imposed severe austerity measures. More turning points in British history Read next: 1956: The shock of Suez Go back: 1851: The Crystal Palace <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/TP-Images-with-overlay20-d8eb37d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The final instalment in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1950–1999. (Image by Getty Images)" title="The final instalment in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1950–1999. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Gerard DeGroot is a professor of modern history at St Andrews University and the author of The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (Macmillan, 2008) Further reading: The Road to 1945 by Paul Addison (Pimlico, 1994); Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War by Gerard DeGroot (Longman, 1996); Never Again by Peter Hennessy (Penguin, 2006); The Making of Modern British Politics 1867-1945 by Martin Pugh (Blackwell, 2002) This article was first published in the October 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part eighteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1850–1899. The Great Exhibition glorified the industrial achievements of the empire, and set the foundations for much of modern Britain, says Peter Mandler…
Oh no! Not the Crystal Palace again! Surely there must be better vantage-points from which to view the high Victorian period? Surely there must be something fresher and more surprising than that overblown and over-exposed greenhouse? Yes, there is – and it is still the Crystal Palace, but one we can now see differently. The Crystal Palace has proved so capacious that every generation can find something new in it. Historically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with that so long as we remember that we haven’t displaced the older interpretations, only enriched them. So the Crystal Palace remains what it has always been, the starting-point of a great Victorian era of peace, industry and empire. This spectacular centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, opened by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851 and straddling the year until it closed its doors officially on 11 October, did celebrate with more than a touch of complacency the peaceful triumph of Britain’s unique compound elite, part-aristocratic, part-capitalist. Britain had escaped the revolutions that had plunged continental Europe into social division and civil war in 1848, and the planning and execution of the Great Exhibition in 1851 was naturally timed to remind the world of that fact. It did celebrate Britain’s industrial supremacy, both in its form and its content. A vast shed – a blend of greenhouse, railway terminus and museum, half again as long as the Millennium Dome built 150 years later – the Crystal Palace was constructed from prefabricated and interchangeable parts made of the most modern materials, iron and glass. It was deliberately filled with products of great size and ingenuity to shock and awe – huge blocks of coal, the largest steam locomotives, hydraulic presses and steam-hammers, a scale model of the Liverpool docks with 1,600 miniature ships in full rigging; sewing machines, ice-making machines, cigarette-rolling machines, machines to mint medals and machines to fold envelopes. If the exhibition was open to all nations, the results were confidently expected to demonstrate British superiority. The global dominance that Britain had achieved not by rapine or conquest but by virtue and hard work – steam-engines and cotton-spinning machines were held up by the novelist Thackeray as “trophies of her bloodless wars”. 1851 in context With its share of world manufacturing rocketing, Britain was a nation of growth, and yet extreme poverty was driving thousands to emigrate The country in which the Crystal Palace was built in 1851 was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – as it had been since 1801, when the Union with Ireland was inaugurated, and would be until the partition of Ireland after the First World War. The great social and economic changes of the Industrial Revolution had bonded Wales, Scotland and England more firmly together – south Wales, lowland Scotland and the north of England, in particular, had all become more urban and industrial in character, more liberal in politics, and more nonconformist in religion. Nationalism was not a potent force in any of these areas. But Ireland had been an exception in all these respects even earlier in the century, and by 1851 had become even more so. Hit by the holocaust of the Irish famine in the late 1840s, its population would dwindle over the rest of the century as emigrants poured out of the country. Between 1841 and 1901 Britain’s population grew from 26.7 million to 41.5 million; Ireland’s dropped from 8.2 million to 4.5 million. While living standards were rising in the second half of the 19th century for most of the population, these rises were distributed unequally – probably more unequally than at any other point in British history. The top half of one per cent of the population accounted for 25 per cent of the nation’s income. In comparison, the same share is earned by the top 10 per cent today. Wealth was distributed still more unequally. There was a class of super-rich, known as the “Upper Ten Thousand”, comprised mainly of landowners and bankers. Three-quarters of the population would have been employed in manual working-class occupations, most of the rest as shopkeepers and clerks. Opportunities for social mobility were severely limited and living conditions for most remained cramped and unhealthy. As a result, it was not only the Irish who emigrated – emigration from all parts of the British Isles escalated steeply over this half-century, especially to the United States, Canada and Australia. However, Britain was very far from a nation in decline in this period. Its share of world manufacturing output held up remarkably well, at just under a fifth of the total in 1900, practically where it had been in 1860. The advent of universal, free and compulsory education in the 1870s and 1880s meant that literacy became nearly total by the end of the century. Despite extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1884, however, not even all adult males were entitled to vote, and some adult males had more votes than others. The United Kingdom in this period was in many respects “free” but still unequal. Messy and modern That complacent picture doesn’t capture the sheer exuberant messiness of the Crystal Palace, or the full range of excitements through which it prefigures the modern life that we live today. Though responsibility for the Great Exhibition was vested in a Royal Commission crammed with the great and the good, and led by the Prince Consort, a free press kept up a loud and rowdy running commentary, and every segment of a diverse and disputatious public opinion – including the large majority who were formally excluded from political representation – offered up its own views. When after three weeks of more exclusive viewing by the “respectable” public the Crystal Palace was opened to “shilling tickets” on 26 May, the floodgates were opened and six million people poured through them in the next four months. Kick-starting modern tourism In fact, the Great Exhibition gave a decisive push to physical mobility – travel to it has been called “the largest movement of population ever to have taken place in Britain” – and it can be said to have kick-started the entire apparatus of the modern tourist industry: the railway journey, the package holiday, the hotel (or at least the B&B), and the restaurant were all to be transformed from elite into popular experiences. Thomas Cook alone brought 165,000 people to the Crystal Palace from the Midlands on cheap excursion trains. To orient these strangers, street signs of the modern type had to be invented. To comfort them, public lavatories were for the first time installed. London, which had been used to dominating national attention in the 18th century but had had to share the spotlight with the great cities of the north in the early 19th, once again became the nation’s cynosure. In the following years, it increased its share of the national population and began to resume a stature that it has never since lost. What had the masses come to see, and what did they make of it? Undoubtedly they were awed by the great machines and demonstrations of power. They would also have been aware of the formidable police presence – anything from 200 to 600 policemen. On the other hand, they had a huge variety of sights to choose from – there were 100,000 exhibits – and could gravitate freely to those that pleased or intrigued them. These were often trinkets and gadgets on a human scale that people could relate to, could imagine in their homes, consumer goods of paper and glass, new styles of furniture, brands of toothpaste and soap. A visit to the Crystal Palace was not supposed to be a shopping expedition. Exhibitors weren’t allowed to display prices or sell over the counter. But supply and demand could not be so easily kept apart. Brochures, posters, trade cards and price sheets proliferated. Outside the Crystal Palace, the rest of London did its best to capitalise on the visitors. Historians now think that the modern age of advertising was opened by the Great Exhibition – the primitive shop signs, handbills and small-print newspaper adverts of the 18th century were gradually transformed by a panoply of new technologies, leading to the billboard, the illustrated display advertisement, the department-store window. Among the visitors in 1851 was a 20-year-old draper’s apprentice from Yorkshire, William Whiteley, who was inspired to move his theatre of operations to London and who in the 1860s expanded his draper’s shop in Westbourne Grove into Britain’s first department store, Whiteley’s, the Universal Provider. Crowd-pleasing cheapness? These surging crowds and their clamour for goods and thrills drew snooty criticisms of vulgarity, and we have long been familiar with comments such as John Ruskin’s – he called the Palace “a cucumber-frame between two chimneys” – and William Morris’s – he called it “wonderfully ugly”. The likes of Ruskin and Morris were offended because the Palace’s projectors had portrayed it as a chance to refine popular tastes, whereas they saw only crowd-pleasing cheapness. Thanks to the railway, visiting the Crystal Palace was not only a national but an international phenomenon. Rail connections between Paris and London had been completed just prior to 1851 and in the year of the Exhibition the numbers of travellers between France and England nearly doubled to 260,000. The international nature of the exhibits gave visitors a powerful sense of a newly wide world – and, with steam facilitating travel both by land and by sea, a shrinking world. The British empire was literally at the centre of the Crystal Palace, with an Indian Court filled with fine materials and finished goods meant explicitly to strengthen trade between metropole and empire. These were hardly trophies of bloodless wars. But there was a strong streak of idealism present, an idealism that did see free trade between equals as the civilised substitute for war. Exhibits from America drew special attention to an emerging power, now seen less as rebellious offspring, more as a potential trading partner. Sensationally, the Americans’ McCormick reaping machine beat its British rivals in a competition, harvesting 20 acres of corn in a day. Visitors of 1851 got a glimpse of what we call globalisation. The telegraph was on display – used to communicate from one end of the giant structure to the other – and contemporaries were well aware of its potential use for global communications, talking of a forthcoming “network of wires” and a “never-ceasing interchange of news”. In about 20 years, that network would span continents; in about 50 years, it would span the world – and, since the telegraph like the telephone or the computer is an electronic device, working at speeds pretty much equivalent to the speed of the Internet today. Palace of the people We are now also better aware that the Crystal Palace had an afterlife, reconstructed on a new site in south London – and serving for another 80 years as the “Palace of the People”, responsible among other things for inaugurating the dinosaur craze (the life-size models are among the few fragments of the Victorian period to survive on the site) and for pioneering a dizzying range of commercial entertainments from high-wire acts to aeronautical displays. Even if we confine ourselves to the year 1851, Crystal Palace works happily as a pivot on which swings a door opening to the modernity we enjoy today. The Crystal Palace was constructed of iron and glass – so how and why did it burn down? What we can see more clearly now than they could then was that the generally optimistic hopes of projectors and visitors, while realised to an extraordinary extent, also cast darker shadows – the 100,000 exhibits have multiplied a hundred thousand-fold in our consumer society, for ill as well as for good; the 500 police have multiplied too; internationalism and the shrinking globe did not betoken world peace; and just imagine the carbon footprint left by all those machines… History facts: 1850–1899 Food consumption per person per week (1860s): 10.9 pounds of bread, 3.9 pounds of potatoes, 0.9 pounds of meat, 1.4 pints of milk Alcohol consumption per person per year (1870s): 1.5 gallon of spirits, 34 gallons of beer Life expectancy at birth (1860s): Liverpool, 30 years; Manchester, 31 years; London, 38 years; Cardiff, 41 years; Portsmouth, 42 years Key years: other important events in the second half of the 19th century 1854 – The Crimean War begins. Despite the high hopes expressed at the Crystal Palace, the second half of the century was not a period of unbroken peace. The Crimean War pitted Britain and France against Russian expansion into the Ottoman Empire. It lasted two years, left contemporaries with a big bill and an inquest into military disorganisation, and bequeathed to posterity Florence Nightingale, the Charge of the Light Brigade (at the Battle of Balaclava) and, indeed, the balaclava (the headwarmers knitted for British troops to guard against cold Russian nights). 1857 – The “Indian Mutiny”. Only a mutiny, of course, from the British point of view – now more frequently called a “Rebellion”. Sepoys – locally recruited soldiers – protested against conditions in the East India Company’s army. A direct result was the end of East India Company rule and the incorporation of India into the formal empire. 1865 – The “Governor Eyre Controversy”. Jamaican Governor EJ Eyre brutally suppressed another rebellion – the Morant Bay rising by black Jamaicans protesting against economic conditions and their lack of rights – killing hundreds and summarily executing one of the leaders, GW Gordon. The ensuing controversy polarised educated opinion in Britain – was Eyre a hero or lawbreaker? – much as the Vietnam War polarised America in the 1960s. 1867 – The Second Reform Act. Although this act gave the vote to only about a third of adult males in England and Wales, it marked the point at which the United Kingdom began to think of itself as a democracy. But it also underscored the inequitable treatment of Ireland, where fewer than a sixth of adult males got the vote in a separate act. 1869 – Origins of Women’s Suffrage. Often overlooked in the shadow of the Second Reform Act, a reform of the municipal franchise in 1869 gave the vote in local elections to unmarried women who were heads of households. This betokened a growing role for women in social and political affairs below the parliamentary level. 1889 – The London Dock Strike. Although the Trades Union Congress can be dated back to 1868, the London Dock Strike brought trade unionism into the centre of public life for the first time, largely because it demonstrated that “ordinary” workers could strike as well – not only skilled workers seeking to protect their trade privileges. 1896 – Origins of the tabloid press. The Harmsworth brothers (later Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere) founded the Daily Mail, the first of a new breed of cheap and cheerful newspapers. It cost a halfpenny – half the cost of the standard cheap newspaper – and specialised in shorter human-interest stories and a vigorously populist editorial tone. 1899 – The Boer War breaks out. The decades of “peace” since the Crimean War had been marred by repeated colonial wars; however these had required little British manpower. This colonial war – against Dutch settlers in southern Africa – required a serious mobilisation and, like the Crimean War, it left behind a bitter taste in human and financial costs, and concerns about Britain’s war fighting capacity. More turning points in British history Read next: 1916: The Long March to Modernity Go back: 1832: The ‘Great’ Reform Act <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/TP-Images-with-overlay19-c02fec4.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part nineteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1900–1949. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part nineteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1900–1949. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Peter Mandler teaches modern British history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His latest book The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair is published by Yale University Press (2006) Further reading: Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851–67 by Asa Briggs (1954; Penguin, 1990); The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display by Jeffrey Auerbach (Yale University Press, 1999); Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936 by JR Piggott (Hurst & Co, 2004) This article was first published in the September 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part seventeen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1800–1849. Parliament could not ignore the rising spirit of democracy, and, amidst fears of revolution, was forced to bow to popular pressure – at least to a limited extent, says Catherine Hall…
On 7 June 1832 King William IV reluctantly gave his assent to the Reform Act (which extended the parliamentary franchise in England and Wales), marking the end of a period of high political tension across the country. Three years previously, in 1829, the Tory party had been split by the decision of Wellington (Prime Minister) and Home Secretary Robert Peel to grant Catholic Emancipation. Faced with the danger of civil war in Ireland, they chose to bow to popular pressure. The sanctity of “the Protestant Constitution” had been breached and Catholics could now sit at Westminster. In July 1830 a revolution in France raised the spectre once again of disorder at home while violent disturbances among agricultural labourers in the South East between August 1830 and December 1831, the so-called Captain Swing riots when machines were smashed and burnt, terrified landed society. In Birmingham the banker Thomas Attwood had formed the Birmingham Political Union, an organisation that mobilised middle- and working-class support, demanding parliamentary reform. The townspeople of places such as Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds sought representation, an end to corrupt patronage, and a wider electorate – though there was little agreement as to who should be included. Attwood wanted “an army not less formidable than that legally exhibited in Ireland, before which ministers were compelled to bend”. Wellington, however, a firm believer in aristocratic power and privilege, was convinced, despite much evidence to the contrary, that Britain “possessed at the present moment a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever” and that “it possessed the full and entire confidence of the country”. His confidence was misplaced and the Whigs came into power knowing that some measure of reform was essential. In March 1832 the Whig proposals for reform were presented to the House of Commons and met with uproar: they were far more radical than had been expected. A £10 household franchise in the boroughs would secure the representation of many middle-class men while excluding working men. This was the kind of “safe and practical reform” envisaged by the leading Whig reformer, Lord John Russell. It was clear to some of the more prescient radicals such as Henry Hetherington that the bill would not meet working-class demands. 1832 in context War with France ended in 1815, popular radicalism returned to Britain and an increasingly powerful middle class began to make its presence felt The late 18th century saw the loss of American colonies, new ideas about forms of government associated with the American Revolution and European Enlightenment, and economic and social changes associated with industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth. It was a period of change on many fronts; the 1790s was a decade of both radicalism and reaction. New divisions of labour and the spread of industrial capitalism meant that discontent was widespread. Many artisans and labourers sought better working conditions and understood that parliamentary representation might be one way to secure them. Merchants, manufacturers, and professional men, many of them Dissenters, faced with civil disabilities, wanted more say in political processes. First reactions to the Revolution in France in 1789 were enthusiastic. Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791–2) with its argument for universal manhood suffrage as the only legitimate basis for government had been greeted with huge enthusiasm. Societies of working men had been established across England and Scotland seeking constitutional reform. But the execution of the French king and queen and the onset of the Terror shifted opinions dramatically, while war with France made criticism an unpatriotic action. Middle‑class reformers retreated and the government embarked on a programme of repression, designed to crush radicalism at home. It was only after the defeat of France in 1815 that popular radicalism re‑emerged, led by figures such as the orator Henry Hunt and brilliant journalist and publicist William Cobbett whose bitter critique of “Old Corruption”, a metaphor for the systematic political oppression associated with heavy taxation, fiscal abuse, sinecures and monopolies, combined with his defence of “Old England” made him one of the most powerful voices of the period. The Tory government, alarmed at the mobilisation of the “industrious classes” (artisans, cotton spinners, handloom weavers, small masters and tradesmen) cracked down again and the Peterloo massacre in 1819, when an unarmed crowd was fired upon, shocked middle-class reformers. During the 1820s working men and women in the areas of the new factory system, whether in Yorkshire, Lancashire, or Lanarkshire, struggled to come to terms with different forms of exploitation while in other urban centres such as London or Birmingham it was the decline of old patterns of skill and the spread of semi-skilled work done by women and children that disrupted established ways of living and working. As EP Thompson argued in his book The Making of the English Working Class a sense of identity and shared consciousness gradually emerged, rooted in the experience of industrialisation and urbanisation, expressed through trade unions, radical press, reading rooms, and a culture of autodidacticism, and increasingly focused on the struggle for the vote for men. Women were expected to support the claims of husbands, fathers and brothers. Class, signifying new relations between masters and men that operated in a market economy, was the key axis of politics in this period. Middle-class men had also been articulating their claims as propertied men, denizens of the new commercial and manufacturing order, to be represented in parliament. James Mill sang his paean of praise in his influential Essay on Government (1819) to the rational and responsible middle-class men who would secure the right kind of polity for a modern world. These men championed families with industrious patriarchal husbands and fathers and domesticated wives, engaged in voluntary associations, and secured authority in their towns and cities with the Municipal Reform Act of 1835. His assessment was sharp. The Whigs, he argued, knew “that the old system could not last and desiring to establish another as like it as possible, and also to keep their places, they framed a Bill, in the hope of drawing to the feudal aristocracy and the yeomen in the counties a large reinforcement of the middle class. The Bill was, in effect, an invitation to the shopocrats of the enfranchised towns to join the Whigocrats of the country, and make common cause with them in keeping down the people, and thereby quell the rising spirit of democracy in England”. Drama in the House of Commons Other radicals, however, including key figures such as William Cobbett whose hugely influential Political Register played a vital part in popular politics, believed that the bill would make a difference and they must support it. It was the alliance from “outside”, of pressure from both middle and working-class reformers across town and country, that ensured the success of reform. But Westminster still held the key and in the 1830s the House of Commons was at the political heart of Britain and its empire. A dramatic second reading in the Commons secured the bill by one vote as Thomas Babington Macaulay (later to be celebrated for his History of England) described to a friend, “Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again. If I should live 50 years – the impression of it will be as fresh and sharp as if it had just taken place. It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver [Cromwell] taking the mace from the table, a sight to be seen only once and never forgotten”. Macaulay’s speeches – arguing for “reform in time”, claiming that the particular genius of the constitution was its capacity to reform itself, and explaining why Britain unlike its continental neighbours escaped revolution – were powerfully persuasive. “All history is full of revolutions”, he argued, “A portion of the community which had been of no account, expands and becomes strong. It demands a place in the system, suited, not to its former weakness, but to its present power. If this is granted, all is well. If this is refused, then comes the struggle between the young energy of one class, and the ancient privileges of another”. Britain on the brink of revolution In the Commons there was sufficient support for reform, but the Lords with their Tory majority and strong contingent of bishops was a different matter. In September they threw out the bill and there were riots of workers in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol. As one Whig peer understood all too clearly, “the bill at last must be carried by force or fear, not from conviction or affection”. In May 1832 the Prime Minister Earl Grey, faced with the intransigence of the Lords, made the shocking demand that the king should create 50 new peers as the only way to secure a majority. The king refused, Grey resigned and the Duke of Wellington attempted unsuccessfully to form a government. These were the celebrated Days of May when Britain came very close to revolution. Petitions poured in from all parts of the country; the novel idea of a run on the banks – “To stop the Duke go for Gold” was the slogan – was proposed, and the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild had to come to the rescue; 200,000 delegates met in Birmingham and heard Attwood hint that armed insurrection might be necessary. The king had to return to Grey and the bill went through. Why did it matter? The Reform Bill, as John Bright the Quaker reformer put it, was “not a good bill, though a great bill when it passed” for its implications were substantial. The same people went on ruling Britain, the aristocracy maintained their dominance in government until the 1870s, patronage did not disappear and nor did deference. Few middle-class men went into the Commons. Yet something very important had happened. An aristocratic Whig government had to bow to popular pressure, just as the Tories had done in 1829. They had opened a door, which they would have much preferred to keep closed. They hoped the business was finished but of course it was not. Strictly men only Many of those working-class reformers who had been bitterly disillusioned by the betrayal of their hopes with the 1832 Act were pivotal to the formation of the Chartist movement which sought universal male suffrage and played a vital part in the politics of the later 1830s and 1840s. The Reform Act specified for the first time that it was men who could vote. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for “every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise”. Smith was a wealthy Yorkshire lady and saw no reason why those who paid taxes should not have a share in the election of their representatives. She had no success but her petition was symptomatic of new claims being made by women, claims that would not be met for more than a century. Meanwhile the newly enfranchised middle class did flex their muscles on the slavery question. In the election that followed the Reform Act supporters of antislavery organised on a large scale to ensure that candidates would pledge to vote for emancipation. In the new session of Parliament slavery was abolished, though apprenticeship, a system of forced labour, remained. Meanwhile, decisions about the character of the nation had repercussions far beyond. In 1833 in debates over the new Charter Act for India it was made clear that while representative government was appropriate for white Britons, a benevolent despotism was the most suitable form of government for India while in Ireland, that “metropolitan colony”, new forms of coercion were introduced that would not have been tolerated on the mainland. The year 1832 stands for a critical moment in the history of both nation and empire. History facts: 1800–1849 The Reform Act in Britain: four nations, but not treated the same… In England and Wales the electorate increased from one in eight adult males to just short of one in five In Scotland one in eight adult males had the vote In Ireland only five per cent of adult males could vote Key years: other important events in the first half of the 19th century 1800 – Act of Union. This was forced through the Irish parliament by British Prime Minister Pitt after the failure of the United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798. The Irish were now represented at Westminster. Pitt promised Catholic emancipation would follow but the entrenchment of the Protestant ascendancy meant that this was long withheld. 1807 – Abolition of slave trade on British ships. 1807 finally saw the abolition of the British slave trade after campaigns on an unprecedented scale had been waged on and off from 1787, led by Clarkson and Wilberforce. “The sense of the nation has pressed abolition upon our rulers” was the judgement of the influential Edinburgh Review. The declaration of the Republic of Haiti also played a part, for French competition in the Caribbean sugar trade was much reduced. 1815 – Battle of Waterloo. The year saw the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the triumph of Britain as a world power. Conquests in the Caribbean, India and the Cape meant that the Empire had expanded greatly and Britain ruled approximately a quarter of the world’s population. 1819 – Peterloo massacre. The end of the French wars saw extensive demobilisation and unemployment. Political demands first articulated by radicals in the 1790s were revived and a mass meeting in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, addressed by the great orator Henry Hunt and demanding political reform, turned into the massacre of Peterloo when the militia fired on unarmed protestors. 1829 – Catholic Emancipation. This was finally granted after years of agitation in Ireland led by Daniel O’Connell. “We are men and deserve to be free” was the cry of the Catholic Association which mobilised huge numbers of men with the support of “their” women across Ireland and forced the civil equality of Catholics on an unwilling Tory administration. A struggle for repeal of the Union soon began, however, for emancipation did not solve Ireland’s grievance. 1833 – An end to slavery. A rebellion of the enslaved in Jamaica in 1831 and a popular campaign across Britain led to the abolition of slavery from 1 August 1834. Forced apprenticeship (brought to an end in 1838) and 20 million pounds in compensation convinced the West Indian interest to accept this. A Charter Act for India increased the role of the British government in India and reduced the power of the East India Company. 1846 – Repeal of Corn Laws. Another popular campaign, this time spearheaded by middle-class free traders, resulted in the Repeal of the Corn Laws, long regarded as a symbol of the continuing power of the landowning classes. Prime Minister Peel’s decision split the Tory party opening the way for Disraeli’s rise to power. 1848 – Revolution in Europe. Revolutions erupted across continental Europe and there were extensive fears in Britain that Chartist demands for parliamentary reform including a universal male franchise could not be contained. On 10 April London was barricaded with troops at the ready but in the event the demonstration on Kennington Common presented no threat. 1849 – Advancement for women. Bedford College was opened, initially to train women teachers, and among its pupils in the years to come were Barbara Leigh Smith and George Eliot. This was one of the signs of the development of the women’s movement that emerged in the 1850s, committed to education, employment and suffrage for women alongside an end to the sexual double standard. More turning points in British history Read next: 1851: The Crystal Palace Go back: 1776: The year of American independence <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/06/TP-Images-with-overlay14-2f9a629.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part fourteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1650–1699. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part fourteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1650–1699. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Catherine Hall is professor of modern British social and cultural history at University College London. Publications include Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and At Home with the Empire (CUP, 2006) edited with Sonya Rose Further reading: The Making of the English Working Class by Edward Palmer Thompson (Penguin, 1968); The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain by Eric Evans (Longman, 1983); The Great Reform Act by Michael Brock (Hutchinson, 1973); “The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act” by Catherine Hall in Gendered Nations. Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century by Ida Blom et al (eds) (Berg, 2000) This article was first published in the August 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part sixteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1750–1799. In 1776, America voted to sever their political ties to Great Britain. The American Declaration of Independence was adopted on 4 July, a date that is now celebrated as 'Independence Day' or the 'Fourth of July'. Here, Jeremy Black looks at the year of the declaration, in which the rejection of British authority by American settlers led to a war that not only threatened the whole British empire but would also, in the long term, lead to changes in its political traditions…
The American Declaration of Independence, adopted on 4 July 1776, was a key moment in the history not only of North America but also of Britain and the English-speaking world. Until that moment, it has been possible that the fighting that had started outside Boston the previous year would end in a compromise, with George III backing down, the solution indeed sought by most of the American Patriots. However, the failure to reach compromise took the Patriots to revolution. What had seemed possibly a short-term conflict, ending when the British withdrew from Boston in March 1776, became instead a major civil war as the British empire struck back with a concerted effort at regaining the lost colonies by force and as the Patriots opted for independence. In March 1776, Congress was still unwilling to accept a motion by George Wythe and Richard Henry Lee that King George III, not the ministry, nor Parliament, be seen as “the author of our miseries”. Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July? This became possible only because George III in effect disowned the Americans as rebels and treated them accordingly. British policies, including the ban on trade with the rebellious colonies, were designed to hurt, while the government’s attempt to recruit subsidy forces (called foreign mercenaries in the Declaration of Independence) was associated directly with George, not least because these troops were Germans. The rejection of British authority was symbolic as well as constitutional. On 9 July 1776, after the colonial assembly of New York gave its assent to the Declaration of Independence, the inhabitants of New York City pulled down a gilded equestrian statue of the king erected on Bowling Green in 1770 (its metal was to be used for cartridges), while, more generally, the royal arms were taken down, and usually treated with contempt. The king’s name was removed from governmental and legal documents, royal portraits were reversed or destroyed, and there were mock trials, executions and funerals of the king, each a potent rejection of his authority. 1776 in context The year’s drama was played out against a backdrop of great industrial and agricultural development – with concomitant social unrest A year earlier, Thomas Farnolls Pritchard had designed the iron bridge that was to be erected at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire in 1777–9. Spanning more than 100 feet, the bridge carried the road on arched ribs springing from the bases of two vertical iron uprights. It showed progress in action, and was a powerful testimony both to the capability stemming from the working of iron, and to the possibility of economic change that was strongly grasped in this period. Economic historians have produced wonderful work refining our understanding of the material realities of the Industrial Revolution, but the most important dimension was psychological, a belief in the prospect and attraction of change. From 1759, for example, there was a marked increase in the number of patents. This belief in change ensured that it became less pertinent to consider the future in terms of a revival of the past or a continuation of the present. Alongside coal and canals, steam engines and turnpikes, there was of course much continuity. In 1800, more of the labour force was still employed in agriculture than in industry and more lived in the countryside than in towns. This was true of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Nevertheless, the trend toward new methods in transport, production and organisation were clear. At the same time, economic development produced stresses. The environmental damage was little recognised, but it was considerable. More generally, working and living conditions could be very grim. Concern about the effects of new machinery on traditional working practices helped lead to violent action. In 1779, Richard Arkwright’s new factory at Birkacre near Chorley, with its machine-spinning of cotton yarn, was burnt down by 3,000-4,000 rioters angered by the offer of work at lower rates. There was also discontent and direct action in rural areas. The enclosure of common land in order to increase agricultural productivity could lead to an angry, indeed violent, response, as with the riots of 1777–80 that accompanied the enclosure of the former Malvern Chase. More generally throughout the British Isles, poaching was a form of resistance that was crucial to the livelihood of many. The Game Laws were widely seen as unfair, while the gentry viewed challenges to them as theft and as threats to the preservation of the social order. Indeed, in the late 1770s, game preserves were first protected by spring guns and mantraps. At the same time, industrial and rural discontent did not prevent an essential political stability. By modern standards, Britain was lightly policed and government relied on a widely-diffused cooperation. This was put under a severe test in Ireland during the 1790s, leading to the unsuccessful rising of 1798, but, elsewhere, the system held, and discord did not prevent an inherent stability. The tottering state In the short term, the impact of the Patriots’ struggle for independence was serious in the extreme. It launched Britain into a war that it did not win, and that became strategically threatening when France (in 1778), Spain (in 1779), and the Dutch (in 1780) joined in as allies of the Americans. As a result, Britain, the great maritime power, was outnumbered at sea for the first time that century. The entire empire was under threat. The British lost positions in the West Indies, West Africa and the Mediterranean. Gibraltar faced a long siege. Britain’s enemies also sought to strike at the heart of empire, with the French and Spaniards trying, unsuccessfully, to invade England in 1779. There was also the danger that resistance elsewhere to Britain, especially in India, would be encouraged by Britain’s enemies. Indeed, the Americans struck at Canada in 1775, and the French at India in 1780. Foreign challenge contributed directly to domestic crisis in Britain. A sense of state and society as tottering were captured by the Gordon Riots in 1780, which brought violent crowds to the centre of London, and by the collapse of the long-serving ministry of Lord North in 1782. This collapse led George III to threaten to abdicate and to go to Hanover, a threat that captured a sense of political and personal breakdown. The long-term, however, is the crucial perspective for 1776. American independence permanently transformed the nature of the British Empire. Prior to then, the bulk of the subjects of the British Crown were of British, or at least European, descent, spoke English, were Christian, and were governed, albeit not to the satisfaction of many in North America, through local legislatures. American independence, however, revealed important deficiencies in the incorporating character of British empire, deficiencies that shattered this empire and that were to be tested thereafter in relations with Ireland. The loss of America was followed, as a result of repeated British successes in war between 1790 and 1815, particularly in India and at the expense of France and its allies, by the creation of a very different British Empire. In this, the bulk of the subjects were not of European descent, did not speak English, were not Christian, and were not governed through local legislatures. This very different imperialism had a major impact, not only on conquered areas, but also in Britain itself. Furthermore, the American Declaration of Independence led to an important division in the British political tradition, one of great importance at the global level. The Declaration asserted a set of principles that suggested a radically different political system, one in which inherited privilege and power were replaced by a fairer society that was open to talent. In time, these values were to influence Britain powerfully, in part as a result of the American success. The example of liberty and freedom in North America was a potent one elsewhere, and not only for radicals like Tom Paine. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/AA400666TURNINGPOINTS-c43e1ba.jpg" width="623" height="386" alt="America rejects the mother country: a 19th-century engraving depicts the moment the Declaration of Independence was read out at Philadelphia in 1776. (Photo by Art Archive)" title="America rejects the mother country: a 19th-century engraving depicts the moment the Declaration of Independence was read out at Philadelphia in 1776. (Photo by Art Archive)" /> A beneficial world order Moreover, the creation of an independent state in North America was to ensure the combination of dynamic expansion on the most promising open frontier of the western world with a political society that owed much to the 18th-century British Whig tradition. Whig freedoms, not least of self-government and self-expression, and a limitation on the power of the Church, were enshrined in the American constitution and, thereafter, remained key to American exceptionalism. Many people of course were excluded from the initial span of American liberty, most prominently slaves and Native Americans, but the prospectus of freedom proved one that was extendable to embrace the immigrant groups that entered North America in large numbers, many from the British Isles. A brief history of Thanksgiving The hold of Whig freedoms on the American psyche has proved long-lived, so the events of 1776 helped ensure that British political culture remained crucial at the world scale in the late 20th century, even after Britain had been subsumed into an inflexible European super-state with individual freedoms shadowed by collectivist solutions. Moreover, many of the liberal ideas that played a central role in British assumptions in the 19th century were taken up by American writers and policymakers from the 1940s, in part, initially, in criticism of the protectionism then shown by the British Empire. Drawing on Adam Smith and others, there was a focus on free trade, and the unfettered movement of money, as political and economic goods, and thus as central goals for government. There was also the notion of a benign and mutually beneficial world order, a goal that proved very difficult in practice, as is very much shown today in the Middle East, but that was an alternative to an empire simply of control, constraint and coercion. The year 1776 also saw the publication of two very significant books. Adam Smith, a Glasgow professor, published The Wealth of Nations which provided the basis for modern economic theory (an achievement marked by his appearance on the £20 note in 2007). Smith argued the case for the free trade that was to become the ideology of the 19th-century British state and economy. This was the cause of much prosperity, in Britain and around the world, as well as of some hardship on the part of those who suffered from the greater international trade and economic specialisation that resulted. Also published were the first volumes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, an enlightened MP. In place of a cyclical theory of history, Gibbon’s work suggested that progress was possible, and claimed that it was not inevitable that a fresh wave of barbarians would destroy Britain as it had done Rome. He also argued that even if new barbarians brought down European civilisation, it had already been reborn on the other side of the Atlantic. More turning points in British history Read next: 1832: The Great Reform Act Go back: 1776: The Jacobite Rebellion Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. His books include A History of the British Isles (2nd edn, 2003), The British Seaborne Empire (2004) George III (2006), and A Short History of Britain (2007: reviewed in this issue’s book section) Further reading: Eighteenth-Century Britain by Jeremy Black (Palgrave, 2001); A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 by Paul Langford (Oxford University Press, 1989); Albion Ascendant. English History 1660–1815 by Wilfred Prest (Oxford University Press, 1998) This article was first published in the July 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part fifteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores explores 1700–1749. The uprising of 1745 enjoyed spectacular early successes yet, as Daniel Szechi reports, it only succeeded in breathing new life into the very regime it aimed to bring to its knees
The most significant watershed in the first half of the 18th century came between July 1745 and April 1746, when the Jacobites launched their last attempt to overthrow Whig control of the British Isles. When the uprising failed, the Jacobite cause was irretrievably damaged and slipped into rapid decline. And with its internal enemy at last vanquished, the Whig regime could turn all its energies to imperial aggrandisement. Out of the Jacobites’ defeat came the epic victories of the Seven Years War, the conquest of the first British Empire and the consolidation of a political order that was to last until the middle of the Victorian era. Yet things hadn’t always looked so rosy for the Whig administration. In fact, it was a British defeat at Fontenoy in modern Belgium on 11 May 1745 that precipitated the rebellion. Prince Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonny Prince Charley”), grandson of James II and VII, had been summoned to France in December 1743 to head a French invasion of southern England scheduled to take place in early 1744. Bad weather, the Royal Navy and English Tory faintheartedness eventually brought that attempt to naught, and the Prince frustratedly idled away his time for the next year. Or so it appeared. In fact, with the help of a syndicate of Irish merchants resident in France, he was secretly preparing a surprise attack on the British Isles. And the news of Fontenoy provided exactly the opening he needed. On 5 July Charles Edward sailed from Nantes with two ships. His plan was to force the Jacobites of the British Isles to live up to their promises by throwing himself into their midst. If enough Jacobites responded and he could expose the weakness, as he believed, of the Whig regime he was sure the French would invade and victory would be his. It was either a bold gambit or a foolhardy gamble, and certainly the odds against success were greatly increased when the Prince encountered a Royal Navy patrol on the way to Scotland and one of his ships was damaged and forced to turn back (with most of his painfully accumulated arms, ammunition and a body of Irish soldiers aboard). Charles Edward thus arrived at Arisaig in Scotland on 25 July accompanied by few more than the famous “Seven men of Moidart”. Once ashore, however, Charles Edward worked wonders. Bluntly told to go home by one appalled Highland chieftain, Charles smoothly countered, “I am come home”. Within three weeks his legendary charm had persuaded two senior clan chieftains to support the rising and other Jacobites were stirring throughout Scotland. As his little army of about 1,500 marched south from Glenfinnan on 19 August it steadily accumulated men. Many were doubtless forced out by their landlords and feudal superiors, but others certainly joined to support the cause Charles Edward represented. 1745 in context The Jacobite rebellion was triggered by grievances at Whig religious indifference, discrimination in Ireland and Scottish economic woes The British Isles on the eve of this momentous struggle was apparently politically stable and in no danger of violent upheaval. But beneath the facade of union and the increasingly visible integration of the Scottish and English economies there was a deep and enduring hostility to the prevailing order. England, Scotland and Ireland had for 30 years been ruled by the Whig party (the party primarily responsible for the revolution of 1688), while their old rivals, the Tories, sourly did what they could to oppose them through conventional politics. A radical element within the Tories’ ranks (the Jacobites), however, went much further and plotted and dreamed of restoring the heirs of James II and VII, the Stuart, Catholic king driven out by the revolution. The Tory party’s first loyalty was to the Church of England, and the Jacobites among them inclined to the exiled Stuart dynasty because they feared the Hanoverian dynasty’s apparent religious indifference was undermining the Anglican hold on society and hence the three kingdoms’ special relationship with God. In Scotland, where the Union had as yet failed to deliver the economic uplift that had been promised in 1707, ongoing political and economic fusion with England remained a bitter source of division and resentment. So, when the Jacobites emerged as the champions of national independence, a wide swathe of Scottish society was immediately drawn to them. In Ireland the Catholic majority was systematically discriminated against economically, socially and legally by the Whig regime, and for two generations thousands of young Irish Catholic men had been slipping away to the continent to serve in the armies of France and Spain. There they openly maintained their allegiance to the Stuarts and did what they could to further the Jacobite cause, while those in Ireland secretly yearned for news of the Stuart “attempt” they hoped would liberate them from Whig oppression. The Jacobite uprising that began in July 1745 came, too, in the midst of Britain’s first major conflict in nearly 20 years. The War of Austrian Succession began in 1740 when Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Silesia and Britain threw in its lot with the beleaguered empress Maria-Theresa against Frederick’s principal ally: France. And though Britain had done tolerably well in the opening stages of the conflict, by 1745 things had taken a turn for the worse. Maria-Theresa’s armies were hard-pressed by Prussian, French and Spanish attacks, and Britain’s ally, the Netherlands, was flagging and war-weary. Worse still, Britain’s main army, led by George II’s son, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was defeated at the battle of Fontenoy. This, in many respects, acted as the trigger for the Jacobite rebellion. Marching hard and fast Hard marching and adept manoeuvring soon put the government’s army in Scotland, commanded by Sir John Cope, at a disadvantage it could only retrieve by retreating. Luck and judgement then combined to allow the now 2,500-strong Jacobite army to seize Edinburgh on 17 September and defeat Cope at the battle of Prestonpans on 21 September. In little more than a month the Jacobites had virtually won control of Scotland. The only question was what to do next. Charles Edward had no doubts: he passionately advocated a march on London as hard and fast as the march on Edinburgh. His Scottish senior officers were not so sure, and only agreed when the Prince assured them he had firm pledges of an English Jacobite rising if they would only march into England. The 4,500-man Jacobite army accordingly crossed the border on 8 November and rapidly progressed southwards, as far as Derby by 4 December, capturing Carlisle and Manchester en route and outmanoeuvring two more government armies to put itself in a position where it could strike unmolested at London. But by the time they reached Derby, Charles Edward’s officers were questioning the whole enterprise. Bar a handful of militants recruited in Manchester, the English Jacobites had conspicuously failed to materialise. And Charles Edward’s only solution to the predicament was to urge that the army press on and attack London, a city of approximately 500,000 people. At a council of the senior officers on 5 December the Prince was outvoted by a coterie of officers centred on his most able commander, Lord George Murray. Instead the Jacobite army was to retreat. Ironically, unbeknown to any of those involved, this decision was taken just as financial panic paralysed the City of London and the French army and navy were in the final stages of throwing together the invasion the Jacobites so desperately needed. A hollow victory Regardless, the retreat was conducted with great skill. Murray dodged and feinted his way past the pursuing government armies, and by Christmas 1745 the rebels were back in Scotland, resting and re-equipping in Glasgow. Government pressure on the Jacobites now, however, became relentless. William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, George II’s youngest son and commander in chief of the British army, had been called back from the Netherlands with the best British regiments. All across England and Wales Whig loyalists were raising money, forming volunteer units and enlisting in the army to fight in defence of Protestantism and liberty (as they saw it). The Royal Navy was doing its best to isolate Scotland from the continent, and Scottish Whigs led by the Earl of Loudon were gathering an army of their own in northern Scotland. Even so, the first government attempt to challenge the Jacobites’ control of central Scotland, led by General Henry (“Hangman”) Hawley, was handily defeated by a revitalised, 8,000-strong Jacobite army at Falkirk on 17 January 1746. The victory was, though, a hollow one. The threat to their homes and families posed by Loudon’s army in northern Scotland united a majority of Charles Edward’s officers in demanding a further retreat northwards, which only ended when the tired army reached Inverness on 18 February. The struggle was, however, far from over. For the next two months the Jacobites raided and probed south from Inverness, and Cumberland’s army raided and probed north from Aberdeen. Both sides were gathering their strength for the final crisis. This came when, for the first time, Cumberland succeeded in surprising the Jacobites by marching north in early April while nearly half their army was away from Inverness raiding and recruiting. He consequently caught the Jacobites at a severe disadvantage when he confronted them on Drummossie moor near Culloden house on 16 April. The ensuing battle did not take long. The Jacobites attacked in traditional Highland style (though many of the men in their ranks were in fact Lowlanders), but over ground that did not favour the headlong charge that was its culmination. Cumberland’s carefully deployed infantry and artillery were thus able to use their superior firepower to maximum effect. Within little more than an hour over a third of the 4,000 or so Jacobites on the field were dead or wounded and the rest in flight. Charles Edward was hustled away in tears before the government cavalry could capture him. According to tradition, as he did so, one of his senior officers Lord Elcho, overwhelmed by the death of his friends and the ruin of the Scottish Jacobite cause, shouted after him, “run, you cowardly Italian!” Hardly fair, but a token of what was to come. Charles Edward fled into the Highlands, where he refused to sanction further resistance despite the regrouping of the greater part of his army at Ruthven between 17 and 20 April. Forced to disperse, the Jacobite soldiers went their separate ways, many of them shedding their weapons, uniforms and cause as they journeyed home to face the consequences of defeat. These were dire. For the next few months Cumberland and his subordinates had their men rape, murder and burn their way through the Highlands and Lowland areas believed sympathetic to Jacobitism. This may have been standard military practice for contemporary armies when dealing with rebels, yet it left a legacy of bitterness that was not soon to fade. Harnessed to Westminster’s dream This dark aftermath was the beginning of a new trajectory for the British Isles. With the Jacobites beaten, Britain’s government could turn all three nations’ military energies outwards, and from the mid-1750s onwards Scotland was harnessed to achieving Westminster’s dreams of global empire. Scotland was, too, internally transformed by the events of 1745. The old ties between Highland chieftain and common clansman, and Lowland heritor and tenant farmer, that had been the basis of society for centuries were in decline before the rising. After 1746 that decline became precipitous. Scotland was on track to becoming a class-based society. Ireland, despite its apparent quiescence during the rebellion, was also far from untouched. Many expatriate Irishmen were involved in the French government’s efforts hurriedly to put together an invasion of England. Others slipped through the Royal Navy’s blockade and fought alongside the Scottish Jacobites at Culloden. When it was all over they were left with nowhere to go. As Charles Edward, haunted by bitterness and loss, drank himself to death in exile, the Jacobite cause withered and died with him. Where could Catholic Ireland now look for succour? Ultimately it turned to radical nationalism, something that would have been unthinkable before 1746. Like all the turning points in this series, 1745 irretrievably changed the scope of what was possible in the British Isles, and ultimately left no future generation untouched. History facts: 1700–1749 Just 62 per cent of children survived to the age of 14 in 1745 The average daily consumption of beer, ale, cider and perry per person was 3–5 pints. This accounted for 19-31 per cent of the average daily calorie intake Around 13,000 Scots were in the Jacobite army at some point during the rebellion. That’s 5.2 per cent of the country’s adult male population Key years: other important events in the first half of the 18th century 1707 – The Act of Union. It may have been touted as an alliance of equals but, in reality, the creation of the kingdom of Great Britain saw a small Scots representation grafted onto existing political structures at Westminster and Scottish interests subordinated to English politics. The constitutional fusion was also championed as being certain to deliver an immediate and substantial boost to Scotland’s allegedly ailing economy (its problems may have been more apparent than real), which it singularly failed to do for nearly 50 years. 1713 – War of Succession. The Peace of Utrecht brought the War of Spanish Succession (1702–13) to a close. This was a highly successful war for Britain in which France was defeated and forced to sue for peace. During the negotiations, however, French diplomats exploited British differences with their allies to extract relatively favourable terms. Britain nonetheless gained substantial imperial possessions and commercial concessions, though it alienated many of its wartime partners in the process. 1714 – The death of Anne. Queen Anne, the last of the Protestant Stuarts in the main line of descent from James VI and I, died on 1 August and was succeeded by Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, the nearest (ostensible) Protestant by collateral descent. The transition from the Stuart to the Guelph dynasty was initially peaceful, and only marred by many Tories’ coolness towards George I, whom they regarded with suspicion because of his religious indifference and the fact he was foreign. 1715 – Jacobite uprising. Inspired by messianic visions of their own righteousness (not to mention consequent likelihood of success) and political hysteria, Jacobite forces rebelled in Scotland, subsequently provoking a rising in northern England. Though much larger in numbers than the 1745 uprising, the rebellion was poorly directed and relatively easily defeated by government forces. The Jacobite army disintegrated in February 1716 in a storm of mutual recrimination that hindered further Jacobite risings for the next 30 years. 1716 – Anglo-French pact. The British and French negotiated an alliance, so revolutionising international relations in Europe. Born of a pragmatic need for international stability on the part of Philippe, Duke of Orléans and Regent of France, and George I at a time when their authority was being challenged by domestic enemies, the alliance was highly successful. For nearly 20 years Britain and France successfully cooperated in maintaining relative peace across the continent. 1720 – Stocks crash. Stimulated by excitement over the rise of French stocks and seduced by fanciful reports of great returns, investors poured huge amounts of money into the South Sea Company in Britain. The bursting of this bubble ruined a few speculators and caused serious losses to many more. As a result, British economic expansion was retarded for over a decade, and the Whig regime was nearly fatally compromised. 1721 – Walpole to the rescue. Sir Robert Walpole saved the Whig party and its hold on power by deflecting public outrage and Parliamentary investigation of the South Sea Bubble away from malefactors within the Whig party and the royal household towards the Jacobite “Atterbury Plot”. As a result, he was able to elevate himself to premier minister and fasten an iron grip on the Whig party. 1736 – Scots lynch army captain. Troops under the command of Captain John Porteous fired on an Edinburgh crowd protesting about the execution of a smuggler. Porteous was convicted of murder, but then reprieved by Government order. Fearing he would be pardoned, a mob broke into the city gaol and lynched him, for which the city was heavily fined by Parliament. Anger in Scotland at this punishment resulted in a crisis in the Scottish Whig party and a surge in support for the Jacobites. 1739 – Mass starvation in Ireland. The bliain an áir (great frost) struck Ireland in December, killing thousands and destroying stored winter food supplies. This was followed by a cold drought and the failure of the harvest in 1740, precipitating mass starvation. It is estimated that, by the time the crisis came to an end in 1741, a higher proportion of the population had died or fled overseas than as a result of the potato famine of the 1840s. More turning points in British history Read next: 1776: The Year of American Independence Go back: 1662: Restoration tragedy Daniel Szechi is a graduate of the University of Sheffield and St Antony’s College, Oxford and is now professor of Early Modern British history at the University of Manchester. His most recent book is 1715. The Great Jacobite Rebellion (Yale University Press, 2006) Further reading: Culloden and the ‘45 by Jeremy Black (Sutton Publishing, 2000); Charles Edward Stuart. A Tragedy in Many Acts by Frank McLynn (Routledge, 1988); The Jacobites. Britain and Europe 1688–1788 by Daniel Szechi (Manchester University Press, 1994) This article was first published in the June 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part fourteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1650–1699. Charles II had been on the throne since 1660 and civil war scars were fading. But now, says John Morrill, attempts to restore a national church set the scene for 200 years of political turmoil
The year 1662 was a warm, bright year: the warmest winter and spring of the whole half century and one of the warmest overall – only dwarfed by the scorching summer of 1686. The scars of civil war, the buildings burned and wrecked by war, were being repaired and replaced. Carpenters and masons were reconverting churches from whitewashed auditoria into sacramental spaces and theatres were being built at an unprecedented rate. Samuel Pepys was able to see a new show most weeks, including The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The French Dancing Master and the first recorded Punch and Judy show. The king was to be seen at many of these plays with his pregnant mistress, a casual insult to the reformation of manners at the heart of Interregnum high-mindedness. A grimmer kind of theatre was enacted at Tyburn where the procession of Regicides dragged there to be half-hanged, eviscerated and cut into pieces was completed. The Restoration made an example of those who took part in Charles I’s trial and execution but passed a wide-ranging indemnity that protected everyone else from prosecution for what they had done over the past 20 years. Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration period But a series of parliamentary acts revealed an on-going neurosis: in late 1661 an Act “against tumultuous petitioning” required all but the humblest petitions to be initiated by JPs and grand juries at quarter sessions; the Licensing Act of 1662 brought in a tougher regime for the control of the press than had existed even before the Revolution – one of its results was effectively to drive newspapers off the streets for most of the next 30 years. Later in 1662, “an Act for the relief of the poor” allowed local officials to forcibly remove all newcomers from a parish if they were “likely to be chargeable” to the poor rate and to return them to their previous place of residence. This was motivated as much by fear of sedition as of vagrancy. But for the better off, 1662 was a good year. The shops were full of goods, the King’s wife introduced the English to tea and the Great Turk coffee house opened in London. In 1662 what Pepys called “the college of virtuosos” (the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge) was established by Royal Charter, and its meetings were one of the few things to distract the king from pleasures of the chase (human and animal). In 1662, Isaac Newton was in his first year at Cambridge, but Christopher Wren was designing weather-clocks, and Robert Boyle was announcing his discovery about the inverse relationship of volume and pressure in gases. In Derby John Flamsteed, later to be the first Astronomer Royal, made his first ever recording of the partial solar eclipse. 1662 in context The country was still recovering from Puritanism and revolution, while the restoration of church and king brought its own problems In 1662, The peoples of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland were coming to terms with the effects of 20 years of civil war and political and religious violence. In the course of the 1640s and 1650s, parish churches were purged of all “monuments of idolatry and superstition”, Christmas and Easter were banned, the Prayer Book was proscribed, bishops, church courts and trappings of hierarchy were swept away. A variety of religious sects sprang up with more (Baptist) or less (Quaker) state encouragement. In 1649 Charles I was put on trial and beheaded for treason against his people, and monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished. A godly army set up and then pulled down various constitutional experiments, the most long-lasting of which made the Lord General Oliver Cromwell Lord Protector. The most contentious of his achievements was the military subjugation of Ireland and Scotland. In Ireland, the Commonwealth governments took almost half the land from Catholics born in Ireland, and gave it to Protestants from England. The population shrank by one third. The proportion of British adult males who died as a result of the fighting was higher than in the First World War. The revolutionaries made many enemies and few friends. By 1660, there was an overwhelming desire for Restoration – for a return to hereditary monarchy, to bishops and Cranmer’s prayers, to Christmas pies, maypoles, sport on Sunday afternoons. But the revolution cast a long shadow. There were enough supporters of the Puritan way – freedom of conscience, the imposition of strict moral codes, plain dealing, plain dress – for the celebration of old and new freer ways to cause political polarisation. All kinds of enthusiasm were discredited. A new spirit of dispassionate, sceptical inquiry challenged the claims of all churches and churchmen. So Church and King were restored, but had to face their critics. And the alliance was fatally wounded by the fact that none of the three monarchs in this half-century was a supporter of the Established Church. Charles II hid his private beliefs so deeply behind a protective marshmallow coating (he was all things to all men) that historians are still not sure whether he was a secret Catholic or an early Deist. James II and VII was a Catholic with an extreme case of convertitis, and William III would do whatever was necessary to ensure that English politicians would underwrite his crusade against Louis XIV. And so the central instabilities of the Restoration, so evident in 1662, created crisis after crisis in 1672, 1679, 1688, 1701. It took Louis XIV of France, threatening to impose popery and arbitrary government on the country, to persuade the political elite to convert the country into a fiscal-military state capable of dominating Europe and claiming a lion’s share of the world’s commerce. That threat was an indirect result of the instabilities of the 1662 settlement, but without those, the trajectory of later 17th-century politics would have been very different. A peaceful year in Europe Internationally, 1662 was a quiet year. There was no European war, although the Chinese seized Formosa (Taiwan) from the Dutch. Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess on 3 May, bringing Bombay and Tangier as part of her dowry. To cover some of the costs of setting her up with an appropriate household, Charles sold Dunkirk, occupied by Cromwell’s troops, back to France for £400,000. In 1660, Charles II had made it clear that he wanted an inclusive settlement. He gave more office, more patronage and more financial rewards to his father’s enemies than to his father’s friends: his friends would not send him on his travels again. He attempted to achieve this breadth in both secular and religious affairs; but he succeeded only in the former. The forces of religious reaction were too strong for him in each of his kingdoms, and in 1662, legislation was passed in each kingdom privileging those who embraced the spirit of the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlements. In England, the Act of Uniformity of 1662 restored a church both Catholic and Reformed, which looked Catholic and sounded Protestant, with a prayer book little changed from that of Elizabeth, with lordly bishops in their medieval palaces. Read more | A timeline of the Restoration period Membership of this state church was made mandatory, with fines and other minor penalties on those who would not attend; and with heavier penalties on those who tried to worship, even in private, according to their experience and conscience. For the next 200 years, the position in English law was that only communicating members of the Church of England could hold public office, or attend university or an inn of court. Charles had wanted to loosen up the terms of membership of his national church, believing persecution would breed far more sedition, than tolerating separation would. But since he never relished a fight, and since his Parliament and many of his advisers were adamant the Church needed to be true to its pre-war traditions and that tolerance would allow sedition to fester, he gave in. As a result, more than one in ten of the clergy resigned, and a similar proportion opted out of regular church attendance and into attendance at conventicles – meetings of dissenters for worship. This created a fundamental instability in English political culture: between those who believed that monarchy needed to be underpinned by a hierarchical, narrow, national church; and those who wanted a different kind of national church or no national church at all. In time, these tensions congealed into the two great parties: Tory (strong church equals strong monarchy equals security of life and property); and Whig (religious pluralism as a hallmark of personal liberty as a hallmark of economic and social prosperity). Expulsion of Scottish clergy Much the same happened in Scotland. A ruined nobility were more ruthless in reclaiming social power and happy to see the power of the Kirk broken and its ministers humbled, and a settlement made that was both erastian (advocating the doctrine of state supremacy over the Church in ecclesiastical affairs) and episcopalian (governed by bishops). The purge on the uncompromising led in 1662 to the expulsion of one third of the clergy. Such men remained convinced they were instruments of God’s will; this made them more seditious than English dissenters. The more seditious they became, the more brutal the reactions of the Scottish establishment: a dark era of torture, massacre, assassination and fanaticism ensued. In 1689 the Revolution was not to be the peaceful fudge that it was in England, but violent, counter-vindictive, partisan. In Ireland, too, religion was the crunch issue. There was spasmodic persecution of clergy, but little attempt to compel Catholics to attend Protestant worship, let alone to convert them. But the big problem was land. In England and Scotland, compromises between the purchasers of confiscated land were usually possible (the purchasers of the land surrendering the title but staying on as tenants on low rents), but in Ireland the problem was unmanageable. More than 40 per cent of the land of Ireland had been confiscated and redistributed to those who had bankrolled English armies to put down the Irish rebellion of 1641 and to 30,000 soldiers who had effected the reconquest. In Ireland, unlike the king’s other kingdoms, in 1662 those confiscations were deemed legal. Charles II promised in 1660 to restore those who had not been directly implicated in the massacres of 1641 and who had supported his Lord Lieutenant against the Parliamentarians. He also promised to compensate those who had to surrender land to that group. These were unrealisable promises. In 1662, the Irish Act of Settlement set up a Court of Claims to examine all these issues. It was overwhelmed by the volume of work and lack of land to square the circle. It left almost everyone dissatisfied except those with family connection or clout with the Irish administration to get their claims to the head of the queue. The 80 per cent of the population who were Catholic were left with 20 per cent of the land. It left England with a permanent problem of garrisoning Ireland and facing a low-level insurgency of “Tories” and “Rapparees” (brigands). It ensured that the Revolution of 1688 in Ireland was not in the least Glorious. It was another bloodbath. 1662 was a year of deceptive calm. Everywhere there is evidence that in the face of a grieving Puritan minority, the peoples of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland set out to enjoy the pleasures forbidden them for 20 years, and engaged in febrile efforts to silence or intimidate those who might try to start the conflict all over again. Charles II talked of religious liberty but ordered the assassination of his most implacable opponents as they plotted against him in exile. The Puritan minister Adam Martindale gave up his pulpit in Rostherne, Cheshire, and invited his parishioners round of a Sunday evening to criticise the sermons given earlier in the day by his successor. He was one of many. What was not restored at the Restoration was peace of mind. History facts: 1650–1699 Number of inhabitants in England 1650: 5.2m Inhabitants in England 1700: 4.9m Number of sick given “royal touch” (cure) by Charles II 1660–85: 51,236 Average age of marriage in England 1650–1700: male 27.7, female 25.9 Tobacco imported into Britain 1675: 2,000 tons Gin distilled in Britain in 1684-5: 533,000 gallons Key years: other important events in the second half of the 17th century 1653 – Cromwell as Lord Protector. Cromwell – wearied by the failure of the Rump Parliament to come up with a new constitution, a new religious framework, more social justice – used his troops to disband it (20 April) and established a Nominated Assembly of godly men with a mandate (4 July) to find long-term solutions. It failed completely and in December Cromwell reluctantly agreed to become Lord Protector under a constitution drawn up by General John Lambert. 1657 – Cromwell refuses the crown. Cromwell was put under great parliamentary pressure to become King. Since the Protectorate was not “known to the laws”, he had more discretionary power than many MPs thought wise; and they thought King Oliver would broaden his support among the many who admired monarchy but not the House of Stuart. But his fear that because God had “blasted the family and the name” it meant He did not want any monarch, made him decline. 1660 – The death of Puritanism. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, there was political meltdown and the Army too fell into factions. In February George Monck, the general in charge of Scotland, marched south and ordered free elections. Parliament recalled the king, but even before they did so, Easter was celebrated in thousands of parishes, and maypoles sprang up on village greens, both symbols that the Puritan experiment had failed. 1672 – The Test Acts. Charles went to war with the Dutch in alliance with the French but chickened out of a deal with Louis XIV to declare himself a Catholic. He did however attempt, by prerogative action, to give full rights of religious assembly to both Protestant and Catholic Dissenters. This backfired, however, and Parliament used the power of the purse to force Charles to accept new restrictions on practising Catholics (the Test Acts). 1679 – Failure of Exclusion Bill. Charles II had no legitimate children, and, as he aged, many Protestants feared both his authoritarianism (bribing of MPs, excessive use of discretionary power, closeness to Catholic France) and the prospect that he would be succeeded by his Catholic brother, James. The Whigs tried (but failed in the House of Lords) to break the hold of “divine right theory” by promoting an Exclusion Bill making Parliament the arbiter of the succession. 1685 – Accession of King James. In February Charles was replaced by James II and VII, who easily saw off rebellions in England by Charles’s bastard son, the Duke of Monmouth, and in Scotland by the rabidly Presbyterian Earl of Argyll. Initially James tried to coax the Tory-Anglicans into working with him to give equal rights to his Catholic coreligionists. They defied him. 1688 – Glorious Revolution. By 1688, James was trying to work with Whigs and Dissenters to promote his Catholic cause. The birth of a Catholic heir and the sheer scale of his attack on Anglican privilege provoked a section of the elite to invite William of Orange to invade to protect Protestantism, the succession rights of his wife (James’s daughter Mary) and to bring English arms and cash into the international coalition against Louis XIV. 1689 – William and Mary. After James fled to France, there was vicious civil war in Ireland, political blood-letting in Scotland and a painful set of compromises in England that allowed William and Mary to rule jointly on terms which some at the time (and since) believed to have changed the nature of monarchy and which others denied. The most important change was the 25 years war with France (1688–1713) that transformed the finances and governance of Britain. 1697 – Peace in Europe.The treaty of Ryswick brought a fragile peace to Europe, although everyone knew that a war between rival claimants to the Spanish succession was imminent. In Ireland, Parliament reneged on the promises William’s generals had made to the Catholics and began a process of sectarian measures (the Penal Laws) that enshrined social and religious injustice. It was also the year St Paul’s Cathedral (rebuilt after the Great Fire of London) reopened for business. More turning points in British history Read next: 1745: The Jacobite rebellion Go back: 1638: The Scottish Revolution <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2007/05/TP-Images-with-overlay15-a4b3be8.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part fifteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores explores 1700–1749. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part fifteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores explores 1700–1749. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Further reading: The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 by Ronald Hutton (Oxford UP, 1985); The Restoration: England in the 1660s by NH Keeble (Blackwell, 2002); Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms by Tim Harris (Penguin, 2004) This article was first published in the May 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part thirteen of our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1600–1649. At first, Charles I saw Scottish opposition to his absolutism and crypto-Catholicism as a local difficulty, but it destabilised all of the Three Kingdoms, says Rab Houston
Crowned King of England in 1625, Charles I progressed north for his coronation as King of Scots in 1633. On his visit, he basked in the compliance of Scotland’s still separate Parliament and the utter obedience of his instruments of government in Scotland – Privy Council, Church and Court. His power within the multiple monarchy of Britain and Ireland, newly made at the accession of his father James I in 1603, seemed absolute. Yet just five years later, Scotland was convulsed by a revolution that caused monarchical authority to evaporate throughout the Three Kingdoms of England (with Wales), Scotland and Ireland, and eventually led to Charles’s execution in 1649. Intelligent, flexible yet tenacious, James proved a much better king of Scotland than of England, but he was able to keep all his kingdoms together – and apart. His second son, Charles, proved good at neither. At the heart of his failure was the close link between religion and politics. Europe’s Renaissance princes had grown politically powerful – too potent for many subjects. They feared monarchs were ready to use the authority they had by virtue of simply being princes (“prerogative” powers) to establish arbitrary or “absolute” government untrammelled by representative institutions like England’s Parliament or the rule of law. Rulers also preferred their subjects to follow their religion. James was a Protestant, but not a Calvinist. Charles was thought a closet Catholic and was married to an open one, Henrietta Maria. To a modern reader, dislike of “big government” may be understandable, but religious affiliation seems a personal choice. In the 17th century religion had very public implications, especially for a monarch, because princes ruled as well as reigned. To contemporaries faced with the last great war of religion on the Continent, the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and the real threat of the extirpation of Protestantism, Catholicism or “popery” was viewed as a danger not only to faith, but also to all rights, liberties, property and privileges enjoyed by British Protestants. Catholics were seen as an early modern fifth column, forever ready to plot and implement treason. More specifically, William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury since 1633, introduced religious changes around a Catholic-leaning doctrine known as Laudianism, which emphasised ceremony in church and what he called “the beauty of holiness”. Charles’s desire for a more traditional and visually reverent Church encountered opposition, though English people worried more about the purely political side of his policies as he tried to enforce “absolutist” rule, dispensing with Parliament from 1629. His drive to extend his personal authority and dispense with what he saw as a penny-pinching and sometimes insolent Parliament went well in the 1630s. He used traditional means of raising money coupled with prerogative courts like High Commission, the supreme power in the Church under the crown, and the hated Star Chamber (a civil and criminal court) to curb religious and political opposition and force through questionable taxes. Discontent at his perceived tyranny was widespread in England at the end of 1637, yet he was riding high – as symbolised by Van Dyck’s portrait of him in 1636. In spring 1638 he won an important test case (Hampden’s Case) about the legality of one of his exactions, “Ship Money”, and looked set to continue pursuing his vision of divine right absolutist monarchy. 1638 in context Charles I’s subjects comprised a disparate set of groups with an uneasy mix of customs, languages and religions – beset by economic problems To appreciate the importance of 1638, we need to understand the diversity of British politics, religion and society in the early 17th century. England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland only became a unified monarchy in 1603 with the Union of the Crowns. Administratively, Wales and Ireland had been closely integrated into the English state since the time of Henry VIII. Scotland had its own Parliament, a separate legal and administrative system, a different currency, and a distinct Church of Scotland. The 1603 Union worked to secure the English succession and to reduce lawlessness on the Border. Yet there was always a legacy of what John Morrill calls “distrust, double-dealing, broken promises, and betrayal”. Understanding was limited by the diversity of the Three Kingdoms. England was firmly Protestant (less than 10 per cent were Catholics) as was Lowland Scotland; the Church of Ireland was Anglican, but most Irish people were Catholics, as were many in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Land ownership was widespread in England, but society was much more polarised in Scotland and Ireland. At least a third of the population of Scotland spoke only Gaelic, 90 per cent of Irish and a similar proportion of Welsh. Few people had a direct political voice. Restricted to perhaps a quarter of adult Englishmen, the parliamentary franchise in Scotland was miniscule, but riots gave more opportunity for women, workers and the young to express themselves. England and Wales was the wealthiest and most economically dynamic part of Britain. It had about five million people, Ireland just over a million and Scotland 8–900,000. Most lived in the countryside: ten per cent of English people lived in towns of 5,000 or more, but just three per cent of Scots and one per cent of Irish. Men married for the first time at about 26, women at 23 and a third of marriages were remarriages caused by a partner’s death. Life was short. Diseases like plague and typhus, over which people had almost no control, could kill thousands and one child in five born alive was dead by its first birthday. This was a violent society, which saw the highest rate of capital punishment in recorded British history. As much as a quarter of employment was in manufacturing, but most industrial production, notably of textiles, was carried out in the home. Trade was mainly in foodstuffs and raw materials, but exciting new commodities like tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco were beginning to be imported from the New World. Energy came mainly from water, wood or the muscles of people and animals and was thus almost all renewable. Expanding population, rising prices and increased unemployment combined with subsistence agriculture to create serious economic problems, particularly in Scotland. Communications were slow, yet migration within Britain was extensive, mostly of agricultural workers over short distances, but London drew people from all over England. Many moved to the New World, but the best opportunities for social mobility in the early 17th century were found in Ireland or in continental Europe. Scots made of stern stuff It was Scotland that brought his ambitions crashing down. The religious reaction there was both stronger and swifter than in England because the Scottish Reformation had followed a more radical trajectory. English Protestantism was a relatively mild creed, albeit with a more militant, “Puritan” wing that aimed to push forward its vision of a godly kingdom on earth. Scots Calvinists were made of sterner stuff, basing their Reformation on a strict version of Protestantism and a “Presbyterian” form of church government that involved chosen laymen as well as the parish clergy in decision making. Scots disliked, and did all they could to subvert and bypass, the Episcopalian church order imposed across Britain by James I. Charles’s government in Scotland was less popular than it had been in 1633 – but not irrevocably so – when he had the Scottish bishops and Laud draw up a Book of Common Prayer for Scotland in 1637. Anti-Calvinist, its attempted introduction acted as a catalyst to the organisation of petitions against what was seen as arbitrary rule, as well as a series of riots, the most famous in July 1637 at St Giles Kirk, Edinburgh. Trying to bring the Scots to heel Charles at first saw the opposition as a little local difficulty, but in February 1638 a group of nobles, magistrates and clergy signed a National Covenant in Edinburgh. On the face of it, this simply bound together liked-minded Presbyterians protecting their religion – written by and for people who wished to unite in a special relationship with God. But it went further. Striking at the heart of Charles’s government, it asserted the primacy of the law, Presbyterian Church and true reformed faith (Calvinism) over royal prerogative, episcopacy and crypto-Catholicism. During summer 1638 the Marquis of Hamilton acted as Charles’s commissioner or viceroy in Scotland and in the autumn both the Scottish Parliament and the first General Assembly of the Church of Scotland since 1617 were called. Hamilton hoped these representative bodies could be used to legitimate a measured introduction of liturgical reform and thus restore royal authority. In fact, they were dominated by Presbyterian clergy and pro-Covenant nobles and together they swept away the royal supremacy over Church, bishops, the Court of High Commission and the Prayer Book. Too late, Charles was swayed by Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland since 1632, who urged a strong line to bring the Scots to heel. Acutely aware of the seething discontents of the Irish, Wentworth believed (prophetically) that concessions in one of the Three Kingdoms would only provoke similar demands elsewhere. Charles raised an army to bring the Scots back to obedience, but its effect in the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40 in Scotland was further to destabilise all the countries over which he ruled. Eventual defeat by the Scots alarmed the English parliament, which blamed Charles for the unrest and tried to curb his powers of taxation and military command. Failure in Scotland gave encouragement to opponents of absolutism and “popery” in England, first in withdrawing the grudging consensus in local government and taxation that had allowed the decentralised early Stuart state to function. Lacking a standing army or anything except the most rudimentary bureaucracy, Charles could only watch the obedience of his subjects drain away. The Scottish debacle also emboldened opponents of Charles’s policies when he was obliged to call Parliament after 11 years of “personal rule”. Amid mounting disquiet, the king was forced to flee London when rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641. Military fortunes ebbed and flowed until the decisive defeat of the royalists at Naseby in 1645. Charles, duplicitous as ever, tried to do a deal with the Scottish nobility, but that alliance too was defeated in 1648. Throughout the decade from 1638 the fortunes of all parts of Britain and Ireland were inextricably entwined. Yet even at the end of 1638 cracks were beginning to appear in the Covenanting theocracy. In parts of Scotland like the north-east that would in the 18th century provide many supporters for the Jacobite cause, Episcopalianism was strong. The Covenanting movement meanwhile contained a fundamental tension between Presbyterians, whose main interest was in protecting their Calvinist Reformation, and the broader political drive to create a more limited monarchy. The later decision to try to confirm the Scottish Revolution by entering into the Solemn League and Covenant with English Parliamentarians in 1643 led to the fateful Scottish invasion of England. This openly divided the Covenanters and gave Charles the chance to try to divide and rule his Scottish enemies. However, the alliance remained unified long enough to defeat Charles, only to fragment irrevocably in 1647–8. Rising tide of sullen disobedience In short, the Scottish Revolution of 1638 both reflected and further encouraged a rising tide of sullen disobedience and active opposition that culminated in England with the calling of Parliament in 1640 and in Ireland with the rebellion of 1641 onwards (see facing page). Charles realised too late both the strength of feeling against his political and religious policies and that the concessions he had made to the Scots struck at the basis of his authority. At the end of 1638 he had capitulated to a Scottish Revolution that nevertheless continued ruthlessly and relentlessly, by intrigue and force of arms, to dismantle the political and religious establishment his father had created in Scotland. “Too weak to be absolute, too ambitious to be anything else” Charles’s arrogant and inept religious policies squandered an inheritance of political stability and plunged not only his dynasty, but monarchy itself, into crisis. The English Civil Wars and Interregnum that filled the years up to 1660 are unthinkable without the events in Scotland in 1638 that began what are known broadly as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The Scots began Charles’s downfall and their Covenanting ideas set the tone for armed resistance throughout Britain in the following decade. It was a true watershed in British history. Above all, 1638 highlights the way that events in one part of Britain influenced the development of others and indeed of the whole United Kingdom. It exemplifies the need for a British rather than purely an English history of the “north Atlantic archipelago” in the early modern period. History facts: 1600–1649 Less than a third of men and less than a tenth of women across England and Lowland Scotland could sign their name circa 1640 35 per cent of the population was 15 or under, 6 per cent 60 or older (c 1600) In 1649 London’s population was 400,000, but Edinburgh, the second city of the British Isles, had only 35,000 and Dublin 20,000 Key years: other important events in the first half of the 17th century 1603 – Union of the Crowns. Elizabeth I never married and without an heir her crown passed to the man whose mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, she had allowed to be executed in 1587. King of Scots at just 13 months old after Mary was deposed by her own nobility in 1567, James VI inherited a much richer kingdom than his own and quickly moved to London where he was crowned James I of England with “silent joye, noe great shouting”. 1608 – Plantation of Ulster. Following the shock of a rebellion by Sir Cahir O’Doherty of Inishowen, previously a loyal ally, James I adopted a radical scheme for systematically colonising Ulster with English and Scots Protestants, in the belief it would subdue unrest and win over the “rude and barbarous Irish” to “civility”. 100,000 Scots and 20,000 English settled in Ulster over the century, sowing the seeds of discontent among the indigenous population that are still evident in sectarian tensions today. 1609 – Statutes of Iona. James’s parallel response to his other problem area, the Gaelic-speaking, Catholic-leaning, clan society of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. A coherent and ideologically driven attempt to alter the nature of the region, it represents an early form of ethnic cleansing of people who allegedly manifested “grite crueltie and inhumane barbaritie”. The Statutes struck at the heart of clan society, which was not principally about kinship, but about feasting and fighting. 1623 – Last English subsistence crisis. While Scotland still had famines in the 1690s and beyond, and Ireland tragically until the 1840s, the last time large numbers of people died of hunger in England was at the end of James I’s reign – and that mainly in the north-west. Thereafter England became the most agriculturally productive country in Europe and the one with the highest average standard of living, creating the preconditions for the 18th-century “consumer revolution”. 1628 – William Harvey and the circulation of blood. First demonstrated in 1616, he published a book about his discovery of the motion of the heart and circulation of the blood, challenging existing theories that saw “humours” determining the function of the body. His work ultimately became recognised as the most important medical advance in a millennium. 1629 – Foundation of the Massachusetts Bay Company. This royal chartered company established the New England colony and marked the beginning of the systematic settlement of North America. The first settlers were Puritans anxious to set up an exemplary “city upon a hill”. Between the 1620s and 1775 roughly 750,000 white people moved voluntarily from Europe to North America and perhaps as many as five million far-from-willing black Africans. 1641 – Rebellion in Ireland. Dispossessed and oppressed by the Plantation Protestants, native Irish Catholics rose in bloody rebellion, stirring up the fears of popish plots and threats of invasion that had haunted English people since the days of the Spanish Armada (1588) and Gunpowder Plot (1605). Extensive and prolonged, the rising permeated British politics during the 1640s and was not finally suppressed until Cromwell’s arrival in Ireland in 1649. 1645-6 – Peak of English witchcraft executions. While most English witchcraft accusations were very personal, the actions of Matthew Hopkins, Puritan, lawyer and self-proclaimed Witch-finder General, single-handedly created the most intensive hunt for witches in English history: over 100 women were executed. Witchcraft accusations show a mental world saturated by the supernatural. 1649 – Execution of Charles I. Being a monarch had always been a dangerous occupation and plenty of previous English kings had died in battle or by assassination, but none had been judicially murdered by his own people. The death sent a shudder through the elites of early modern Europe. It also introduced a bold experiment in both social engineering and republican government that was reversed (but never forgotten) in 1660. More turning points in British history Read next: 1662: Restoration tragedy Go back: 1588: The Spanish Armada <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2021/06/TP-Images-with-overlay14-2f9a629.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part fourteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1650–1699. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part fourteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1650–1699. (Image by Getty Images)" /> Rab Houston is professor of modern history at the University of St Andrews. His books include Autism in History (Blackwell, 2000), The New History of Scotland (2001) and Punishing the Dead: Suicide in England and Scotland, 1500–1850 (OUP, 2010) Further reading: The British revolution, 1629–1660 by Allan Macinnes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); The fall of the British monarchies, 1637–1642 by Conrad Russell (Clarendon Press, 1991); The Civil Wars: a Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638–1660 edited by John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (Oxford University Press, 1998) This article was first published in the April 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part 12 in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1550–1599. Pauline Croft says the decisive defeat of Spain's invasion force helped reconcile England and Scotland – and had great significance for western Europe too
You may think it hardly original to choose the defeat of the Spanish Armada as the key event of 1550–99. However, its significance is often misunderstood. It was not merely an English or even British drama, but a contest when much of the fate of western Europe hung in the balance. After the accession of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, friction between England and Catholic Spain became endemic. In 1580, the English sea captain Sir Francis Drake returned from his successful circumnavigation of the globe, including sailing up the Pacific coastline of south America and ransacking Spanish settlements. At the same time, Philip II of Spain’s forces invaded Portugal, where the royal line had died out, leaving Philip as the nearest heir. The conquest of Portugal brought huge extra colonial territories to the Spanish crown: it also brought the deep-water Atlantic port of Lisbon, a great naval asset. The successful takeover of the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Terceira in 1582/3 confirmed Spain’s new status as an oceanic power. Meanwhile France was devastated by divisions between the Huguenot (Protestant) party and the extreme Catholic League. The death in 1584 of the Duke of Anjou, next in line to his childless brother Henri III, indicated that the throne would go to their distant cousin, the Huguenot Henri of Navarre. That was intolerable not only to the Catholic League but also to Philip II. They secretly concluded an agreement that Spain would support the League when civil war inevitably resumed. In the Netherlands, a dominion inherited by Philip from his father, a long standing rebellion appeared to be waning. Philip’s nephew, the Prince of Parma, was proving an effective general and in July 1584, the rebels’ charismatic leader, William the Silent, Prince of Orange, was assassinated. England now faced the possibility that Spain might soon control the entire coastline of western Europe, from the western Mediterranean around France to the borders of north Holland. In August 1585, convinced she had no other option, Elizabeth concluded the treaty of Nonsuch, sending aid to the Dutch. To Philip, that made England a hostile power, and in October he began to think seriously of an invasion. By spring 1587, preparations were proceeding rapidly in Cadiz, the Basque ports and Lisbon. Then in April, with no warning, Sir Francis Drake descended on Cadiz and destroyed 24 ships, together with considerable stores of food and munitions. From then on, Spain was committed to the Enterprise of England. 1588 in context Elizabeth I managed religious divisions and kept Spain at bay. England’s earlier prosperity declined but relations with Scotland improved England was overshadowed by France and Spain, but since the latter were usually at odds with each other, it could pursue its own interests safe from attack. Until 1550, England and Scotland were often at war, and for a while the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the son of Henry II threatened England with a Franco-Scottish “pincer movement” on the Borders and in the Channel. However after mid-century, France fell victim to a series of civil wars, largely the consequences of the Reformation. Spain was hardly touched by the Reformation and grew wealthy on profits from its New World territories. Elizabeth and her council had to ensure religious divisions did not destabilise the country, and that Spain, the super-power, was kept at arm’s length. The first aim was achieved, and English intervention in Scotland in 1560 ensured the success of the Scottish Reformation. Thereafter the victorious Protestant faction in Scottish politics cultivated an increasing amity with Elizabeth. The Scottish Reformation alarmed the French crown, and led English statesmen like the staunchly Protestant Sir William Cecil to foster the “British dimension” in their policies. All this alienated Scotland from its traditional ally, France, and strengthened good relations with England. But Spain’s Philip II became increasingly hostile to Elizabeth, whom he saw as a troublemaker, on the high seas and in the Netherlands. Elizabethan England prospered, with good harvests for over 30 years and an increase in overseas trade. London boomed and English merchants reached out to Muscovy, the Levant, and in 1600, the East Indies. Stability was broken only by the rising in the North, (1569–70) which was harshly repressed, and the disturbance in the capital led by the earl of Essex in 1601. The queen put great effort into public appearances, particularly in the 1570s, going on progress throughout the country. After 1588, the second part of her reign was darker, with England involved in continental wars and faced after 1594 with a gathering revolt in Ireland. The majority of the population were still Gaelic in language and culture, and remained Catholic. Led by Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, they seized the chance of throwing off the English yoke, and hoped for Spanish aid. In England, a rising population put pressure on limited resources. Military costs led to heavy taxation, and inflation, harvest failures and poor trade due to wartime disruption made life more difficult for most, and desperate for the poor. As the queen aged, there was concern over the succession. After the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587, her son James VI of Scotland was the most likely heir. Elizabeth never confirmed him as successor, but after 1586 she paid him a pension. On her death in March 1603, the new King James I was peacefully proclaimed by her privy council. Standing between England and conquest There are four main points about the events of 1588. First, despite Drake’s raid, the scale of the Spanish action was enormous, and twin-pronged. The Armada intended to link up with Parma’s Army of Flanders, which would punch home the invasion. On the vessels were 19,000 troops, almost all Spanish veterans. A further 27,000 were being readied by Parma for bringing across the Channel, in requisitioned vessels and barges. The admiral, Medina Sidonia, commanded around 130 ships with the combined firepower of 360 guns. The campaign cost 45,000 ducats a day and tied down the whole military and naval resources of the Iberian peninsula, gravely affecting the defence of other parts of the Spanish monarchy. All that stood between England and conquest was the navy. Secondly, despite the sheer size of the Armada, the contest was not completely unequal. Largely constructed in the 1570s, the English navy’s “race-built” vessels were fast, heavily armed and weatherly. They proved far more manoeuvrable than anything in the Spanish fleet, which never managed to implement its plan of grappling and boarding them. The English on board, unlike the Spanish, were all skilled seamen and even the aristocrats in command, men like Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham and Lord Henry Seymour, all had some sailing experience and joined in the crew’s labours. The royal navy consisted of 36 fighting ships with six smaller pinnaces, essentially message ships. They were backed up by 143 merchant vessels, some of them heavily gunned for privateering – preying on the enemy’s shipping to make money out of captures. The best of the fleet, especially the ten biggest race-built vessels, was superb, but it was a small force to hold off the massive, crescent-shaped formation coming up the Channel. Thirdly, the situation was rendered even more dangerous since the English privy council misread Spanish intentions and ordered troops to gather at Tilbury in Essex. Medina Sidonia intended to land his formidable forces in Kent. He would establish a base for Parma’s men, then as soon as they were streaming across the Channel, the veterans carried on the Armada would storm to London. However, English strategy was superior to Philip’s over-ambitious plan of linking up Medina Sidonia’s fleet with Parma’s army. English land forces were in the wrong place, but the navy was not, for Drake had correctly divined Spanish intentions. The English ships initially tried to engage the Armada in Atlantic waters, but failed and returned to Plymouth. There, on 30 July 1588, over a hundred ships assembled in Plymouth Sound. Under cover of darkness, they skilfully tacked across the face of the oncoming Armada and round its southern tip. Advantageously placed upwind of their opponents, English vessels continually harassed the Spanish formation as it sailed eastwards. Parma could not move his men safely across the Channel until the Armada had cleared it of English warships. He also faced a threat from rebel Dutch vessels trying to blockade him in, ready to fire on his unarmed barges if they put to sea. Provided the English navy remained capable of fighting, Parma’s forces were unlikely to embark. Competently, Medina Sidonia brought most of his great fleet relatively unscathed into Calais roads on 6 August, but the English still controlled the Channel. Alternate history: what if the Spanish Armada had succeeded? Fourthly, the English won the key battle. On the night of 7 August, eight fire ships bore down on the Spanish galleons clustered off Calais. Faced suddenly with the burning vessels, most Spanish captains cut their anchors and fled. The Armada was transformed from a cohesive and still formidable fighting force to a scattering of panic-stricken vessels. Remarkably, they managed to regroup, but the following day, off Gravelines, the English came within artillery range and the battle raged for nine hours. Morale on the Armada was broken and Medina Sidonia hanged a captain who disobeyed his orders to continue fighting. Twenty officers were arrested: a recent discovery in the Spanish archives has shown that even surrender was briefly considered. Although the Armada sustained great damage, so far only six major galleons had been lost. Worse was to come on the way back; more than 30 ships, weakened by English guns, sank in severe storms off the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. But as the experienced admiral of the Biscayan squadron observed in his journal, the whole venture was lost when the English retained command of the Channel, preventing them from linking up with Parma. The ships went down as they were fleeing for home, long after their enterprise had ended in defeat. There have been attempts, at the time and more recently, to argue that the outcome was just due to luck, or weather, or more in the nature of a draw, since Spain rebuilt a substantial navy in the early 1590s. Those arguments are unconvincing. The campaign of summer 1588 was an outstanding English victory. It was hard fought, and by the end, the English were almost out of ammunition. However, Drake’s fireships were a brilliant tactical device and Gravelines must count as one of the greatest English naval actions. It is clear from the profusion of pamphlets across Europe that everyone accepted Spain had been resoundingly defeated. Philip II never again considered an invasion of England by combined sea and land forces: the best his rebuilt navy could do was to raid Cornwall. The outcome of 1588 was a European turning point. England’s successful resistance showed that Spain was not invincible, encouraging Protestants in the Netherlands and France to continue their struggle. The Dutch threw off Spanish rule and Henri of Navarre became king of France, bringing religious peace and economic recovery. The young James VI of Scotland, bound to England by the treaty of Berwick in 1586 but alienated by the execution of his mother Mary Queen of Scots in 1587, shrewdly seized the Armada moment to emphasise his claim as Elizabeth’s heir. He wrote at the height of the crisis in summer 1588, assuring her of his support “as your natural son and compatriot of your country”. In 1589 James also composed a “Meditatioun” on the unity of “the Ile of Britain”, jointly protected by “our virtewe” and God’s “michtie wind”. Scotland’s king presented the events of 1588 as a victory for “Britain” and for himself as the future first king of “the Ile”. James had done little to help, but he recognised that the defeat of the Spanish Armada was already becoming a defining moment in the development of a national identity that would be both British and Protestant. History facts: 1550–1559 Population peaked in mid-century for England and Wales at about 3.4 million, but by 1561 had shrunk by around a quarter of a million. This was due to poor harvests and epidemic diseases. Thereafter a steady rise took the population to c4.2 million for England and Wales by 1603. Key years: Other important events in the second half of the 16th century 1558 – The accession of Elizabeth. Queen Mary had been a persecutor, burning over 300 people at the stake for their beliefs. Her successor, her half-sister Elizabeth, was a moderate Protestant who hoped to avoid religious division by constructing a national church acceptable to everybody. The Church of England never became completely comprehensive, but Elizabeth’s mostly benign rule brought peace and security to England. 1560 – The Scottish Reformation. The absence of the half-French Mary Queen of Scots (who as fiancée of the heir to the French throne was at the French court) allowed a Protestant group to seize control. In 1560 they dominated the Scottish Parliament, abolishing the power of the papacy and the Mass. In England Sir William Cecil persuaded Elizabeth to use English troops to evict the French, who were forced to withdraw. The Protestants, initially a minority, steadily transformed Scotland into a Presbyterian country. This was crucial in developing Anglo-Scottish Protestant solidarity, allowing a sense of “Britishness” slowly to emerge on both sides of the Border. 1561 – Recoinage completed. From 1544, coinage had been steadily debased for profit by successive monarchs until it looked untrustworthy. Plans for a full recoinage were drawn up in 1556, under Mary, but nothing was done until 1560 when the base coin was “cried down” by proclamation. The minting of good quality new coins was completed in 1561. It caused inconvenience, even hardship, but was essential for economic expansion and overseas trade. 1570 – Rebellion and excommunication. Northern England remained conservative in religion and its leading nobles, the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, joined a conspiracy in 1569: the Duke of Norfolk would marry Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic and Elizabeth’s nearest heir, while the North would rise in rebellion. Just as it collapsed, the Pope xcommunicated Elizabeth, releasing her Catholic subjects from loyalty to her. This major tactical miscalculation made the plight of English Catholics more difficult. 1580 – Drake returns to England. Drake left Plymouth in November 1577. Three years later, he returned, becoming only the second captain, and the first English one, to complete the circumnavigation of the globe. He brought with him booty from Spanish ships and settlements, so when the Queen knighted Drake at Deptford on the deck of his weatherbeaten flagship Golden Hind she was condoning attacks on Philip II’s subjects. 1588 – The Welsh Bible. Publication of the first Welsh-language Bible. The Welsh New Testament appeared in 1567, but translating the rest of the Bible took 21 more years. The privy council ordered that by Christmas, every Welsh parish should acquire a copy. The Welsh Bible helped make Wales into a genuinely Protestant country. 1589 – The Portugal expedition. The defeat of the Armada led to over-optimistic English plans to complete the humiliation of Spain by destroying those ships that had returned to harbours on the Iberian north coast, and assisting Portugal to throw off its Spanish conquerors. The expedition had muddled aims, conflicts arose among the commanders, and little was achieved. 1596 – The Oxfordshire rising. In November 1596, a few men gathered in western Oxfordshire to complain about recent enclosures. They plotted to throw down the fences enclosing new fields, to seize weapons from the houses of the gentry, perhaps even to murder some landowners. Two were executed, but the following year the privy council also rebuked the local gentry for their enclosures. The real problem was the disastrous series of four harvest failures from autumn 1594 to autumn 1597, which sent food prices soaring and hit the poor hardest. 1599 – The Globe theatre. William Shakespeare was already established as a playwright, but in 1599 he and his troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, moved into the Globe. They became the capital’s leading company, performing among other great plays The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. Between 1570 and 1630, England produced a profusion of talent that has hardly ever been matched, with the Globe dominating the London scene. More turning points in British history Read next: The Scottish Revolution Go back: Henry VIII declares his empire <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2007/04/TP-Images-with-overlay13-4244e02.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Part thirteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1600–1649. (Image by Getty Images)" title="Part thirteen in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1600–1649. (Image by Getty Images)" /> This article was first published in the March 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Part eleven in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1500–1549. Henry VIII's new vision of kingship carried with it lofty ambitions of controlling the British Isles from Westminster, says john guy – but neighbouring nations weren't keen on the idea
Few events in England have rippled out to create a tsunami affecting the whole of the British Isles as much as those of 1534. In this year Henry VIII, who had divorced Katherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, completed his break with the Pope by getting Parliament to acknowledge him as Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England. This meant that Henry had the right to appoint the bishops, vet the articles of faith, and impose his will on the monasteries, all of which he did. To enforce his new powers, Henry revised and extended the treason law. Anyone disputing the royal supremacy, even by words alone, would be put on trial. To winkle out opposition, he set a test: an oath of supremacy and allegiance to the king and the “imperial Crown”, to be taken by those holding offices in Church and State, sitting in Parliament, or who were in religious orders until he dissolved them. Historians like to debate whether Henry ushered in a reign of terror, which misses the bigger picture. The effects weren’t just confined to England. To justify his actions, Henry announced a new theory of kingship based on Biblical and classical prototypes, giving an extra layer of meaning to the phrase the “imperial Crown”. In a nutshell, he claimed imperium (“empire”) with expansionist territorial overtones. When the Duke of Norfolk discussed this with a bemused Spanish ambassador, he cited the precedent of King Arthur, “emperor of Britain, Gaul, Germany and Thrace”. The ambassador could barely keep a straight face, saying it was a pity that Arthur hadn’t also been “emperor of Asia”. Soon no one was laughing. In 1534, Henry began a radical overhaul of provincial government. Implemented in its initial stages by Thomas Cromwell, its focus was Wales, Ireland, the northern borderlands, and finally Scotland. All but Scotland were Tudor dominions, although more in name than in fact. The crown’s writ ran unevenly north of the river Trent and was ignored in Wales and Gaelic Ireland: the people who really mattered in the outlying regions were the territorial magnates. Scotland was, of course, an independent kingdom ruled by the Stewart king, James V, except that he was Henry VIII’s nephew. This encouraged Henry to believe in Scotland’s dynastic dependency, awakening dreams of Anglo-Scottish union. Earlier in his reign, Henry had revived Edward I’s claim to be “superior” and “overlord” of Scotland. In and after 1534, he believed that Wales, Ireland and (increasingly) Scotland were “within the orb of the ‘imperial crown’ of England”. No grand theory of state formation underpinned Henry’s policy. He acted mainly out of fear. The northern border was a constant problem: it was vaguely defined and thieves crossed to and fro. Local magnates such as the Cliffords, Dacres or Percies kept the peace, but held their posts almost on a hereditary basis and were regarded by some as fifth columnists. While such criticism was often unfair, Henry was listening to their enemies. He especially questioned the loyalty of Lord Dacre of Gilsland against whom charges of treason had been made. 1534 in context The world was explored, the Reformation was imposed, wealth was redistributed (often towards the king) – and the poor got poorer A rapid demographic upturn marked this period. After 1500, the population rose by a third, but expansion brought problems. Prices and rents soared. Landlords began to enclose common land or amalgamate smaller farms into larger ones. Investors bought land for profit, so that tenants or copyholders were displaced. Many became wage-labourers or migrated to the towns. Speculators tried to sell foodstuffs in the dearest markets. Landlords prospered, but the poor got poorer. London dominated the cloth and luxury trades, but smaller ports shared in the boom. Cloth exports reached a peak by 1550. Wool exports declined, and trade was disrupted after 1544 by exchange-rate fluctuations: the result of coinage debasements. Bristol merchants led the search for the Northwest Passage to Asia. They reached the north-eastern shores of North America, and fished off the coast of Newfoundland. According to tree ring data, the period was one of the warmest before 1900. Although the Thames froze over three times, that wasn’t unusual before its flow was regulated. In 1526–7 and 1535 it rained for up to three months, followed in 1536 by a severe drought. Regional identities were strong, but the rise of printing and literacy shaped the culture. Although Celtic languages were widely spoken in 1500, no book appeared in Cornish, Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic (spoken in the Highlands and Western Isles), while the first book in Welsh wasn’t printed until 1546. No printer worked in Ireland before 1551, and then only in Dublin. By 1550, the London and Edinburgh presses were turning southern English and Lowland Scots into the predominant languages. The biggest changes resulted from the Reformation, when Henry VIII broke from the Catholic papacy, and (in England and Wales) the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In London and the south-east, Lollardy and Protestantism made inroads. In most other places the Reformation was imposed from above. Parishioners weren’t always happy with their clergy, but identified with Catholic liturgies. Each region had its own distinctive saints and shrines: government attacks on images, pilgrimages and prayers and intercessions to saints were more disruptive than the break with Rome. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and sold their lands, Cromwell had meant to use the money as a permanent endowment for the “imperial crown”. His policy failed, because Henry spent most of the cash. The impact was greatest in northern England, where religious houses were part of the social fabric. The redistribution of wealth and church patronage was the major change. The consequences for agriculture were fewer, as many of the monastic lands were already leased to the same gentry who bought them. The inefficiency of Tudor government is revealed by the Dissolution in Ireland. Outside the Pale, just half of the monasteries were dissolved – the others were so poor, it wasn’t worth the effort. They lived on as beacons of the papal Catholicism that Henry VIII detested. In Scotland, James V failed to exploit the rights he extracted from the Pope to nominate to vacant prelacies beyond acquiring the assets of six abbeys for his illegitimate sons. By 1560 the wealth of the monasteries had passed to the nobles. In several cases, their descendants still own these lands. Paranoia sets in A paranoid Henry came to believe that a group of nobles was plotting to overthrow him. Ireland posed the greatest threat, since outside the Pale (the area around Dublin where English rule was concentrated), the Gaelic lords were Catholics who refused to pay taxes or abandon Brehon law or customs (whereby disputes were arbitrated by Gaelic judges, the Brehons). Hitherto, their loyalty was secured by delegating royal power to a trusted magnate family: the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare. By combining a sufficient following in the Pale with their power in the Gaelic community, they had performed a juggling act that had kept Ireland stable for almost 30 years. Wales was closer and the gentry more malleable, but still dangerous. English law was disregarded in the Principality and border marcher lordships, where conflicts of jurisdiction enabled suspects to flee from one lordship to another. Jurors could easily be corrupted, and guns had been fired into the courts. Henry regarded Wales as a haven for insurgents. He was the more concerned because Welsh levies and horses formed the backbone of the royal army, and the favoured route for transporting troops to Ireland was through the (then) port of Chester. In 1534, Henry pounced on Lord Dacre and the Fitzgeralds in a pincer movement. Dacre was put on trial for treason and surprisingly found not guilty, the only nobleman to be acquitted by his peers during the reign. This didn’t deter Henry. As soon as Dacre walked free, he was re-arrested and returned to the Tower. He paid an astronomical fine of £10,000 and undertook not to go more than ten miles from London without the king’s written permission. By then, Henry had the ninth Earl of Kildare in custody, intending to charge him with treason, but his detention sparked a spectacular revolt. Thomas Fitzgerald, Lord Offaly (“Silken Thomas”), the Earl’s heir, denounced Henry as a heretic and ordered those born in England to leave Ireland on pain of death. He threatened to ally with the Pope and the King of Spain, and claimed that 12,000 Catholic troops were on their way to Ireland. Soon the country was convulsed: Dublin Castle was besieged and the rebels went on an orgy of looting and burning, terrifying the citizens. It took a huge army until August 1535 to suppress the revolt, costing 1,500 English lives and £40,000. Henry executed the ringleaders, but their revolt had turned the struggle into something approaching a Gaelic war of independence, committing him to a costly, interventionist policy of “anglicising” Ireland. This explains why, in 1541, he altered his official style from “Lord” to “King” of Ireland. He was incensed by Irish taunts that his “regal estate” there was granted by the Pope, referring to Adrian VII’s bull Laudabiliter, which had granted lordship over Ireland to the Anglo-Normans and implied that Henry held Ireland as a papal fiefdom. When Henry’s threats backfired In Scotland, Henry meant to prevent James V from allying with Spain or France, if that meant Scotland continuing to support the Pope. Opponents of the divorce from Katherine of Aragon had already fled across the border. So had James Griffyd ap Powell, a silver-tongued Welsh rebel, who’d talked his way out of the Tower of London promising to buy horses in Ireland for Anne Boleyn. Instead, he fled to Scotland, where he asked James V to aid a Welsh uprising against Henry. Henry was angry with James for allowing Scots to join the Irish revolt. In 1534, he knew he couldn’t fight on two fronts, so he tried conciliation. He admitted his nephew to the Order of the Garter and sent him a letter justifying his theory of kingship and royal supremacy. When James ignored it, Henry switched to threats, provoking James into his own “imperial” claims and marriage to a French princess in 1537. When she died, James quickly chose another, Mary of Guise. Thereafter, Henry’s determination to conquer Scotland by fair means or foul preoccupied him until his death. In 1534, Cromwell sent a task force into Wales with orders to root out “papists” and try treasons and felonies using English law. His efforts culminated in Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543 which assimilated the medieval Principality and marcher lordships into 12 shires subject to English common law, complete with parliamentary representation at Westminster and a legal system modelled on the English assizes. Henry VIII’s vision of “imperial” kingship meant that royal ecclesiastical supremacy was closely linked to an expansionist, centralising impetus throughout the territories of the British Isles and Ireland – a highly explosive cocktail. In the longer term, the Reformation largely succeeded in England and Wales, whereas in Ireland the extirpation of Catholicism was always unrealistic. Tudor policy in Gaelic Ireland became identified with conquest and colonisation, whereas in Wales the gentry traded their cooperation for patronage. In Scotland, there was a Reformation but no royal supremacy: when eventually the Presbyterian Kirk came into conflict with the Anglican ecclesiastical supremacy, the results could trigger sectarianism almost as bitter as that between Catholics and Protestants. Even in the minds of anglophile Scots, England’s royal supremacy was a fundamental obstacle to union. While Thomas Cromwell’s task force was busy in Wales, its members travelled to Chester. At five o’clock in the morning of 15 September 1534, an earthquake shook the Castle, which “rocked like a cradle, to the great fear of us all therein”. This seismic event, creating panic as far away as Shrewsbury, might well be a metaphor for the half-century. When Henry VIII attempted to govern the outlying regions by a centralised system of command and control from Westminster, he bit off more than he could chew. He shoulders a large share of responsibility for what historians call the “British” or “Three Kingdoms” problem: the dilemma faced when the actions of political elites in one or two of these kingdoms trigger a hostile reaction in another, or when cross-border (especially religious) alliances could subvert or defeat crown policy. A major theme until the 20th century, the problem lingers on in contemporary debates about “Britishness”, the future of Northern Ireland, and Scottish and Welsh devolution. Population Facts: 1500–1549 England in 1500: 2.15m England in 1550: 3.01m Wales in 1500: 210,000 Scotland in 1500: 600,00 (approx) Ireland in 1500: unknown Dublin in 1500: 5,000 (approx) Key years: other important events in the first half of the 16th century 1504 – Empson and Dudley. Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth of York, died. So did Reynold Bray, the king’s chief minister in all but name. Without their moderating influence, Henry would make Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley his agents of fiscal and prerogative enforcement leading to charges of rapacity. Henry married his eldest daughter, Margaret, to James IV of Scotland, the first step towards Tudor plans for dynastic union. 1509 – The Accession of Henry VIII. Henry began his reign by courting popularity. He imprisoned Empson and Dudley for a year before executing them. He promised full redress of subjects’ grievances, but carried on almost exactly as his father had done. He would need even more money to pay for wars and new palaces, and to finance his dreams of conquests in France and Scotland. No attention was paid to Ireland. 1515 – Wolsey made Lord Chancellor. Henry’s first minister was Thomas Wolsey. He’d risen to power as supremo for military procurement. He used church patronage to climb the ladder, but the key to his success was his seeming ability to achieve everything that Henry desired. He was the first to experiment with the printing press for government forms and propaganda. He would diagnose the need for reforms in Ireland, but reverted to supporting the Fitzgeralds when his attempts failed. 1517 – Bad outbreak of ‘the sweat’. A viral pulmonary disease swept through the land on a terrifying scale. The symptoms were myalgia and headache, leading to abdominal pain, vomiting, unbearable headache and delirium, followed by cardiac palpitation, paralysis and death, all in under 24 hours. Henry VIII fled to the countryside. 10,000 died during the year, including 400 Oxford students in a week. The first outbreak had been in 1485, the last in 1551. 1520 – The Field of the Cloth of Gold. Wolsey organised a meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I of France in search of a “universal peace”. Held just outside Calais, the kings talked to little lasting effect. The event was mostly about magnificent displays of power and wealth. The English built a temporary palace crammed with artworks, with fountains dispensing free wine or beer. The main activities were dancing, banqueting, and a full-scale tournament. Francis beat Henry at wrestling. 1527 – The divorce comes into the open. Henry VIII wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. He was in love and wanted a legitimate male heir. Wolsey had to fix it, but Pope Clement VII was a virtual prisoner of Charles V, Katherine of Aragon’s nephew, and refused to give dispensation. Wolsey’s position was further eroded by a rebellion in East Anglia caused by his foreign policy, and Henry increasingly took charge. 1536 – The Pilgrimage of Grace. Anne Boleyn was executed for alleged adultery and incest. Cromwell started dissolving the monasteries and issuing articles and injunctions for the new Church of England. He triggered a massive revolt in Lincolnshire and the north. 40,000 rebels wore pilgrim badges to show they were loyal to the Catholic faith and supported the monasteries. They would be brutally dispersed, but Cromwell was fatally undermined. 1542 – The Battle of Solway Moss. Henry’s army defeated the Scots at the battle of Solway Moss. James V died shortly afterwards. His daughter, Mary Stewart, was Queen at six days old. Her mother, Mary of Guise, would act skilfully to protect her daughter. Henry VIII was determined to betroth her to Prince Edward, his young son by Jane Seymour. When the Scots frustrated his efforts, he would invade Scotland, poisoning Anglo-Scottish relations. 1549 – The overthrow of Protector Somerset. When Henry VIII died, his son Edward VI was nine years old. For two years, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was in charge. He too tried to conquer Scotland, but failed. Meanwhile, his push towards full-blooded Protestantism, currency debasements and inept social and economic reforms caused chaos. Mass protests in East Anglia were the closest thing to a Tudor class war. Somerset was overthrown, and the Duke of Northumberland restored stability. More turning points in British history Read next: 1588: The Spanish Armada Go back: 1453: Richard grabs the throne John Guy is a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, specialising in the period 1450–1700. He received the 2004 Whitbread Biography Award and Marsh Prize for his biography My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Harper Perennial). Other publications include Tudor England (OUP, 1990) This article was first published in the February 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine