The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (79 page)

With the Nonconformist element so strongly represented in the government a fresh approach could be found towards Ireland, increasingly a sore in the body politic. The 1869 Church Disestablishment Act removed the insulting title of official state Church from the minority Protestant Church of Ireland. Even in the north it had next to no membership other than its clergymen, for most Ulstermen were Presbyterians. The Irish Church became a free Episcopal Church and its bishops no longer sat in the House of Lords.

But as far as the majority of the Irish were concerned the important issue was the land. Other than in the north with its linen and shipbuilding industries, farming provided the only employment in Ireland. Depopulation after the famine had brought in a series of landlords attracted by cheap land, but they proved as ruthless as the old, and only a little more scientific. Gladstone’s first Irish Land Act in 1870 attempted to put right the many grievances of the Irish tenant farmer, by compelling landlords to compensate tenants for evictions if they had made improvements in their holdings. A system of loans was instituted to enable tenants to purchase land.

But though the Liberal government might congratulate itself on being such an effective new broom, its reforms had taken place against a menacing background. It was at last plain after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 that the balance of power had tilted away from France and Britain. For 400 years the British had viewed the French with wariness if not enmity. At the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, when the North German Confederation took a Bonaparte emperor prisoner as well as the astounding number of 104,000 of his soldiers, the French became pitiable victims.

In continued pursuit of his ambition to unite the remaining southern German states under Prussia, Bismarck tricked the French into beginning the Franco-Prussian War on the basis of their objections to the German Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne. Napoleon III needed a war to revive his flagging popularity. But though it emerged that he had intended to move the French frontier into Belgium and that he still had hopes of the Rhine provinces, the cumulative impression of Prussian savagery and French weakness left Europe gasping. The price of peace was the surrender to Germany of the French lands of Lorraine and Alsace and payment of an indemnity ‘for causing the war’ of £200 million to Germany. A German garrison would be maintained on French soil until it was paid. France took ten years to recover her strength as an international force, and for the first time the British began to envisage Germany as the enemy. Real fear of Prussian soldiers forced the British army to agree to the much needed reforms outlined above.

But Britain remained neutral over the Franco-Prussian War. She was not in the mood nor had she the strength to interfere in the continent of Europe when attacks on the old balance of power became regular events. British statesman were conscious of how foolish the British lion had looked roaring over Schleswig–Holstein when it had no teeth. When in 1871, seeing the French disorder, the Russians abrogated the peace treaty that had ended the Crimean War and remilitarized the Black Sea, Britain accepted that there was nothing she could do.

In the mysterious way of electorates, a subtle discontent began. The man in the street felt that Britain had been worsted by the Russians over the Black Sea. There was also a dawning realization that, though Britain dominated world shipping, her share of manufacturing was beginning to decline from the high-water mark of twenty years before. Gladstone had also agreed to have an arbitrator appointed over claims by the United States that she should be compensated for the destruction of Northern shipping during the Civil War by the Confederates’ British-built
Alabama
. When news broke that the arbitrator had decided that Britain should pay the colossal sum of £3 million to the United States, it was greeted with stupefaction. It was not so many years since Palmerston had laid down the rule that Britain’s natural mode of expression was gunboat diplomacy. The
Alabama
affair added to the British public’s impression that Mr Gladstone was unable to stand up for Britain’s interests abroad, whatever good he did at home. Did being Liberal-minded also make you feeble-minded?

By 1874 the British public had had enough of being improved. With the reorganization of the Conservative party by Disraeli, the Tory machine became a formidable weapon at elections. The dazzling Disraeli attacked Gladstone and the Liberals as not being patriotic enough, comparing the Cabinet seated on the front bench opposite him to a range of exhausted volcanoes. He played on the fears of the well-to-do. How would their sons get into the civil service or the army now that the old routes of patronage were gone? Among the less progressive there was a feeling of the world changing too much and too fast for them.

Gladstone’s 1872 Licensing Act, which shortened the hours of drinking, annoyed everyone who enjoyed passing time at their local. He himself told his brother after his defeat at the next election that he had been ‘borne down in a torrent of gin and beer’. That election came in 1874: Gladstone dissolved Parliament with the manifesto promise to abolish income tax, but Disraeli became prime minister for the second time, and remained so until 1880. Gladstone for his part announced moodily that he was leaving the Liberal party and Parliament, so that he might have ‘an interval between Parliament and the grave’. In fact he would be prime minister for three more terms, which fortunately for her the queen lacked the prescience to see.

Disraeli was ecstatic–he was back at ‘the top of the greasy pole’ as he had put it in 1868. The queen was very pleased too. Gladstone had lectured her during private visits as if she were a ‘public meeting’. Much to her annoyance he was always trying to involve the Prince of Wales in state business. Disraeli the literary man treated her as if she was a character from an old romance. She was ‘the Faery’ to him, as he constantly told her, and she loved it. They exchanged literary gossip–‘we authors, ma’am’, said Disraeli the distinguished novelist tactfully, as Queen Victoria was very proud of her journal’s publishing success.

Disraeli ended a ten-year period of great unpopularity for the monarchy since Prince Albert’s death, during which republican movements had mushroomed, by getting Victoria to appear in public after years of seclusion. Soon Disraeli was allowed to sit in the royal presence whereas Gladstone had always had to stand. He was also permitted to write to the queen in the first person, instead of referring to himself as ‘the prime minister’. He amused her, yet he was profound and sentimental by turns. He did not frighten her with dour democratic thunderings. Being with Disraeli was as intoxicating as drinking champagne, and he enjoyed a good deal of that too.

Above all Disraeli deliberately expanded the British Empire. Like most other politicians of his era, Disraeli had previously believed the colonies to be a millstone round the British government’s neck, but he changed his mind. He began instead to be excited by the idea of Britain as an imperial country with an imperial destiny, publicly regretting that the grants of self-government to colonies like Canada had not been accompanied by measures for an imperial tariff, and keen to see a federation of the Dutch and British colonies in South Africa. Disraeli added to the queen’s royal titles and her glamour by making her the Queen Empress of India in 1876 and had her proclaimed in this new style at Delhi. By far his most important achievement, however, was securing the Suez Canal for Britain.

The Suez Canal was the fast route to India. When it opened in 1869 it cut the distance from Britain to India by about six weeks and thousands of miles, for its waterway was a short cut between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. For the British, with their huge, distant Indian Empire, its strategic value was even more important than its commercial. In the event of another Indian Mutiny or of invasion of the subcontinent by Russia, the Suez Canal could carry reinforcements far more quickly than the old route down the Cape. If the British controlled it, they controlled the gateway to their eastern empire.

Disraeli was at his best in foreign affairs. For him, secret deals and backstairs arrangements were the breath of life. When in the autumn of 1875 he heard a rumour from one of his sources that the Khedive of Egypt was about to go bankrupt and that his shares in the Suez Canal were up for grabs, or more importantly were on the point of being grabbed by a French syndicate, he had no time to lose.

Parliament was still in recess and could not grant the money immediately. It might take months to debate such a purchase and give its approval. In a typically dashing move, Disraeli approached the Rothschild banking family, whose liquidity was such that they had often produced the cash to pay the troops during the Napoleonic Wars when the government was running short. The prime minister’s private secretary Montague Corry was sent to the Rothschild bank headquarters at New Court. Ushered into Baron Rothschild’s presence Corry told him that the prime minister needed the then colossal sum of £4 million (worth about a billion pounds in today’s money). ‘When?’ asked Lord Rothschild, without much excitement. ‘Tomorrow,’ said Corry. Rothschild was picking at a plate of lustrous muscatel grapes on a silver-gilt stand. He took another grape and, having ruminated thoughtfully, spat out the skin. ‘What is your security?’ he asked. ‘The British government,’ said Corry. ‘You shall have it,’ said Rothschild.

With the Rothschild loan, Disraeli bought 40 per cent of the shares in the Suez Canal, making Britain the largest single shareholder in the company. It was a stunning coup. Disraeli sent a dramatic note to the queen telling her about the Suez Canal. ‘It’s yours,’ he wrote, as if the Canal were a personal gift.

Disraeli’s prime ministership also saw a great deal done in the way of domestic legislation. Like Peel, he believed the Conservatives must continue to remake the alliance between the commercial and landed interests in the country if they wanted to be a viable party. Since their enfranchisement in 1867 those commercial interests now had to include the working classes. There had to be social reform if what Disraeli called Tory Democracy was to be properly cemented. His government set out to improve the lot of the poor. Where Gladstone was more interested in bettering men’s souls, Disraeli addressed himself to their material needs.

Thanks to the outstanding Tory home secretary Richard Cross, in 1875 the Tories passed an enormous amount of practical social legislation. The Artisans Dwellings Act enabled local authorities to sweep away slums and replace them with healthy housing. In Birmingham in particular, under the Radical mayor Joseph Chamberlain, the unhealthy slums which had grown up round sites of manufacture were levelled to the ground and modern housing constructed in their stead. Legislation removed the last legal remnants restricting the trade unions when the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act legalized peaceful picketing.

Disraeli’s chance to perform on the world stage came in 1875, a year after he had become prime minister, with the revival of the Eastern Question–that is, the question of what was to become of the Ottoman Empire. But this time it was the Eastern Question influenced by the unifications of Italy and Germany. More than ever the peoples of the Balkans felt the same nationalist stirrings for their own states, while Austria–now that she had been deprived of her territory in Italy–looked to make it up in the Balkans.

In 1875 there was a series of risings by the inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina against their savage Turkish overlords which were brutally put down, despite protests from the great powers. These were followed by revolts among the Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins. In the case of the Serbians and Montenegrins they were sufficiently well armed to begin a war against Turkey in June 1876. But so successful were the Turkish armies against them that Russia felt the need to back the Christian rebels. By 1878 the Russians were at Adrianople (modern Edirne), and thus threatening Constantinople.

The need to protect Turkey became pressing. But at the end of June 1876 the general British acquiescence to the policy of supporting Turkey had vanished, as the
Daily News
started to publish reports from its own correspondent of the appalling massacres taking place in Bulgaria. Just as during the Greek Wars of Independence, a wave of indignation swept the now enormous British newspaper-reading public. How could Britain, which prided herself on being the friend of liberty, the foe of slavery, the home of justice, the refuge of oppressed exiles, be the ally of such people? Was she not sullied by her association with barbarism?

Over one weekend Gladstone poured out one of the best-known political pamphlets ever written,
The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East
. (Disraeli muttered that of all the Bulgarian Horrors it was the greatest.) Selling 200,000 copies in a month, in thundering phrases it called for the Turks to leave Bulgaria forthwith: ‘Their Zaptiehs and their Mudits, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.’ Turkey should not be allowed by the authority of the European powers to renew her charter for ruling Bulgaria.

At a great public meeting at Blackheath Gladstone called for the liberation of all the miserable provinces rebelling against Turkey. He was back in politics. The best resistance to Russia would come not from propping up the odious Turks but by reinforcing the strength and freedom of those countries which had to resist her. The solution to the Eastern Question, said Gladstone, was ‘to place a living barrier between Russia and Turkey’.

Disraeli had no sympathy for this moral earnestness. He was incapable of taking the matter seriously, even though by now a government agent sent out to Turkey had confirmed the worst of the reports and hundreds of thousands of British people believed that it was shameful for Britain to have an ally like Turkey. Disraeli felt that morals were not part of alliances; he had no moral objection to an alliance with Turkey. To the last he thought that some of the massacres were made up, the ‘babble of coffee houses’. But, with Gladstone at the head of the campaign, the country became fixated on the atrocities. Even so, Gladstone’s speeches incensed the queen–she began to consider him a half-mad firebrand.