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Table of Contents

At Osborne—Beginnings of Revolution—The Reform Banquets in Paris—Lola Montes and the King of Bavaria—Downfall of Louis Philippe’s Government—Flight of the King—Establishment of the Second Republic—The Queen and the Orleans Family—The Chartist Movement—Its Secret History—Its Leaders—The Queen Retreats to Osborne—The Chartist Meeting at Kennington—London in Terror—The Duke of Wellington’s Precautions—Abortive Risings at Bonner’s Fields and in Seven Dials—Riots in the Large Towns—Collapse of Chartism—Ireland and the “Young Irelanders”—The Rebellion of “’48”—The Battle of the Cabbage Garden—Arrest of Smith O’Brien and the “Young Ireland” Leaders—Austria and Prussia in Anarchy—Flight of Metternich—The Berlin Mob and the King—Anxiety of the English Court—The Queen’s Correspondence with her Half-Sister—The Anglo-Spanish Quarrel—Sir H. Bulwer Expelled from Madrid—The Queen’s Indignation at Lord Palmerston—Conversation between the Queen and Lord John Russell—Palmerston’s Victory—The “Three Budget” Session—The Anti-Income-Tax Agitation—Blundering in Finance—“Scenes” in Parliament—Irish and Colonial Controversies—The Encumbered Estates Act—Repressive Legislation—Dawn of the Reform Agitation.

During the autumn Session of Parliament, while the Irish Coercion Bill was under debate, the Queen and her family retired to Osborne. Pleasant experiments in landscape gardening there formed an agreeable diversion from the distracting anxieties of foreign politics in London. And truly by this time affairs on the Continent began to assume a more threatening aspect than ever. In Switzerland the rebellion of the seven Catholic cantons of the Sonderbund had been crushed by General Dufour, who commanded the forces of the other fifteen cantons. The rising was suppressed before the Cabinets of England, Austria, France, Russia, and Prussia had time to intervene. But in Italy the popular party, excited by rumours of Lord Minto’s sympathy with their movement, were stirring up the people against their Austrian masters. The Pope was growing afraid of his own diluted Liberalism. France was rapidly becoming demoralised. Sensational trials in the law courts revealed a shocking amount of corruption in official circles in Paris. The deficit in the Budget was greater than had been anticipated. Louis Philippe was accused of debauching the electorate and the Representative Chamber by bribery; his quarrel with England, and his futile attempt to win compensatory alliances elsewhere, destroyed his prestige; the Liberal Party, secretly encouraged by his enemy, Lord Palmerston, attacked his Government with every weapon of invective and ridicule; his Ministers had lost the confidence of the people, and the demand for a wide extension of the franchise accordingly became loud and deep. To this demand, perfectly reasonable in itself, the King and his Minister, M. Guizot, offered the most dogged and infatuated opposition.

The movement in North Italy against Austrian domination also created an agitation for reforms in the Two Sicilies, to which the King would make no concessions whatever. The Royal troops, in January, 1848, were beaten in an attempt to quell a revolt in the island of Sicily, and a futile compromise was scornfully rejected by the insurgents, who insisted on nothing less than the Constitution of 1812, and the assembly of a Parliament at Palermo. Naples in turn became restive, whereupon the terrified King dismissed his autocratic advisers, formed a Liberal Ministry, and granted a Constitution, with an amnesty, on the 12th of February. Even Lord Minto, Palmerston’s unofficial emissary to “Young Italy,” failed to persuade the Sicilians to accept it. But these concessions, barren as they were, forced the hands of the Pope and of the rulers of Tuscany and Sardinia, who in turn granted Constitutions. In fact, the tide of revolution was rising fast, and threatened to sweep everything before it in the Italian Peninsula.

Opinions differ as to what was the spark that lit the conflagration which made 1848 the annus mirabilis of Revolution. It has been customary to say it was the stupid opposition of Louis Philippe and M. Guizot to the Reform banquets in France, which were fixed for the 22nd of February. Lord Malmesbury, however, traces the origin of the outbreak to the popular disturbances in Munich early in the month. The people of Munich, it seems, were incensed against the King, who had dismissed his Prime Minister, Prince Wallenstein, for advising him to expel his mistress, Lola Montes, from Bavaria after her infamous influence had become paramount in the Royal councils.88 Lola Montes had a most extraordinary career. She first appeared in society in London in Lord Malmesbury’s house, where she sang ballads—Spanish ballads—and was spoken of as the widow of a certain Don Diego Leon, who had been shot by the Carlists. His lordship, an easy, good-natured man, had made her acquaintance in a railway carriage coming up from Southampton, and that was the story she had told him. She was permitted to sell laces, veils, trinkets, and “curios” to Lord Malmesbury’s guests at his private concerts, so that she might earn a little money, while trying to dispose of some

THE REVOLUTION IN PARIS: CROWDS SINGING “MOURIR POUR LA PATRIE.”

“property,” about which there was much mystery. Then she went on the stage at the Opera House as a dancer, but was a failure. It ultimately turned out that she was a rank impostor, for instead of being the widow of a Spanish Don, she was a “Spaniard” from Cork, who had married an Irish officer called James, in the Company’s service in India. It was after her failure at the Opera House that she captivated the King of Bavaria, who used to permit her to review the Royal army, and amuse him by slashing the faces of his veteran generals with her riding-whip, when their troops failed to reach her standard of smartness. On the 19th of February she was driven from Munich—the troops refusing to fire on the people. Her house was sacked, and her collection of pictures destroyed.

M. Guizot, on the 21st of February, prohibited the Reform banquet in Paris. On Tuesday the 22nd the National Guard had revolted, and the mob from behind barricades attacked the troops. On Wednesday not one-tenth of the National Guards answered the roll-call. The Government was paralysed with panic; Ministers resigned, and M. Odillon Barrot impeached M. Guizot. The insurrection rapidly made headway, and on the 24th Louis Philippe abdicated in favour of his son, the Comte de Paris, and fled from his capital.

LANDING OF LOUIS PHILIPPE AT NEWHAVEN.

As soon as the Royal Family had left the Tuileries, the mob gutted the Palace, smashing everything in it but the throne, which they carried through the streets, amidst shrieks of derision. M. Lamartine formed a Provisional Government, which proclaimed a Republic. The King and Queen, it seems, made their way to Dreux, where, thanks to a friendly farmer, they procured disguises. After wandering to Trouville and Honfleur, they ultimately embarked in a fishing-boat, and were picked up by the Southampton steamer, Express, which had been hovering off Havre to meet the fugitives. On the 3rd of March, about midnight, his Majesty, under the name of “Mr. Smith,” was shivering in a little public-house at Newhaven, called the “Bridge Inn.” On the 4th they reached London, and immediately drove to Claremont. Other members of the Royal Family of France arrived by devious ways, after much variety of perilous adventure, and were received by the Queen with a generous hospitality, the warmth of which was indeed far from pleasing to the English people.

England had neither forgotten nor forgiven the hostile duplicity of Louis-Philippe’s foreign policy, and even Prince Albert had to beg her Majesty—whose heart has always been easily touched by the spectacle of sorrow or misfortune—to moderate her expression of sympathy for the dethroned monarch. In the House of Commons some of the Radicals, alarmed at the Ministerial proposals to increase the military expenditure of the country, professed to see in these courtly demonstrations of compassion additional proofs of hostile designs, on the part of England, against the French Republic. Cobden, in a letter to his friend, Mr. George Combe, of Edinburgh, said he dreaded the revival of the Treaty of Vienna, for he suspected that the Court and the aristocracy were eager to make war on the Republic. So far as Prince Albert was concerned this, as we have seen, was an unjust suspicion. But it was equally unjust to the Queen. “We do everything we can for the poor family,” she wrote to King Leopold, “who are indeed sorely to be pitied. But you will naturally understand that we cannot make common cause with them, and cannot take a hostile position to the new state of things in France.”89 In truth, Louis Philippe—who complained to the Queen that Palmerston’s intrigues with the Liberals in France had upset his Government—deserved his fate. The outbreak which followed the foolish prohibition of the Reform banquet was only that of a turbulent mob. The King had a large and loyal army at his back, and the proverbial “whiff of grapeshot” would at the outset have quelled the rising. Louis Philippe, however, lacked the courage to defend his crown, and his flight transformed a riot into a revolution. At the same time the French people acquiesced in the Revolution of ’48 for various reasons, which have been very fairly stated by two of the shrewdest observers of the day, Sir Robert Peel and M. Alexis de Tocqueville. When Mr. Hume crossed the floor of the House of Commons one evening, and carried the news of Louis Philippe’s fall to Peel, the latter whispered to Hume:—“This comes of trying to govern the country through a narrow representation in Parliament, without regarding the wishes of those outside. It is what the Party behind me wanted me to do in the matter of the Corn Laws, and I would not do it.”90 M. de Tocqueville, three weeks before the Revolution, predicted the catastrophe in a speech in the Chamber, in which he warned the Government that it was trembling on a volcano of Socialism.91 In a letter to Mr. Senior he says that the real cause of the Revolution was “the detestable spirit which animated the Government during this long reign; a spirit of trickery, of baseness, and of bribery, which has enervated and degraded the middle classes, destroyed their public spirit, and filled them with a selfishness so blind as to induce them to separate their interests entirely from those of the lower classes, from whence they sprang,” who were thus delivered over to the quacks of Communism, and the tyranny of ideas, destructive not merely of ministries and dynasties, but of moral order and civil society.92 An elected legislature, springing from a narrow franchise, and a strong centralised Government, were both manipulated for dynastic, as distinguished from national, purposes, by a selfish monarch, who had not the courage to defend his throne. The vast increase in material wealth which Louis Philippe’s reign brought to France, held as it was by a limited class, who had forfeited the respect of the nation, failed in these circumstances to avert the calamity that gave birth to the Second Republic.

England, more fortunate than France, was but lightly touched by the edge of the Revolutionary cyclone. It caused a few Chartist riots in Great Britain, and the rising of the Nationalist Party in Ireland, headed by Mr. Smith O’Brien.

On the 6th of March, whilst the Budget controversy was raging in the House of Commons, Mr. Cochrane, a defeated candidate for the representation of Westminster, organised a popular demonstration against the proposal to increase the Income Tax. A misguided mob, who had no incomes to tax, converted the meeting into a riot in Trafalgar Square, which the police suppressed. On the 5th of March Glasgow was surprised by a mob of unemployed workmen, and it took three days ere the police and the military forces, reinforced by special constables, restored order. Riots were also suppressed in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Newcastle. In London, however, the Chartists threatened to assemble on Kennington Common 150,000 men. Under the leadership of Feargus O’Connor they were to march to Westminster, ostensibly for the purpose of presenting to the House of Commons a monster petition, explaining their grievances, and demanding reform.

The grievance of the Chartists was really the grievance of the working classes. Their alliance and support enabled the middle classes to wring from the Crown and the Peers the Reform Bill of 1832. But the middle class alone profited by that Bill, which transferred political power from the aristocracy to the shopocracy, leaving the artisans and manual toilers unenfranchised. Why their persistent agitation for political privileges since 1832 should have led people to believe that revolution was impending in 1848, has been considered a mystery, especially as the outbreak on Kennington Common was a fiasco. Yet there was good reason for this panic. From Lord Grey’s correspondence it is now clear that the country was on the brink of civil war in 1831, when the King resisted Reform. But from 1831 to 1848, the resistance to an extension of the franchise had come not from the Crown, but from the House of Commons. When, however, the House of Commons obstructs progress in England—and it is apt to do so whenever it gets the chance—the situation becomes serious. Obstruction from the Sovereign, if unreasonable and malignant, can always be met by the power of the Commons to stop supplies. Obstruction by the Upper House can be met by the power of the Crown to create new Peers. For obstruction by the House of Commons,

BRIDGE AND CASTLE, NEWPORT, MON.

however, it was felt that there was no real remedy but argument or revolution—argument if the people were comfortable and patient, revolution if they were hungry and impatient.

The Chartist organisation of 1839—which collapsed with the Newport riots—was really a gigantic secret society. It was organised by Major Beniowski, a Polish teacher of mnemonics, three working men—Cardo, a shoemaker, Warden, a gardener, one Westropp (occupation unknown)—and a mysterious individual, said to be a foreign police spy. On a given hour, on a given day, twenty cities were to be burned to the ground, and a reign of terror was to be inaugurated. The late Mr. David Urquhart claimed to have discovered the conspiracy, and to have broken it up by demonstrating to some of the leading workmen implicated that two of its chiefs were Russian agents, who had some time before planned a similar outbreak in Greece. Suspecting they were being used as tools of a Foreign Power, the English conspirators countermanded the order for a simultaneous rising, and thus it came to pass that the outbreak in Wales, where Beniowski was in command, was the sole result of the movement. There is good reason to believe that the Chartists were working

JOSEPH STURGE.

with Continental revolutionists, but it must not be forgotten that Mr. Urquhart suffered from a monomania, which took the odd form that everybody who differed from him was a Russian spy.93 The political position of the Chartists was rather curious. The Tories were the only Party who showed them any sympathy, for they shared their antagonism to the Reform settlement of 1832, which was essentially a Whig settlement. Then the Chartists were always suspicious of the Free Trade movement as a capitalists’ agitation, the real object of which was not to give the people cheap bread, but to get them to work for low wages on the strength of reducing the price of food. Mr. Cobden’s friends often complained that the Anti-Corn-Law League meetings were broken up by Chartist roughs, who were incited to violence by Tory Protectionists.

After the collapse of the conspiracy at Newport, the Chartists formed a purely political organisation, whose objects were admirably described in the able and moderate speech in which Mr. Sharman Crawford, in 1842, attempted, without success, to pledge the House of Commons to take the People’s Charter into consideration. The motion was contemptuously rejected by 226 to 67. The Chartists were then divided into two parties—the London Convention, representing the “physical force” Chartists, and the smaller Birmingham Convention, identified with Mr. Joseph Sturge. He aimed at reconstructing the alliance between the working and middle classes, that had carried Parliamentary Reform in 1832, and at starting an agitation for an extension of the Franchise, and for triennial Parliaments. Both factions joined in bringing the pressure of agitation on Parliament in 1848, an agitation which it now seems was quite peaceful in its intent, though the revolutionary excitement in France naturally induced the well-to-do classes to see in it an anarchical conspiracy. The first check the Chartists received was the intimation that their meeting and their procession would be prohibited because both were likely to lead to disturbances.

It is amusing to look back now on the panic that smote the upper and middle classes at this time. On Friday, the 7th of April, Lord Campbell wrote to his brother, declaring that “many people believe that by Monday we shall be under a Provisional Government.” It is only fair to say that the Duke of Wellington scoffed at all these alarmist rumours—in fact, he told Lady Jersey that there was no reason to be alarmed, and he advised ladies who consulted him to drive about as usual.94 “I suppose,” writes Lord Campbell again, “we shall all fly to Hartrigge—if I can escape in disguise.” On the 9th of April Campbell again writes:—“(Yesterday) we were considering in the Cabinet how the Chartists should be dealt with, and when it was determined that the procession should be stopped after it had moved, we agreed that the particular place where it should be stopped was purely a military question. The Duke of Wellington was requested to come to us, which he did very readily. We had then a regular council of war, as upon the eve of a great battle. We examined maps and returns and information of the movements of the enemy. After long deliberation, plans of attack and defence were formed to meet every contingency. The quickness, intelligence, and decision which the Duke displayed were very striking, and he inspired us all with perfect confidence by the dispositions which he prescribed. There are now above 7,000 regular troops in London, besides a train of artillery. The special constables are, as you will see, countless. We are most afraid of disturbances after the procession is dispersed, and of the town being set fire to in the night.” This was a memorable Cabinet meeting, and Macaulay said he should remember it to his dying day.95

The demonstration, which frightened everybody except the Duke of Wellington, took place on Monday, the 10th of April—a hot spring morning favouring the objects of the agitators. The delegates first of all met in convention at 9 a.m. in the Literary and Scientific Institution, John Street, Fitzroy Square, and received an intimation from the Commissioners of Police that the “Monster” Petition might be taken to the House of Commons, but that no procession would be allowed to accompany it. Mr. Feargus O’Connor gave the delegates prudent and pacific advice, but they resolved to adjourn to Kennington Common, hold their meeting, and then proceed in procession with the petition to Westminster in spite of all opposition.

Gradually the ever-increasing mass of agitators marched on, crossing the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge, and reaching Kennington Common at 11.30 a.m. A communication was then made to Mr. O’Connor by the police authorities, the result of which was that a compromise was arrived at. Mr. Mayne, the Commissioner of Police, agreed to permit the prohibited meeting to be held, and Mr. O’Connor agreed to abandon the idea of a procession, and to pass his word that the demonstration would be conducted in an orderly manner. The authorities had arranged to block the bridges with police and, if need be, troops. Even “physical force” Chartists like Mr. Ernest Jones could only accept the situation, whilst regretting that the meeting had not been held on the other side of the river, in which case they would not have had to recross the bridges to march on the House of Commons. Mr. Jones admitted, however, that they were not prepared to fight the authorities, and he, too, advised the meeting to disperse peacefully. Spasmodic outbreaks of horseplay and demonstrations of displeasure from isolated groups of agitators took place. A man called Spurr, supported by Mr. Cuffey, insisted on going on with the procession until they were stopped, whereupon they could withdraw the petition on the ground that they had met with illegal resistance.

During the day the streets presented the appearance of a holiday. The police were withdrawn from their beats, and concentrated on special points, the town being patrolled by special constables—among whom, by the way, Prince Charles Louis Bonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III., was enrolled—who wore white bands on their arms, and carried truncheons as emblems of authority. These patriotic citizens were mercilessly ridiculed by their ungrateful fellow-citizens, who passed rude remarks on their awkward appearance and their incongruities of stature and costume. People were extremely unfeeling in their comments on the appearance of certain “specials” who wore spectacles or eyeglasses, and who carried umbrellas in addition to their staves. All the public buildings were garrisoned with troops; the clerks in the public offices formed special corps of defence, and many gentlemen of rank brought up their gamekeepers from the country, armed them, and prepared their mansions for a regular siege.96 Trafalgar Square was occupied by 200 police. The parks were closed; a corporal’s guard of the Household Troops held each entrance to them, and patrols of the Guards

FEARGUS O’CONNOR.

marched up and down the Mall. Apsley House was barricaded, and Mr. Carlyle says Piccadilly was almost deserted, the Green Park shut, “even the footpaths of it;” and “in the inside stood a score of mounted Guardsmen, privately drawn up under the arch—dreadful cold, I daresay. For the rest, not a single fashionable carriage was in the street, not a private vehicle, but, I think, two surgeons’ broughams all the way to Egyptian Hall, omnibuses running, a few street carts, even a mud-cart or two; nothing else; the flag pavements also

THE CHARTIST DEMONSTRATION ON KENNINGTON COMMON.

nearly vacant, not a fifth of the usual population there, and those also of the strictly business kind.”97 Buckingham Palace was protected by a strong force under arms at Wellington Barracks, ready to march on it the moment it was threatened. The Bank was fortified by a company of Sappers and Miners, who built on the roof platforms for cannon, and guarded them with loopholed breastworks of sandbags, &c., so that a mob could be swept away by grapeshot at a moment’s notice. Special constables, organised by Aldermen of the wards, guarded the City. Hardly a single red-coat, however, was to be seen anywhere, but at various strategic points troops were in readiness, to be let loose if the mob showed signs of fighting. There was a fight between the police and the mob at Blackfriars Bridge. But the police who guarded Waterloo Bridge were able to amuse themselves as they pleased. No Chartists came near it—the bridge being guarded by something much more formidable to them than troops, namely, the man who kept the toll-bar.

When the events of the 18th ended with the contemptuous treatment which the House of Commons gave to the Chartist petition, two things happened. The upper middle class burst into a chorus of triumph over their successful suppression of anarchy. The working classes who joined the Chartist movement were flung into the arms of the “physical force party,” who pointed to the failure of the petition and the demonstration, as a proof that the methods of agitation favoured by Mr. Sturge and the Birmingham Convention were futile. It is important to keep these facts in view, for the transformation of the Chartist movement into a movement of violence after the 10th of April, has led many writers to assume that the peaceful agitation which culminated in the Kennington meeting was truly a revolutionary conspiracy, which was put down by the courageous demonstration made by the Party of Order. The facts that the meeting at Kennington was unarmed, that its numbers, so far from reaching 100,000, did not exceed 20,000, that the existence of a toll-bar on one of the bridges was sufficient to determine the direction which the “revolutionary” procession should take, and, above all, the fact that the meeting was held on the Surrey side of the river, thus leaving the police and troops in complete command of the bridges in rear of the Chartists—all indicate that up to the 10th there was no serious idea of appealing to arms. It was absurd to argue that the event was dwarfed by the preparations which were made to meet it, for these preparations were kept secret. On the other hand, a good effect was subsequently produced by these preparations, for they showed that the Party of Order, though quite willing to give Mr. Feargus O’Connor full liberty to play the braggart and the fool, were also determined to maintain the law against any mob of law-breakers, however strong or however turbulent. They gave agitators fair warning that in England, at least, the resources of civilisation against anarchy were by no means exhausted. The Queen had with some hesitation yielded to the advice of the Cabinet, and had removed the Court to Osborne during this anxious period. But she and Prince Albert both kept a vigilant eye on events as they unfolded themselves in the metropolis. Writing to King Leopold on the 11th of April, she says:—“Thank God, the Chartist meeting and procession have turned out a complete failure! The loyalty of the people at large has been very striking, and their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such wanton and worthless men immense.”98 Albany Fonblanque had the fairness to admit that it was “clear that the bulk of the London Chartists have no disposition to commit themselves to the chances of involving it in outrage;”99 and Mr. Cobden says, in one of his letters:—“In my opinion the Government and the newspapers have made too much fuss about it (the Chartist rising).”100

The two men who got and deserved most credit for the happy termination of the Chartist meeting were Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, and the Duke of Wellington, whose opinions on the affair had the greatest weight with the Queen. On the 11th of April, when all was quiet, the Duke of Wellington met Lord Campbell, and the following conversation took place between them:—“I went up to him,” writes Lord Campbell, “and said, ‘Well, Duke, it has all turned out as you foretold.’ Duke—‘Oh, yes, I was sure of it, and I never showed a soldier or a musket. But I was ready. I could have stopped them wherever you liked, and if they had been armed it would have been all the same.’ Campbell—‘They say they are to meet next on the north side of the town, and avoid the bridges.’ Duke—‘Every street can be made a bridge. I can stop them anywhere.’ Campbell—‘If your Grace had commanded Paris on the 25th of February, Louis Philippe would still have been on the throne.’ Duke—‘It would have been an easy matter. I should have made the Tuileries secure, and have kept my communications open.’ Then, more suo, laying hold of my arm, and speaking very loud, and pointing with his finger, he added—‘Always keep your communications open, and you need have nothing to fear’”101

When the fiasco of the 10th of April put the Chartist organisation under the control of the “physical force” party, the first step was initiated by Mr. Ernest Jones in the National Convention. It was to reconstruct the whole Chartist body as a secret society, on the pattern of the United Irishmen. Moderate men were removed from the Executive Council, and agitators like Dr. Macdowall, who had taken a prominent part in the troubles of ’39 and ’42, were elected in their places. The change in their methods was first illustrated by the sudden assemblage, without warning, of a vast meeting of 80,000 men on Clerkenwell Green and Stepney Green, on the evening of the 29th of May, when processions from all parts of London also moved by converging routes to Smithfield, and then marched along Holborn, Oxford Street, Pall Mall, the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, to Finsbury Square, where they dispersed. This was a demonstration arranged to test the working of the new secret organisation. Rifles and pikes began to appear in the lodgings of the Chartists. An alliance was formed with some of the turbulent leaders of the “Young Ireland” Party. Spies were swarming in every city, and a

CHARTIST AGITATION: THE POLICE FORCE ON BONNER’S FIELDS.

(Reduced, by permission, after the Engraving in “The Illustrated London News.”)

Secret Committee, consisting of seven men, named Cuffey, Ritchie, Lacey, Fay, Rose, Mullins, and a man named Powell, alias Johnson, who, though pretending to be a workman, was really a professional pedestrian, known in sporting public-houses as the “Welsh Nurse,” began to plot a regular insurrection. Powell joined the Committee to betray it, and his counsels breathed of fire and slaughter. Ernest Jones had by this time been imprisoned for proclaiming to a meeting that the green flag would soon wave over Downing Street; and another man had also been imprisoned—one Williams—because in a speech he had insinuated that the Government was brutalising the people by letting the police beat them with truncheons, when they came into collision with Chartist meetings on Clerkenwell Green. Whit Monday, the 12th of June, was the day fixed on for the Revolution, and on that day the Metropolitan branches of the Society were to assemble on Blackheath and Bishop Bonner’s Fields—meetings which were prohibited by the police as illegal. When warrants were issued for the arrest of Macdowall and the leaders, the Blackheath meeting was abandoned, and orders were given to concentrate a Chartist gathering on Bonner’s Fields, so as to divert a large police force from the

WILLIAM SMITH O’BRIEN.

City. On the evening of the 12th the Chartists resolved to abandon the meeting on Bonner’s Fields, not because the authorities at Scotland Yard prohibited it, but because it was raining, comforting themselves with the reflection that they had detained a large force of police and troops there to watch them. They were then in hopes, as Rose, one of the leaders, said to Mr. Frost, that in London by that time “they are at it hammer and tongs.”102

But when the time came for striking, the conspirators were unprepared, and nothing was done. Some of the leaders—like Cuffey—now felt that it was hopeless to attempt an armed revolt, yet the forces behind them were too strong to be controlled, and they were compelled to go on when they would have drawn back. They accordingly fixed the 15th of August for the grand effort; but on that day, when waiting in the “Orange Tree” public-house, in Orange Street, Bloomsbury, they were suddenly arrested by a small body of armed police. “A sword,” writes Mr. Frost, “was found under the coat of one, and the head of a pike, made to screw into a socket, under that of another. One had a pair of pistols in his pocket, and the fourth was provided with a rusty bayonet, fastened on the end of a stick. Some were without other weapons than shoemakers’ knives. A pike, which no one would own, was found under a bench.”

At this moment groups of surly-looking labourers were lounging in the streets and at the bars of public-houses in the Seven Dials. Suddenly a man with haggard eyes and a face pale with fear was seen to rush into the midst of a group at the corner of St. Andrew’s Street, and whisper a few hurried words to a labourer, who with a pickaxe was fumbling about a loose stone in the causeway. He was then seen darting from group to group, from public-house to public-house, and very soon the police began to hover in the distance. In a few minutes the groups of loungers had almost entirely disappeared, and the public-houses were mysteriously emptied. There is reason to believe that the flag of revolution was to have been first raised in the Seven Dials, where the first barricades were to have been flung up, the spot, says Mr. Frost, who was a leading Chartist, being chosen “on account of its contiguity to Whitehall, and the facilities offered by its narrow streets, radiating in so many directions from a common centre, for a rapid advance.” The pale-faced man, whose appearance was the signal for the dispersal of the loungers round the Seven Dials, was an emissary from the “Orange Tree,” bringing tidings of the arrests there. Cuffey, Ritchie, Lacey, and Fay were tried for sedition, and sentenced to transportation for life. Mullins received a long term of imprisonment. Powell, the spy, instead of a handsome reward, only got a free passage to Australia, where, being an idle fellow, he did not remain long. What became of him is not known. The other spy, a constable named Mullins, was subsequently dismissed from the police force for misconduct, and after a career of crime was hanged for murdering an old woman called Elmsley, at Hackney, for the sake of a few pounds she had in her house. The Chartist organisation broke up. Its members, finding that the working classes alone could effect nothing, sensibly reverted to the programme of Mr. Sturge and the Birmingham Convention. They accordingly joined the Parliamentary Reform Association, which was launched into existence by the middle-class Radicals, under the auspices of Mr. Joseph Hume and his political associates.

Writing to Baron Stockmar about the collapse of the Chartist meeting at Kennington, Prince Albert says, in one of his letters—“I hope this will read with advantage on the Continent. Ireland still looks dangerous.” It had looked so “dangerous” at the end of 1847 that its condition, together with the commercial panic in England, had caused Parliament to be summoned in the November of that year. Now the country, under the misguidance of the “Young Irelanders,” was drifting into civil war.

It is not difficult to be generous to a “lost cause,” and in the “Young Ireland” movement, which ended in the disaster of ’48, there is much that enlists the sympathies of liberal-minded liberty-loving men. It sprang from a reaction among the youth of the educated and literary classes, against the coarse vulgarity of O’Connell’s methods of agitation. His favourite weapon was race-hatred. This he roused by passionate appeals to bitter memories of the past, when “the base, bloody, and brutal Saxon” trod the Celt under foot, tortured his priests, desecrated his altars, and proscribed his faith. The “Young Irelanders,” especially after Catholic Emancipation, felt that no practical good was done to the rack-rented peasantry by denunciations of Cromwell’s tyranny. Moving diatribes against Elizabethan oppression, in their opinion, did still less to reform the bad government, the weak executive, and alien bureaucracy of Ireland in the Victorian era. O’Connell’s aim was to pit the Celtic Catholics against the Protestant Anglo-Irish. The “Young Ireland” Party aimed at uniting all Irish patriots, irrespective of creed or caste, in a purely political and secular movement for emancipating the peasantry from landlordism, and Ireland from English government. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy,103 one of the founders of the movement, says that its leaders favoured constitutional agitation, but, if compelled to adopt stronger measures, they were ready to accept the arbitrament of the sword. Their mistake lay in committing themselves to this latter part of their programme, without possessing the means of carrying it out. When they did that, success could alone distinguish their policy from treason.

The “Young Irelanders” were led by Thomas Osborne Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, John Blake Dillon, and several other young men of enthusiasm and talent, and their movement was literary as well as political. They became an organised party in 1842, when the Nation newspaper was started, under Duffy’s editorship—a paper, says the late Mr. P. J. Smyth,104 which was “filled with a spirit of intense nationality.” Its articles, political and historical, its ballads and lyrics, both pathetic and humorous, were all devoted to glorify the achievements of Irishmen in the past, or give voice to their passions, aspirations, and demands in the present. All hereditary feuds, the “Young Irelanders” said, must be forgotten. Ireland was to be Irish—not Anglo-Irish or Celtic. All men who loved her were to be ranked as Irishmen. Hereditary party spirit they regarded, wrote Sir C. Gavan Duffy, as an ignis fatuus in a country “where the lineal descendants of the O’Neils, O’Briens, and O’Connors were Ministers, and where Philpot Curran, Wolfe Tone, and Theobald Mathew sprang from Cromwellian soldiers.” The agitators were a little hazy and vague and self-contradictory as to the precise amount of

CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY (1848).

allegiance which they would yield to the Imperial Government; and Davis, in his correspondence with Daniel Owen Maddyn, rails as much at English ideas—English Utilitarianism, Materialism, and “Sensualism”—as at the supremacy of the Pope or Protestant ascendency. Just before the outbreak of ’48, too, Mr. Smith O’Brien’s avowed object, as leader of the “Young Irelanders,” was to set up in Ireland an independent Republic. On the land question, however, they were sound and moderate. They demanded security of tenure, fair rents, free sale of tenant-right, and reasonable facilities for the natural growth of peasant proprietors. But, said they in their manifesto in the Nation, “we are not ready to jump into a servile war for this purpose,” and, as Mr. P. J. Smyth has observed, they taught that “expropriation, if it could be realised, would be disastrous.” Davis, who was poet-laureate of the movement, was a Protestant of Welsh descent, Duffy and Dillon were Catholics.

“Young Ireland” soon fell out with O’Connell and the patriots of Conciliation Hall. O’Connell’s organ, the Pilot, attacked the Nation for its

THE IRISH REBELLION OF 1848: FORGING PIKES.

atheism. The Nation retorted that O’Connell betrayed Ireland by abandoning the “divine right of Revolution” for Whig alliances. In 1845 Davis died, and the leadership of the Party passed into the hands of William Smith O’Brien, his lieutenants being John Mitchel and John Martin. All three were Protestants. Mr. Smith O’Brien was descended from King Brian Borhoimè—who played the part of Alfred the Great in Irish history. A brother of Lord Inchiquin, he was an aristocrat and a Tory, with frigid manners, and a high and chivalrous sense of honour. He had drifted into the “Young Ireland” Party, firstly, because fourteen years’ experience of the Imperial Parliament convinced him that it could not legislate wisely for Ireland, and, secondly, because he despaired of any other Party obtaining for Ireland the only Government that could lift her to her place among the nations. As a speaker he was cold, logical, and stilted. But he had a severe and ascetic sense of public duty, and his fidelity and truthfulness secured for him the unswerving loyalty of his followers.

It was in 1847 that “Young Ireland” first came into collision with the authorities. John Mitchel, whose violent teaching was abhorred by O’Brien, virtually seceded from the Party represented by the Nation. He had started the United Irishman, and he made it a venomous advocate of Revolution. The outbreak in Paris, in 1848, put the game in Mitchel’s hands. The populace imagined that no government could stand against a mob. “Confederate” Clubs sprang up like mushrooms, and Mitchel became so reckless in his appeals to force that the Government were compelled to “gag” him. He was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for treason-felony, on the 20th of May, 1848. O’Brien and Meagher, who had been prosecuted in March, escaped because the juries disagreed.

Dr. Kevin Izod O’Doherty and Mr. D’Alton Williams, a fortnight after Mitchel’s condemnation, brought out a new organ, the Irish Tribune, and Martin, “honest John Martin,” as he was called, followed up with the Felon, a paper whose teachings were so abominably bloodthirsty that Albany Fonblanque, in the Examiner, suggested it ought to be called the Fiend.105 The sole defence for a truculence, which can be paralleled only by the ravings of Marat, is that the “Young Irelanders” had been goaded to madness by the terrible scenes of the famine, and the apparent impotence of the English Government either to prevent or cope with that hideous calamity. Five weeks after the Felon appeared, Martin, Williams, O’Doherty, and Duffy were arrested. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and warrants were out against Mr. Smith O’Brien and Meagher (pronounced Maär), the latter the fiercest and most eloquent of their orators. They felt they had now gone too far to draw back, though it would have been easy for them to do so by simply letting themselves be arrested. They considered it their duty to offer to head a rebellion before they were captured; but when they appealed to the people to rise, they found that the peasants hardly knew who they were. They were looked on askance as the men who had quarrelled with O’Connell, and were denounced by the priests. Even if the peasants had been willing, famine had left them physically unfit for battle. Why dwell on the story of the wretched fiasco that was called the “rebellion” of ’48? The small band of patriots who joined the standards of the insurgents had few arms—pikes, old guns, and scythes were their chief weapons. They had no commissariat, no generals, and no plan of campaign. A barricade, commanded by Dillon, was “rushed” at Killenaule. At Ballingarry a party under Mr. Smith O’Brien, hailed by his followers as “King of Munster,” on the 26th of July besieged six policemen, who had taken refuge in a farmhouse belonging to a widow called Cormack. The police refused to surrender, and on the 29th Mr. O’Brien, with reinforcements, again appeared. Another party of policemen came on the scene. A few shots were exchanged, and then the insurgents tried to fire the building. “The widow Cormack, whose five children were in the house,” writes Mr. A. M. Sullivan,106 “rushed to the rebel chief, flung herself on her knees, and asked him if he was going to stain his name and cause by an act so barbarous as the destruction of her little ones.” Mr. O’Brien ordered the combustibles to be flung aside, and his followers, galled by the fire from the improvised fortalice, and disgusted by his soft-heartedness, beat a hasty retreat. The leader of the insurrection, like Scott’s Highland Chieftain, “took to the hills, and became a broken man.” On the 5th of August he walked from his mountain refuge to Thurles Railway Station. When taking a ticket for Limerick, a guard named Hulme recognised and arrested him. With Meagher, Leine, and O’Donoghue, who were captured in the same locality, he was lodged in Kilmainham Gaol. O’Brien and his comrades were tried at Clonmel on the 21st of September, and sentenced to death. This was subsequently commuted to transportation for life, whereupon the condemned men protested that the commutation was ultra vires on the part of the Queen, and that they had a legal right to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered,” or set free! The protest was of no avail, for Parliament quickly passed a special Act, empowering the Crown to commute sentences of high treason. Dillon, O’Gorman, and O’Doherty escaped to America. Duffy was thrice brought to trial, but his advocate, Mr. Butt, thrice baffled his prosecutors. Mr. Smith O’Brien and his companions were set free in Van Diemen’s Land, on parole. Subsequently they were allowed to return home, but Mr. O’Brien died in retirement, never again taking part in public life. Hundreds of able and promising young men fled from the country, and Ireland suffered not only by the exile, enforced or voluntary, of the most public-spirited men in her governing middle class, but from the reaction and the prostration that always follow an abortive revolution.

Though the progress of the Revolutionary movement in England, Ireland, and France engrossed the interests of the Queen and Prince Albert, it was impossible for them to be indifferent to its progress in other countries, notably in Germany, where it took the form of a movement in favour of National Unity. Ferdinand I., a monarch weak alike in body and mind, at this time sat on the throne of Austria. He was, however, little better than the tool of Prince Metternich, the energetic and unscrupulous Minister in whom Absolutism was incarnate. After the fall of Louis Philippe, turbulent Viennese mobs demanded constitutional reforms in Austria. On the 13th of March, the populace sacked Metternich’s Palace, in Vienna, and the Minister himself, disheartened on finding that his Imperial master shrank from defending his prerogatives, fled from the capital in disguise. “If emperors disappear, it is never till they have come to despair of themselves,” was the mocking observation with which Metternich placed his resignation in the hands of the Archduke Charles. Hungary naturally caught the contagion of Liberty, and Louis

THE EXCHANGE AND FREDERICK’S BRIDGE, BERLIN.

Kossuth carried in the Diet at Pesth an address to the Emperor Ferdinand, demanding a national Government, from which the foreign—i.e., the German—element was to be eliminated. Feeble efforts at repression in Vienna ended in the concession of a Free Press, a National Guard, and a Liberal Constitution for the Empire.

It almost seemed as if the Revolution of ’48 had come to enforce the views which the Queen and Prince Albert had in vain impressed on their German relatives. Those views were to the effect that the time had arrived when the Princes of the Empire ought, as a matter of grace, to grant constitutional liberties to their subjects. But their Teutonic Majesties and Serenities had lest their chance of conceding by policy what Revolution now extorted from

THE KING OF PRUSSIA ADDRESSING THE BERLINERS. (See p. 346.)

them by force. The movement began in Baden, where, on the 29th of February, the Grand Duke was compelled to grant a Free Press, a National Guard, and Trial by Jury to his subjects. It spread fast through the minor States. In Munich it ended in the abdication of the King on the 21st of March. In the Odenwald the peasants sacked the baronial castles, and a servile war seemed imminent, even in Coburg. The Queen was therefore excited by every fresh outbreak, her only consolation being that Belgium—her uncle’s kingdom—remained tranquil. The Prince Hohenlohe, the husband of her half-sister, and her half-brother, the Prince of Leiningen, were simply ruined. “All minds,” writes the Princess Hohenlohe to the Queen, “are on the stretch.... Never was such a state of lawless vagabondage as there is now all over Germany, more or less. At all hours of the day young men are walking about the streets doing nothing.” Business was at a standstill: there was neither buying nor selling, marrying nor giving in marriage; and the Queen’s half-sister, in another letter, speaking of herself and her illustrious family, remarks, piteously:—“We are undone, and must begin a new existence of privations.”

Prussia was stricken sharply by the revolutionary tempest. The very day after Metternich fled from Vienna the mob of Berlin rose against the Government. Riot after riot followed this outbreak, and the concessions proclaimed on the 18th of March came too late—though the King, Frederick William, imagined he would win the sympathies of the German race by advocating the formation of a United Germany, federated under one flag, one army, one law, and one executive. The people, full of joy at their triumph, went to the Palace to congratulate their Sovereign, who came forth to harangue them. A glimmer of steel, however, within the castle quadrangle in an instant transformed the loyal crowd into a raging and rebellious mob. “Bitter experience,” says Mr. Charles Lowe,107 “had taught them to distrust the word of their King. But instead of retiring, a squadron of dragoons, with a company of foot, advanced to clear the square; and either by accident or design, two muskets were fired into the crowd. ‘Treason!’ ‘Revenge!’ ‘To arms!’ was resounded on every side.” Two hundred barricades rose in the streets as if by magic, “and the city was soon one wild scene of carnage,” lit throughout the dark hours of night and morning by the red glare of sacked and burning houses. The troops virtually triumphed, but the King, grief-stricken, because of the slaughter of his “dear Berliners,” suddenly gave the command next morning to “cease firing.” The unpopular Ministers were dismissed. An amnesty was proclaimed, and the troops were ordered to quit the city. A Burger Guard was extemporised, and the King was compelled by the mob to stand bareheaded on the balcony of his Palace, and salute a ghastly procession of the dead who had been slain by his troops. On the 21st of March he rode through the streets, delivering many effusive and emotional speeches, promising a liberal constitution, and pledging himself, even in defiance of Austria, to head the movement for German Unity. The Crown Prince (afterwards Emperor William I.), who was wrongly supposed to have ordered the troops to fire on the people, fled to England, and his Palace was saved solely because some loyal person artfully chalked over it the words “National Property.” He was most hospitably entertained by the Queen till the end of May, when he returned to Berlin. “May God protect him,” writes her Majesty to her uncle, King Leopold. “He is very noble-minded and honest, and most cruelly wronged.”

Italy, already a hotbed of discontent, naturally participated in the revolutionary movement. Early in March, Lombardy rose against the Austrians, and Venice, led by Daniel Manin, proclaimed a Republic. Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, yielding to popular pressure, put himself at the head of the agitation for Italian unity, and on the 23rd of March advanced to Milanese territory. The people of Tuscany and the Papal States flew to arms, but were pacified by the grant of constitutions, though the Pope was forced by the populace in May to levy war on Austria, his most faithful ally. The Dukes of Parma and Modena fled for their lives from their capitals. In Sicily alone the revolution was suppressed by force. This seems to have disheartened the liberators of North Italy—or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say it encouraged their Austrian masters. Ignoring defeat after defeat, the Austrians, under Radetsky, held on to their Italian provinces with grim tenacity. Pacific mediation was rejected on both sides, and, finally, Charles Albert, who by this time found that Sardinia was expected to bear the brunt of the war single-handed, was rendered helpless by his fatal reverses at Custozza (22nd of July) and Somma Campagna (26th of July). The Pope, alarmed by the liberal movement he had encouraged, lost the confidence of his subjects, and on the assassination of Rossi, his secretary, fled from Rome to Gaeta (24th of November). From thence he issued a protest against the Revolutionary Government of the Holy City, which protest was promptly supported by the armed intervention of France.

In Spain, however, the Revolution, in May, took a form which gave Queen Victoria the greatest anxiety. At first all parties in the Cortes were opposed to violence. Suddenly, however, the Party of Action waxed strong. The Government foolishly prorogued the Cortes, and this was followed by a protest in the shape of a popular rising in Madrid, on the 26th of March. It was suppressed, and a few of the most distinguished men in Spain were summarily banished beyond the seas. Lord Palmerston here interfered with characteristic recklessness and audacity. On the 16th of March he wrote to Sir Henry Bulwer, the British Minister at Madrid, requesting him to advise the Queen of Spain to change her Ministers. Sir Henry Bulwer not only sent a copy of this despatch to the Duc de Sotomayor, but also procured its publication in the Opposition newspapers. The Spanish Government, incensed at Sir H. Bulwer’s intrigues with the Party of Violence, not only resented this impertinent interference with their affairs, but haughtily returned the despatch to the English Foreign Office. Lord Palmerston replied sarcastically to Sotomayor, and not only approved of the conduct of Sir Henry Bulwer, but caused him to be made a K.C.B. Accordingly, on the 19th of May, the Spanish Government requested Sir Henry to leave Spain within forty-eight hours, which he did, and a cessation of diplomatic intercourse was the result. Lord John Russell, the Prime Minister, had seen Lord Palmerston’s ill-advised despatch,

THE FOUNTAIN OF CYBELE, MADRID.

and having told Lord Palmerston that he objected to it, he naturally concluded it would not be sent. “Shortly after,” writes Mr. Greville,108 “he (Lord John Russell) was with the Queen, and, in conversation on this topic, he told her what had passed between Palmerston and himself, and what he had said. ‘No! did you say that?’ said the Queen. He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, then,’ she replied, ‘it produced no effect, for the despatch is gone. Lord Palmerston sent it to me. I know it is gone.’”

There was quite a storm of indignation against Lord Palmerston in every political club and coterie when this affair became known. The Queen was angry, and so were Palmerston’s colleagues, some of whom declared that they could not defend his conduct. He was attacked by the Opposition in both Houses; and Lord Lansdowne, who had to plead for him in the Lords, told Lord John Russell that “this must never happen again,” and that in future Lord Palmerston must not be allowed to send out any despatches unless they

BARON STOCKMAR.

(Engraved, by permission, after the Portrait in Sir Theodore Martin’s “Life of the Prince Consort.”)

were sanctioned by Lord John himself.109 It was morally certain that Sir H. Bulwer had, at Lord Palmerston’s instigation, mixed himself up with the intrigues of the revolutionary party in Madrid, and on the 5th of June Mr. Bankes gave expression to the true feeling of every section of the House of Commons, by moving a Vote of Censure on Lord Palmerston. Whigs, Tories, and Radicals were agreed that his conduct had been imprudent and discourteous. The Queen expressed to Lord John Russell her grief over his rude and untoward management of diplomatic business. His colleagues condemned him in private, and yet the attack on him mysteriously collapsed. The debate, says Mr. Greville, cynically, was a fight “with muffled gloves,” and why? Palmerston, for whom the stars in their courses fought, was saved by two strokes of luck. Sir Robert Peel, whose defence of him was a piece of exquisite irony, decided that as the Ministry refused to desert him he must be supported, Peel’s sole object at this time being to protect the only Ministerial combination which could protect Free Trade. The Spanish Government had also put themselves in the wrong in ordering Sir Henry Bulwer to quit Madrid, merely because Lord Palmerston sent them, through him, an insolent and foolish despatch. Members who were prepared to vote for Mr. Bankes’s motion felt that unless it were proved clearly that Sir Henry Bulwer had participated in revolutionary conspiracies, they must vote for the Government, on the score of national honour. The Spanish Ministry failed to prove this, because they dared not set forth their case. One of Sir Henry Bulwer’s instruments in driving the Narvaez Government from office was Serrano, who from corrupt motives revealed the conspiracy to Narvaez. But Serrano was the lover of the Queen of Spain, and had his evidence been adduced against Lord Palmerston, her Majesty would have been unpleasantly compromised. The debate on Mr. Bankes’s motion was thus a Parliamentary victory for Lord Palmerston. But it served to augment the distrust with which the Queen and his own colleagues regarded his harum-scarum method of conducting the business of the Foreign Office.

Parliament, which had been adjourned over the Christmas holidays, again met on the 3rd of February, 1848. Meeting as it did on the eve of a revolution in Europe, and at a time when the masses of the English people were in a ferment of discontent, one might suppose that it was greatly agitated by the tempest of sedition that raged outside its walls. On the contrary, it pursued its course with almost stoical indifference to “the condition-of-England question,” and neither the sullen temper of the English working classes, nor the impending revolt of the “Young Ireland” Party, seems to have given the representatives of the people the slightest concern. In fact, the West Indies now took the place of Ireland and the manufacturing districts of England, as a scene of distress worthy of monopolising the attention of Parliament. What Mr. Disraeli said of similar events in 1834 might well have been said of those of 1848, namely, that “the mean position which the Saxon multitude occupied as distinguished from the Jamaica planters sank deep into their hearts.” Again the attention of the working classes was drawn to the contrast between the interest which Parliament displayed in “a petty and exhausted colony” and “the claims for constitutional rights by the working millions of England.”110 Oddly enough, it was Mr. Disraeli’s own leader, Lord George Bentinck, who, finding that the planters attributed their sufferings to the loss of the protection which differential duties on foreign sugar had given them in the English market, took up their case at this inopportune moment with more warmth than prudence. He moved for and obtained the appointment of a Committee to inquire into their grievances. In June the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, brought forward a proposal to advance £200,000—ultimately the sum was fixed at £170,000—for the purpose of helping planters to get coolie labour. Lord John Russell subsequently announced further concessions. He refused to exclude slave-grown sugar from the English market. He, however, proposed to reduce the duty on colonial sugar, leaving ordinary foreign sugar at its existing rate. But he applied to both colonial sugar and certain varieties of foreign sugar a descending scale of reduction, which would in 1855 end in equalising them, though up to that period a slight advantage would be given to the colonial sugar. The philanthropists attacked the scheme because they demanded the total exclusion of slave-grown sugars. Some Free Traders like Mr. Hume attacked it, because they thought the true remedy lay in letting the colonists have more freedom in importing labour, and in managing their own affairs. A painful scene took place during these debates between Lord George Bentinck and Lord John Russell. Lord George declared in violent language that Mr. Hawes, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, had suppressed a despatch which threw light on colonial distress. Lord John Russell jeered at his antagonist’s connection with the turf, where alone, he said, such tricks were common. Mr. Disraeli retorted by saying that for his services in detecting a turf fraud Lord George Bentinck had been thanked by a Committee, the chairman of which was the Duke of Bedford, Lord John Russell’s brother. During this wrangling the House of Commons was converted into a bear-garden, and members roared and hooted at each other as if they were maniacs. The Government carried their proposal only by a majority of fifteen, and this, together with loss of prestige from bad management and clumsy Parliamentary tactics, further weakened the Cabinet in the eyes of the public. Even the Queen began to think she might soon have to send for Lord Stanley, for it was only Sir Robert Peel’s support that kept the Administration alive.

The financial statement of the Government, which was made, not by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir C. Wood), but by Lord John Russell himself, early in the year, had been disappointing. He estimated a deficit of £2,141,209, and he said it must be met either by increasing taxation, or reducing the cost of the Army and Navy. But the agitation which had been raised by the Duke of Wellington about the defenceless state of the country drove the Ministry to increase the military and naval estimate by £358,000, in addition to which Lord John Russell decided to take a Militia vote of £150,000. He proposed, therefore, to continue the Income Tax, which was to expire in April, 1849, for five years, raising it from 7d. to 1s. in the pound. The duties on copper ore, equal to £41,000, were to be remitted, which would leave a surplus of £113,000 on the Estimates. Never did a Budget raise such a storm of opposition. Were Ministers mad, asked Mr. Hume, that they proposed to increase taxation daring a time of commercial distress and seething political discontent? He and Mr. Cobden demanded, like all the Radicals, a reduction of armaments to meet the estimated deficit on the Budget. All the Protectionists, of course, fell upon the Ministry, crying, “Behold the fatal results of Free Trade!” and demanding the substitution of indirect taxation, or import duties, instead of an increased Income Tax—a tax which, said they, they would never have permitted Sir Robert Peel to impose, had it had not been understood that it was to be only a temporary one. Sir Charles Wood in a few days offered to refer the Estimates to Select and Secret Committees, a proposition violently attacked, as tending to relieve Ministers of their constitutional responsibility, and permit Committees of the House to encroach on the true functions of the Executive. Then the country rose as one man against the Budget, and members were threatened with the loss of their seats if they voted for an increased Income Tax. On the 28th of February Sir Charles Wood accordingly brought in an amended Budget. He would continue the existing Income Tax for five, or, if the House decided, for three years; but for two years, to meet a deficit which he thought was temporary, he proposed to add 5 per cent. to it. This still further irritated the country, whose ideas on taxation the Government utterly ignored. The working classes scoffed at the House which fretted over the addition of sevenpence in the pound on the tax on their incomes, when they paid twice as many shillings in the pound on the great staples of their consumption. The middle classes complained that Ministers paid no heed to their demand that a distinction be made between permanent and precarious incomes, and for the adjustment of the tax to the means and substance of the taxpayer.

Meantime the Select Committee on the Estimates were reducing them. On the 25th of August Sir C. Wood stated to the House that the Committee had so adjusted revenue and expenditure that there would only be a deficit of £292,305 to meet. To that he had to add the extraordinary expenditure of the year, incurred on account of the Caffre War, together with sums for relieving fresh distress in Ireland, which brought the total deficit to be met to £2,031,226. This sum the Government proposed to borrow in the open market. After some protests from the Radicals against increasing the floating debt in time of peace, and against the refusal of the Government to reduce establishments, the Ministry carried their point. But the Cobdenites taunted them with Sir Robert Peel’s remark, that he would not attempt to govern the country unless he could equalise its expenditure and its revenue.

Parliament in 1848 was tolerably free from discussions on the interminable Irish question. But Mr. Smith O’Brien, the leader of the Irish Party of Action, was in earnest, and his followers were full of enthusiasm for Irish nationality. Lord Clarendon had attempted to conciliate the priesthood, but he had failed; and the Executive in Dublin sought for increased power to maintain order in Ireland. Hence a Bill aimed at seditious clubs was brought forward by the Government. It empowered the Lord-Lieutenant to arrest and detain any person whom he suspected of conspiring against the

SIR GEORGE GREY.

Queen’s Government—in other words, it was proposed to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act.111 The Bill passed rapidly through all its stages, even Radicals like Mr. Hume voting for it, reluctantly, as a hateful incident in our Irish policy. They, however, warned the Ministry that they must lose no time in bringing in remedial measures, dealing with the Franchise, the Church, the Grand Jury laws, and Municipal Institutions in Ireland. On the 26th of July the Bill was passed through the Upper House. A few days afterwards Mr. Sharman Crawford, previous to the House of Commons going into Committee of Supply, moved that the distracted condition of Ireland demanded the constant attention of Parliament, and said that if he carried his motion he would follow it up with one which Lord John Russell had moved in 1844, referring the subject of Irish grievances to a Select Committee. He complained of the delays in remedial legislation; but Lord John Russell, though conciliatory, opposed the motion on the plea that it would be better to proceed gradually with the work of reform in Ireland, than to burden the House with the impossible task Mr. Crawford would impose on it. It was in this debate that Mr. Bernal Osborne complained that Ireland was governed, like a Crown Colony, with “a mock Sovereign, a Brummagen Court, and a pinchbeck Executive,” and recommended the abolition of the Viceroyalty, the government of Ireland by a fourth Secretary of State, occasional sessions of the British Parliament in Dublin, and an annual visit of the Queen and Court to her Irish dominions. Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, also suggested that the Government would not be averse from modifying the position of the Established Church in Ireland, and there seemed to be in the minds of Ministers a disposition to seek, in a scheme of “concurrent endowment,” a solution of the Irish problem. Mr. Crawford’s motion was rejected by a vote of 100 to 24.

On the 24th of February the Lord Chancellor introduced the Irish Encumbered Estates Act. The measure provided for the swift and easy sale and transfer—voluntary or compulsory under an order of the Court of Chancery—of estates whose owners could not pay off their mortgages and had no capital to improve them. The mistake lay in selling along with the estates, which were the landlords’, the improvements which, as a rule, were made by the tenants, and which in equity, and by the custom of land tenure in Ireland, belonged to the latter. The measure was therefore pregnant with evils which had to be dealt with subsequently by the Land Acts with which Mr. Gladstone’s name will be permanently associated.

What was the effect of the Chartist rising on Parliament? It bulks but slightly in the proceedings of the Legislature. On the 10th of April Mr. Feargus O’Connor presented to the House of Commons a petition signed by 5,706,000 persons in favour of the “six points of the Charter”—namely, Vote by Ballot, Annual Parliaments, Manhood Suffrage, Equal Electoral Districts, Abolition of Property Qualification for Members of Parliament, and Payment of Members. He moved that it be read by the clerk. The first sheet was taken up and the prayer read, whereupon the messengers of the House gathered up the five great masses of parchment of which the petition consisted, and rolled it to the table. On the 13th Mr. Thornley, on behalf of the Select Committee on Petitions, reported that the Chartist petition weighed not five tons, as was alleged, but 5¾ cwts., and that it contained only 1,975,496 signatures, and not 5,706,000, as Mr. O’Connor had stated. Among these appeared the names of the Queen as “Victoria Rex,” the Duke of Wellington, K.G., Sir Robert Peel, and names that were no names, such as “No Cheese,” “Pugnose,” “Flatnose,” and the like, so that doubts as to the authenticity of the document might be fairly raised. Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Cripps exchanged pungent personalities over this discovery, and when Mr. O’Connor left the House, the Speaker, fearing a duel might be the result of the quarrel, induced Mr. Cripps to withdraw his imputations on Mr. O’Connor’s honesty. Lord John Russell then moved that Mr. O’Connor be arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms. The offender, on being brought to the bar, gave explanations which brought the scene to an end.

On the 7th of April Sir George Grey brought in the Crown Government Security Bill, which was a device of Lord Campbell’s for reducing the offences created by the Act of 1796 from treason to felony, and for extending it to Ireland, where, as the law then stood, it was impossible to punish a revolutionary movement, except by treating it as treason or misdemeanour. This gave a deathblow to the odious statutory crime termed “constructive treason,” substituting, as Lord Campbell says in his Journal, a plain, easy, popular method “by which incipient traitors may be prosecuted as felons, and transported beyond the seas.” In one of the debates on this Bill, Mr. Smith O’Brien, while professing his loyalty to the Queen, declared he was not loyal to the Government or to the Imperial Parliament, and would do what he could to overthrow the one and dissever the other. He lashed the House into fury by his references to his intrigues with the leaders of the French Revolution, and by menacing England with the hostility of the Republics of France and America. Campbell’s Bill may be described as one to degrade “the spouters of state sedition,” as Mr. Disraeli once called them, to the level of vulgar criminals in the eyes of the people. A Bill enabling the Home Secretary on his responsibility to compel the departure of aliens visiting the country not from the usual motives of business and pleasure was denounced by the Radicals, led by Sir W. Molesworth, as “analogous in principle to the famous law of Suspected Persons of the 17th of September, 1793, one of the most accursed laws of the Reign of Terror.” Lord John Russell was taunted with having opposed a similar provision which disfigured the Aliens Act in his maiden speech in 1814, and Mr. David Urquhart amused the House by quoting Leviticus xxiv. 22 and Numbers ix. 14 against the proposal. It was, however, carried in both Houses.

It was felt at this time that the House of Commons was not equal to the task of social legislation. A large Party, under the leadership of Mr. Joseph Hume, contended that the duty of Parliament to the people did not begin and end with the passing of repressive laws in a revolutionary crisis. But as the House was then constituted, they felt that little else could be expected from it, and they accordingly urged that it be made effective by being reformed. To bring the popular chamber into closer touch with the people, Mr. Hume and other Radical Reformers argued that the franchise must be extended. Hence arose his Resolution of the 20th of June, to the effect that the House of Commons did not fairly represent the people, and his proposal for (1) household franchise; (2) vote by ballot; (3) triennial Parliaments; (4) equal apportionment of Members to population. This motion marks the beginning of the great Reform movement which culminated in the Reform Bill of the Derby-Disraeli Government in 1867, and of Mr. Gladstone’s Government in 1885. Lord John Russell opposed the Resolution, though he abandoned the doctrine with which he was credited, namely, that the Bill of 1832 was final, and he admitted that it had worked badly, by enforcing too great uniformity of qualification. Mr. Disraeli opposed every one of Mr. Hume’s proposals, except that for triennial Parliaments. Mr. Sidney Herbert, on behalf of the Peelites, also opposed Mr. Hume, who was supported solely by Mr. Cobden, the Radicals, and the “Manchester School.” The Resolution was rejected by a vote of 351 to 84.

FROM AN ETCHING BY THE QUEEN.

THE SOUTH-EAST CORRIDOR, WINDSOR CASTLE.