A History of England

The first couple of years of the Liberal government elected in 1906 saw some achievements but also a great deal of frustration. The Unionist majority in the House of Lords annulled the Liberals’ in the Commons. That blocked many of the government’s initiatives. This period ended in August 1907 when Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, started a series of three heart attacks over the next fiftee...

The 1906 general election had given the Liberals a colossal majority in the House of Commons. In the Lords, however, the Unionist opposition still held an unassailable majority against them. This meant that they could block Liberal legislation as they wished. Some significant measures were lost as a result. On the other hand, some passed, including, strangely enough, some measures backing working-...

Arthur Balfour’s intention in resigning as Prime Minister but without a general election was probably to oblige Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman to form a government, which might force their divisions to the surface. That would weaken their chances in an election that was bound to be held soon. There was a curious symmetry between the divisions in the main parties. The Liberals were split t...

The divisions among Unionists – the Conservative Party and the Liberal Unionists, then in government together – over tariff reform massively damaged their electoral chances and came as a real gift to the Liberals. That was on top of Balfour’s Education Act of 1902, which had allowed the Liberals to heal their rifts over the Boer War and come together in attacking the government. It looked as thoug...

A factor of small but growing importance at the end of Salisbury’s premierships, and during Balfour’s that followed, was offered by the Labour Representation Committee. It had been formed by trades unions working with left-wing parties of the working class, most notably Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party. With no MPs before the election of 1900, it had grown to four by 1903 which, in an enviro...

A major issue the Balfour government had to deal with was immigration. That became a thinly veiled pretext for anti-Semitism, since increased persecution of Jews inside the Russian empire sent huge numbers abroad seeking for refuge. A great many reached London, though far fewer than was often claimed. This episode looks at the reactions to the problem, which was often surprising, at least in appea...

Poor Balfour. He achieved a surprising amount considering how little time he had as head of government. What made it worse was that most of the measures he pushed through attracted at least as much criticism as praise. Often they caused deepening rifts amongst his own Unionists and even, on at least one occasion, strengthened the Liberals by helping to unite them again after their own deep splits...

The first thirty years of the twentieth century were a crucial period in the campaign to win the vote for women. But women’s rights concerned far more than just the vote. Across the nineteenth century, a series of remarkable women campaigners had pushed back the boundaries in significant ways, in property rights and status in law especially for married women, as well as in access to higher educati...

Eventually, Britain brought overwhelming force to bear on the Boer fighters. Combined with the mistreatment of their civilians, that at last forced them to surrender, though that meant abandoning the independence of the two republics and accepting their absorption into the British Empire. There were some lessons to be learned from the heavy work that the empire had to make to beat the small irregu...

Celebrations over victory in the Boer War, and the landslide general election win it led to for Salisbury, turned out to be premature. Indeed, towards the end of 1900, the war was entering its darkest phase. The Boers, far from admitting they were beaten, switched to guerrilla warfare. And the British Army responded with scorched earth and concentration camps. Farmhouses were burned, as were crops...

We’ve been tracking years and years of Tory rule in Britain. It’s as though the once dominant Liberal Party had practically vanished from the scene. In fact, though, things were changing in its ranks, with new figures emerging to lead the party back towards government. One of these, David Lloyd George, we’ve met before but briefly and, in this episode, we get to know him better. However, despite t...

The tide turned for the British in South Africa when they sent enough troops out to overwhelm the Boers entirely – well over half a million over the whole length of the war or approaching half as many again as the entire Afrikaner population. They also replaced some hopeless generals by a couple of more effective ones, Frederick Roberts, who’d served with distinction in the Second Afghan War, with...

Two depressingly similar men, unbending, old, bearded, entirely committed to the advantage of their own race, were glaring at each other between the Boer Republic of the Transavaal and the imperial heartland of Great Britain. President Kruger of the Transvaal was determined to protect the way of life of his Boer people, at the expense of denying the other whites moving into his country any of the...

An episode in two parts. The first is an adventure story, the extraordinary march across Africa of a small detachment of French troops led by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand. He occupied the abandoned Egyptian fort on the Nile at Fashoda. There he was met not by the planned supporting columns of Frenchmen, but by General Kitchener with a massively bigger force. In fact, the two men didn’t fight, but...

Salisbury had a fairly accurate view of just what Britain could and couldn’t do on its own, given the limitations on British power itself, but also the blocks caused by domestic political opposition . He equally had a clear notion of just what massive damage the new generations of weapons might do in a war in which both sides had them, essentially a war between great powers. Finally, he also under...

The running sore of British relations with Ireland was running still and just as sore. This time another Balfour, Gerald as opposed to his brother Arthur, but like him a nephew of the Prime Minister Salisbury who nepotistically appointed him, was pursuing a policy designed to address some Irish grievances, rather than simply tighten repression. That was made easier by the reduction in unrest and e...

Henry Labouchère’s amendment of 1885 had criminalised any sexual act between men, labelling it gross indecency, an offence which was a great deal easier to prove than the older charge of sodomy. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was at the peak of his fame and acclaim, with his play The Importance of Being Earnest having had a hugely successful premier. He was also in a stormy relationship with Alfred Douglas,...

Lord Salisbury had decided to serve as his own Foreign Secretary and, indeed, it was events abroad that most marked his third administration. This episode starts by looking at the great feast of Empire which was Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee of 1897. It was Britain at its peak of might, with the biggest empire the world had ever seen, wealthy, powerful, and with a people broadly united behind t...

Back in chapter 120, we met two extraordinary women, Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale, who transformed the world of nursing. Now we’re looking at four more women who were just as remarkable. They took on the stronghold of the doctors, and broke in. As they did that, they also began to force open the doors of the universities. The specific task of gaining access to universities for women was t...

Salisbury was back for his third term in office, but for now without a majority in the House of Commons. He had to form a government, and for the first time it would include Liberal Unionists as ministers. One of them, Joseph Chamberlain, surprised Salisbury by choosing to be named Secretary of State for the Colonies in preference to either of the great posts he’d been offered. It seemed that impe...

With both eyesight and hearing fading, Gladstone couldn’t last long after his defeat on Home Rule. Though he lasted as long as he could. Even after almost the entire cabinet prevented him from blocking an increase in naval expenditure, demanded by the admirals, and which he feared would merely add fuel to the fire of an arms race, he still clung on for a while longer. Finally though, in February 1...

The 1892 election had given Gladstone his chance to form yet another government and establish two new records: the only man to have been Prime Minister on four different occasions, and the oldest man ever to have held the post. He formed a government which gave the young Asquith his chance to shine in a senior position, which he certainly did. It also gave the Earl of Rosebery, dithering about it...

The pendulum had been swinging fairly steadily over the twenty years up to the early 1890s, with any party that won an election generally losing the next. That happened again in 1892, although the win was nothing like as decisive as Gladstone had hoped, leaving him instead dependent on Irish MPs to have the votes to challenge for office again. It also produced a crop of interesting new characters...

Just two weeks after the end of the divorce proceedings between Katharine and William O’Shea, the Irish Parliamentary Party assembled in Committee Room 15 of the Palace of Westminster, for the most fateful meeting in Charles Stewart Parnell’s career. The backlash from the divorce and the revelations that emerged about Parnell’s behaviour, left Gladstone feeling that continuing his association with...

We break away in this episode from our account of events in Britain’s ever-troubled relationship with Ireland, to look instead at Africa, where things were about to get a lot worse even than they were for the Irish. From 10% of the landmass being controlled by European colonial powers in 1870, by 1914 the figure had grown to nearly 90%. Some of the drive to extend European possessions had been dri...