A History of England

When the Earl of Derby’s second government fell, Victoria tried to impose a Prime Minister of her choice on the elected politicians who felt rather differently. That, though, was obsolete thinking. In the end she had to take Palmerston back. He was now 75, though as ready for hard work as ever. He faced a number of foreign affair challenges, most of them wars. A war with China to complete successf...

This week we’re into Dizzy times again.  Disraeli, or Dizzy as he came to be known, had played a leading role in bringing down the Palmerston government in 1858. That allowed the Earl of Derby, leader of the Conservatives, to form his second administration. With Derby in the Lords, responsibility for managing the government’s affairs in the Commons fell to Dizzy, as Leader of the House of Com...

After discussing his relative success with a moderately liberal programme in England last time, in this episode we talk about Palmerston’s far greater difficulties abroad. There was another Opium War in China, as Britain fought to enforce the East India Company’s right to push drugs there, and then an uprising in India, which Brits still like to think of as a mutiny though many Indians see it as a...

After the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the troops came home from Crimea, as did the remarkable women we talked about last week: Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale. They came back to different lives: Nightingale went on to do seminal work in nursing and in healthcare analysis – she revealed an unusual grasp of mathematical methods and became the first female member of the Royal Statistical So...

Mary Seacole, Jamaican and Mixed Race, and Florence Nightingale, White and from the English middle class, both in different ways did extraordinary work in Crimea as nurses. They both opened the doors to a different kind of nursing, in which practical steps such as good hygiene was vital, alongside a caring attitude towards patients. The two met but never worked together.  For the kind of radi...

Conditions in Crimea were appallingly bad, and all sides lost more men to disease than in combat. Britain did particularly badly in the first year, when the French performed rather better. However, in the second year (two years, note: the quick war the Allies had hoped to fight had transformed into a grind) the British did far better, and much of that was down to a radical change in healthcare. Ne...

Extraordinary! For once, instead of being at war with each other, Britain and France are going to war together against someone else. In this instance, Russia. And eventually in Crimea. Where the war is pretty much a constant succession of cockups, mostly by Britain, but from time to time by France too. One of the most spectacular is also the most celebrated moment from that whole ghastly war, the...

Just as, after the Second World War, the Western European powers were grateful to Russia for using its colossal military force to ensure the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, while still being frightened of that military, so in the 1850s, those same powers were grateful for the role Russia played in bringing down Napoleon, while feeling nervous about the huge military power it had used. By that time, Ru...

The tale of the first government led by the Earl of Derby (whom we first met as Lord Stanley), in which Benjamin Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, from its start to its fall such a short time later. And then, the start of the Aberdeen government, in which the same post was held by William Ewart Gladstone, perhaps rather more successfully. He did have one major advantage, granted by s...

It was time for Disraeli to break through. Not yet to the top job: that, as Melbourne had predicted years before, would go to Stanley, now known as Derby. But Disraeli would land a big job in government, that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not an easy job for a man who was no financial expert. His major challenge was that he represented a political group opposed to the Repeal of the Corn Laws, ju...

We’re back in 1848, with the Year of Revolutions, a few of which succeeded, most of which were put down – not least in Northern Italy, where Joseph Radetzky, celebrated in a cheerful Strauss tune, proved far less cheerful in his treatment of opponents to Austrian rule. Britain, on the other hand, saw no revolution, though many feared one from the Chartists. In the event, the last shout of Chartism...

We saw last week that the Russell government stood back from the Great Irish Famine to the point of practically criminal negligence. But what was it doing in the meantime? Well, it turns out that it wasn’t achieving much. It was a minority government, only able to hang on to office because of the divisions in the Conservative Party. Indeed, the most dramatic events mostly surrounded the figure of...

A million dead. Over a million emigrants. A population that has never recovered to its level before the disaster. The Irish starved while the British government stood back and decided to let the market solve the problem for it. Or even to allow what it saw as God’s will to work itself out. The legacy is a deep well of bitterness against Britain. With the descendants of the emigrants in the United...

Peel’s name is tightly bound up with the issue of Corn Law Repeal, the striking achievement of his only full period in office (the hundred days he had before didn't really count). The repeal was, however, double-edged: a major success but also a (politically) fatal self-inflicted wound, obtained only at the price of splitting his own party and having to accept support from the Whigs, or Liberals a...

As Melbourne left the scene, so men like John Russell could step into his place. Russell had indeed been adding to his reputation as a liberal, just as his Whig Party was increasingly being transformed into the Liberal Party. A fellow liberal, but increasingly a rival, was Lord Palmerston. He was highly critical of his successor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, but the behaviour Palmerston den...

The curious relationship continues between Queen Victoria and her first Prime Minister, Viscount Melbourne. It is, however, perhaps less easy than in the past, as the young queen becomes more wilful, more determined on getting her way. One of the things the queen’s particularly determined about is not having that “cold unfeeling disagreeable man” Peel as Prime Minister. However, when Melbourne dec...

After the last few episodes and their focus on domestic issues, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Grey and Melbourne governments had practically no foreign policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a global power with a huge empire, Britain was actively pursuing foreign policy objectives. And in Lord Palmerston, it had a foreign minister far more activist than, Melbourne, to gu...

After Peel’s 100-day stint in office, Melbourne was back. He took advantage of his return to rid himself of some figures he disliked in his government, though he had to keep Palmerston in place, despite his dislike of all activism. That dislike was based on his pursuit of an easy life, so it’s not surprising that though he had a few achievements, there weren’t many and they weren’t spectacular. Mu...

It was time for Melbourne. But not a long time, as the king decided to try the old royal trick of getting rid of a prime Minister, the last time a monarch attempted that. So, like Napoleon, Peel got a hundred days. What’s more this episode takes a look at the curious private life of Melbourne, using the word 'curious' in a broad sense, extending as far as an Epstein-like appetite. In addition, we’...

Another significant measure passed by the Grey government was a lot less creditable than the Great Reform Act or Abolition of Slavery. The 1834 Poor Law mandated the construction of workhouses and set out to achieve the aim of making public assistance to the unemployed, sick or old, a lot less pleasant than work – an aim often pursued by politicians today as well and which it achieved. It wasn’t t...

Just how great was the Great Reform Act? It was passed in an atmosphere that came close to being revolutionary. That drove the passage of the Act. It didn’t, however, make it a revolutionary Act. On the contrary, its aim was much more to head off revolution. Indeed, its entrenchment of landowning interests in the counties, and its extension of the franchise to the middle class but not to workers,...

The shift from Tories to Whigs in government in 1830 was dramatic enough, but nothing like as dramatic as the changes that had taken place in Britain as a nation. Both the impact of the Industrial Revolution, creating large new middle and working classes, and the continued decline in the power of the throne, meant that there was a growing and eventually irresistible demand for new groups of people...

Just who were these Whigs? It turns out that, though theirs would be a government having to undertake reform, in its make-up it would be the most aristocratic of the century. Since the biggest obstacle to reform were the aristocrats and their acolytes, that was a tad ironic. The problem was that the pressure to do something about the condition of the poor was becoming irresistible. And there was i...

It had been 46 years. In all that time, apart from the 14 months when they had led the Ministry of all the Talents in 1806-1807, the Whigs had been excluded from power. But in 1830, they at last came back. A lot of that was down to the divisions in the Tory Party – now increasingly called the Tory Party again, even by its members – which under the pressure of civil reform (Emancipation of Protesta...

To greet our reaching 100 episodes, we’re going to pause and recap how far we’ve come. When we started, England, was just a small country on the edge of Europe, trying to punch above its weight, giving far more powerful nations – notably Spain – a bad time. But then it grew, sorting some of its constitutional problems as it went, often painfully, as in the Civil Wars and the execution of the King....