A History of England

The cops are what Robert Peel’s best remembered for. Thanks to him, the world’s first professional, civilian police force was launched. It hasn’t always lived up to initial expectations, with London’s Metropolitan Police going through particularly difficult times just now but, boy, it’s an initiative that has left its mark. And not just in Britain. There was controversy about setting up a police f...

Reformers were on the move. Elizabeth Fry was notable as a woman speaking out in a man’s world, campaigning for prison reform, especially for women prisoners. But there were many others, notably the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who found a strange way of having his body dealt with after death. A slightly ghoulish way. But whatever clarion voices campaigned for reform outside Parliament,...

That poor, saintly William Wilberforce. He’d spoken with such courage and dedication for the slaves for so long. And yet now, with a more radical movement emerging championing the poor and oppressed in Britain itself, he found himself the target of hostile attack. Aging and with his health going, He withdrew from public life in 1825. Meanwhile, Canning was back in government, serving under Lord Li...

A scandalous episode: first the king trying to divorce his wife and a major domestic row developing between them, all conducted in public, with armed guards and slammed doors to exclude the Queen from her husband's coronation. Wonderful proof that the Royal family’s gift for generating bad publicity, and entertaining the population with it, is nothing new. Next, a repressive government is met by a...

Popular belief, back in the nineteenth century and also today, was that the British Empire in India may have been flawed and imperfect, but it set out to benefit the native peoples. In this episode, we take a look at that belief, and find that actually it did a great deal of damage, that the benefit it might have produced was already being pursued by local figures who might have got a lot further...

Pete, Dave and Bobby are the subjects of this episode. But Pete’s a place not a person. It’s St Peter’s Field near Manchester, site of one of those epoch-shattering, and epoch-shaming, events that would mark British politics for the next decade or more. Dave is another in the series of remarkable economists that started with Adam Smith. Apparently, he was also rather a nice guy. As for Bobby, he w...

The Congress of Vienna set up peace in Europe for decades. Indeed, it prevented any kind of general war across the whole of the Continent for nearly a century, until the First World War broke out in 1914. But it wasn’t quite as straightforward as the outcome might suggest. The power of Russia, with 600,000 troops now occupying many parts of Europe, led to a quick rehabilitation of the former enemy...

Napoleon makes his second bid for power, and comes unstuck, as Wellington and Blücher prove too much for him at Waterloo. It’s a victory the Brits like to celebrate as a great triumph for the country, up on a par with Trafalgar ten years earlier. The truth, though, is that even within Wellington’s army, there were more Germans than Brits. And, when you add in Blücher’s Prussians, Napoleon’s defeat...

It was peace at last. For the first time, apart from one short break, for a generation.  Peace, however, requires managing, just like war does. That management took the form of a new approach to the relations between European states, with the old concept of a Balance of Power giving way to the new one of a Concert of Nations. The innovation meant that nations would find a way to settle their...

Although Britain was in the closing stages of a long and desperate struggle with France, it somehow managed to get itself sucked into a separate war with the United States. Called the War of 1812, accurately for the start, hopeless for its end – in 1815 – it was unnecessary and avoidable. As a Canadian historian, Pierre Berton, put it when talking about the final accord, the Treaty of Ghent, “It w...

1812 was a year of turning points. It was  the year that Spencer Perceval was murdered, the only British Prime Minister to have met such a fate, and his successor Lord Liverpool was appointed. Just a tad more significantly, it was also the year when Napoleon, sick of seeing his anti-British blockade, the Continental System, being undermined by nations ostensibly part of it, decided to invade...

This is where we start to get to know the future King George IV, in the time when he became Prince Regent. We also meet his friend ‘Beau’ Brummel and  talk about the disastrous way that friendship ended. Disastrous, that is, for poor old Beau. This was during the premiership of Spencer Perceval. It was while he was in office that the Peninsular War really started to get some momentum, behind...

The Ministry of all the Talents has fallen and the Duke of Portland, after a record-breaking gap of 24 years, has formed a new government. The people making it up are now referred to as Tories and think of themselves that way. As for the Whigs, who had a brief taste of power with the Talents, their first in 23 years since 1783, they’re going to have to wait to return to power until 1827. Meanwhile...

Slavery: finally, the time had come for a major step to be taken. Oh, no, not the actual abolition of slavery itself. But at least the abolition of the trade in slaves. Funnily enough, that’s something Pitt might have taken on. But he didn’t. He seems to have been a man who understood that politics was the art of the possible. Though sometimes he saw as impossible what might have been in his grasp...

It’s time for Pitt’s second go as Prime Minister, and for another round of war in Europe. But Pitt was no longer the conquering hero he once had been. On the other hand, there was one notable moment of conquest during his second term in office: what remains the greatest naval victory in British History, the Battle of Trafalgar. Which, oddly enough, led to two fine illustrations of the ambiguities...

An episode about interludes… The first of these looked like the end of an era, when William Pitt the Younger stepped down as Prime Minister, after seventeen years in power, and still younger than any other British Prime Minister has been on even first taking office. It turns out, though, that seeing it as an end was premature. It was, indeed, an interlude. The other was the Peace of Amiens. The tr...

After talking about Britain’s biggest and most lucrative colony, India, we now turn our attention to its oldest, closest and most troublesome, Ireland.  We've seen that Pitt had tried to establish free trade between the two islands. He failed, when the British parliament demanded concessions for British business that it was impossible for the Irish parliament to accept. So, faced with the imp...

We’re back with Britain’s great imperial project in India, going great guns (often literally) despite the war in Europe. It was still in principle being run by England’s old East India company, though increasingly that was little more than a fiction behind which the British state exercised direct rule. There were more glorious wars against rebellious local leaders, where ‘rebellious’ meant ‘more i...

Things just got worse and worse for the Austrians after the Battle of Marengo, until they were defeated again by the French, and much closer to home, at Hohenlinden in Bavaria. They made peace with France, as did Russia, leaving Britain as the only major power still in the Second Coalition, which was now all but dead. Britain did win a couple more victories, notably in Malta and then, with the Tur...

A tale of good and bad luck among high-ranking military men. That’s the fortunate Admiral Nelson and his far less fortunate victim, the Neapolitan Admiral Caracciolo. And Napoleon as a general enjoying the good fortune of being saved by the far less fortunate Desaix. Plus the difficulties of building the Second Coalition, especially for a British diplomat who had to wade through to icy water to tr...

It’s a time for duels. The one between the nations you already know about, and we’re simply following its next stages. But the one between two men is more than a little strange, especially as one of them was the British Prime Minister. Also in this episode, we see Nelson hitting the big time with a major victory of his own. And Napoleon reaching for the big time, as he sets out to win supreme poli...

We’re wrapping up on the curious year of 1797, when Britain saw success at sea against its external enemies, but also a terrible threat from within its own Royal Navy, in the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. It saw economic problems and the struggle to keep funding the war, both resolved by more touches of William Pitt’s financial genius. It also saw Pitt negotiating for peace with France, faili...

Strange times for Britain. And for William Pitt the Younger. While at the beginning of his time as Prime Minister, he’d had to contend with being in a parliamentary minority, losing votes right and left, he’d enjoyed extraordinary economic success. Now, though, with a powerful majority, he faced economic hardship and the unrest to which it led. Partly that was due to bad harvests as well as the im...

Having dealt with all the background, in revolutions both French and Industrial, in this episode we move into the War of the First Coalition, Act I of the long series of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that ended at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. In passing, in this episode, we deal with the height of the Reign of Terror in France, culminating in the execution of its main architect, Robespierre...

During the long sequence of wars that engulfed Europe between 1792 and 1815, there was one constant: whoever else might shift allegiance, Britain and France were always against each other. Britain was the wealthiest nation in Europe. France was the first to build a mass army. Those were ingredients for an entirely new kind of war. This episode looks at how Britain became so wealthy, France so powe...