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Britain in the 18th century

 

Owning land was the main form of wealth in the 18th century. The highest class were the peers and peeresses of the House of Lords and their spouses and families. They were the nobility and held the high political offices, the high ranks in the army and navy, and owned large estates, usually scattered over the country. Some were lawyers or merchants.

The next class were the gentry. Their family heads had land and were often Justices of the Peace. They were sometimes mem­bers of the House of Commons. The oldest son took over from his father, while the other had to find a living such as in the church, law, medicine, or trade. They usually lived in mansions.

The old yeoman class was disappearing due to their selling their land to larger landowners. Farming on a large scale was more productive.

The next class were the “middling sort”. In this class were merchants, lawyers, substantial tenant farmers, smaller freehold­ers, in town traders, shopkeepers (who now kept their wares inside and lived on the second floor), clerks and civil servants, and cus­toms and excise men.

The last class were the manual workers. These were wage earners or independent craftsmen, jewellers, etc. These workers typically worked in their stone or brick houses in a rural setting. Many women and children were employed. It was not unusual for a man to work 13 hours a day for 6 days a week. Real wages were higher than at any time since the mid-1400s.

Lastly were the mass of the population of London: hordes of labourers who depended on casual employment and could be dismissed at will.

The gap between rich and poor became greater. Marriage re­mained a main way to wealth. Also, one trained in the law could aspire to have a successful career in high political office, which also brought wealth.

 

Law and government

 

In 1707 there was union with Scotland, in which their Parlia­ments were combined into one. The country was known as Great Britain.

The high offices of the Crown included the Chancellor, Keep­er, President of the Council, Privy Seal, Treasurer (who was usu­ally also the leader of the House of Commons and the Chancellor of the Exchequer), and two Secretaries of State, who were in charge of all foreign and domestic matters other than taxation, one for the north and one for the south. Other offices were: Paymaster General, Secretary of War, and Treasurer of the Navy. Starting with the monarch, government positions were given by patronage to friends and relatives, or if none, to the highest bidder.

The king’s ministers were those members of his Privy Council who carried out the work of government. By distributing patron­age, the ministers acquired the influence to become leading mem­bers of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. They made policy, secured the king’s consent, and then put through the nec­essary legislation. The king was to act only through his ministers and all public business was to be formally done in Privy Council with all its decisions signed by its members.



The king gradually lost power. The last royal veto of a Par­liamentary bill was in 1708. By 1714, the Privy Council ceased making decisions of policy. Instead a cabinet, not identified with any particular party, was chosen by the Queen, who presided over their meetings, which were held every Sunday. It dealt with Par­liament. In 1720, the number of peers in the House of Lords was fixed, so that the Crown could create no more. About 1720, Robert Walpole, son of a country' squire, who came to be first minister of the Crown and the leader of the Whigs, organized the cabinet so that it was of one view. He led it for twenty years and thus became the first prime minister.He was brilliant at finance and lessened taxation. He was successful in preserving the peace with other nations and providing stability in England that led to prosperity. The Whigs opposed a standing army and over-reaching influence of the Crown. They espoused the liberty of individual subjects. Their slogan was “liberty and property”. They generally favoured foreign wars.

Members of the Parliament felt responsible for the good of the whole country instead of accounting to their electors, but self- interest also played a part. Leading commercial magnates of the realm sought to be members of Parliament or governors of the Bank of England to be able to take up government loans at ad­vantageous rates, snap up contracts to supply government depart­ments at exorbitant prices, and play an important part in deciding what duties should be charged on what goods.

About 5% of the population could vote. Voting was open, rather than by secret ballot. Seats in Parliament could normally be bought either by coming to an arrangement with some land­owner who had the right to nominate to a closed seat or by buying enough votes in constituencies where the electorate was larger and the contest more open. As of 1710, electees to the Commons had to have 600 pounds annual income for knights or 300 pounds an­nually for burgesses.

Ambassadors were made immune from arrest, prosecution and imprisonment to preserve their rights and privileges and protection by the Queen and the law of nations.

In 1747, Justices of the Peace were authorized to decide issues between masters and mistresses and their employees who were hired for at least one year. If a servant misbehaved, they could authorize reduction of wage, discharge, and hard labor at a house of Correction up to one month.

Mercantile law was developed by the common law courts, especially the King’s Bench.

The office of sheriff was now an accessory department of the common law courts for summons, executions, summoning the jury, and carrying out the sentence of the law.

Seditious libel trials in England and the colonies were followed closely and their defendants broadly supported. John Wilkes,a member of the House of Commons, published a criticism of a new minister in 1763. He wrote a scathing attack on a speech de­livered by King George III when he opened Parliament. First the printers of the paper were arrested on the orders of the King and then Wilkes himself. However, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas ordered him to be released. Wilkes became a popular hero, and the following year he was elected Lord Mayor of London, but he soon got into further trouble. This time he fled the country. He was 8 tried in his absence and outlawed. When Wilkes returned to England he was imprisoned and brought before the court. This time the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench reversed the sentence of outlawry stating that ‘public policy is not an argument in a court of law’. Wilkes was released. His victory established princi­ples of the greatest importance: that the freedom of the individual is more important than the interests of the state.

 

Colonies

 

There was much competition among countries for colonies. Quebec and then Montreal in 1760 in Canada were captured from the French. About 1768 James Cook discovered New Zealand and Australia; his maps greatly helped future voyages. The English East India Company took over India as its Mogul Empire broke up.

There was a steady flow of emigrants to the American colo­nies, including transported convicts and indentured servants.

If the results of the wars against France left the British colo­nists in America with a new sense of confidence, they also made parliament in London increasingly aware both of the value of the American colonies and of the likely cost of defending them.

British America consisted of the thirteen colonies founded or developed by Britain between 1607 (Virginia) and 1732 (Georgia), together with four provinces won through warfare — Nova Scotia in 1713, and then Quebec and West and East Florida in 1763. The British government felt that this important bloc of overseas territo­ry now required more coherent control and better defense — both to be supplied from London. But many in the original thirteen colonies regarded any such interference as an intrusion.

This difference in attitude led inevitably to friction. London, sending over British troops, expected the colonists to contribute to the expense and to allow the soldiers to be quartered in Ameri­can homes. The colonists saw this as an unacceptable imposition, in both financial and personal terms. Similar resentment resulted from British measures to control the judges and courts in America, to lessen the power of the elected assemblies in each colony, and to collect more effectively the customs due on trade between the American mainland and the West Indies.

But British taxes provoked the most deeply felt grievances and the most effective American response. In 1776 the Ameri- 'can colonies declared their independence from Britain, relying on the principles stated by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau that man was naturally free and all men equal, and that society was only created with their consent. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence which listed the colonies’ grievances against the Crown which reiterated many of the provisions of the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights, specifically dispensing with and suspending laws, maintaining a standing army and quarter­ing troops without legislative consent, imposing arbitrary taxation, encouraging illegal prosecutions in strange courts, and corrupting the jury process. It was adopted on July 4, 1776.

 

 


9

The Victorian Era

 

Victoria was the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Brit­ain and Ireland from 20 June 1837, and the first Empress of India from 1 May 1876, until her death on 22 January 1901. Her reign lasted sixty-three years and seven months, longer than that of any other British monarch. In general, the period centred on her reign is known as the Victorian era.

The Victorian era of the United Kingdom marked the height of the British Industrial Revolution and the apex of the British Empire. Although commonly used to refer to the period of Queen Victoria’s rule between 1837 and 1901, scholars debate whether the Victorian period—as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Vic­torians—actually begins with the passage of the ReformAct 1832.It was concerned with giving the middle classes a stake in gov­ernment rather than with changing the basis of government. The total electorate was increased by 57 percent to 217,000, but the artisans, the working classes, and some sections of the lower mid­dle classes still remained outside “the pale of the constitution.” Yet the composition of the new House of Commons differed little from that of the old. It continued to reflect property rather than population, and landed interests remained by far the largest inter­ests represented.

Early Victorian England was turbulent and excited, and, if it had not been for Robert Peel, who succeeded Melbourne as prime minister after the general election of 1841 and had returned to power the “Conservatives” (as Peel liked to think of his party), there might well have been even greater disorder. From the start Peel attached top priority to financial reform. Beginning with his budget of 1842, he set about simplifying and reducing tariff restric­tions on trade, and in the same year he reintroduced an income tax. In 1846 he repealed the Corn Laws (import tariffs designed to protect corn prices in the UK against competition from less expensive foreign imports). The first national Public Health Act was passed in 1848.

Most people were concerned, too, about the rise in popula­tion. At the first (defective) census of 1801, the population of England and Wales was about nine million and that of Scotland about 1.5 million. By 1851 the comparable figures were 18 mil­lion and three million. At its peak between 1811 and 1821, the growth rate for Britain as a whole was 17 percent for the decade. It took time to realize that, as population grew, national produc­tion would grow also.

The railway age may be said to have begun in 1830, when the line from Manchester to Liverpool. By 1851, 6,800 miles of rail­way were open, some of them involving engineering feats of great complexity. There was as much argument among contemporaries about the impact of railways as there was about the impact of steam engines in factories, but there was general agreement about the fact that the coming of the railway marked a great divide in British social history.

In 1851 Britain was the workshop of the world and the main influence on the industrialization of other nations. The GreatEx­hibitionof 1851 in London symbolized this economic supremacy. People from all parts of the world could examine machines of every kind. Part of the success of the exhibition was political as much as economic. The objects on display came from all parts of the world, including India and the countries with recent white settlements, such as Australia and New Zealand, that constituted the new empire. The exhibition was a triumph not only for the economy but also for Victoria and her German husband, Albert, whom she had married in 1840. Despite outbursts of opposition to Albert by the press, particularly in the patriotic mid-1850s, the family life of the Victorian court began to be considered increas­ingly as a model for the whole country. The fact that Albert had appreciated the significance of Peel’s achievement and that he put his trust in the advancement of industry and science was as important as the fact that Victoria herself established monarchy on respectable foundations of family life.

 


Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1988


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