A History of Britain, Volume 3 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Preface

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1: FORCES OF NATURE: THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION?

  CHAPTER 2: FORCES OF NATURE: THE ROAD HOME

  CHAPTER 3: THE QUEEN AND THE HIVE

  CHAPTER 4: WIVES, DAUGHTERS, WIDOWS

  CHAPTER 5: THE EMPIRE OF GOOD INTENTIONS: INVESTMENTS

  CHAPTER 6: THE EMPIRE OF GOOD INTENTIONS: THE DIVIDEND

  CHAPTER 7: THE LAST OF BLADESOVER?

  CHAPTER 8: ENDURANCE

  Picture Section

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  While Britain was losing an empire, it was finding itself…’ The compelling opening words to The Fate of the Empire, set the tone and agenda for the final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain, her people and her past. Spanning two centuries, crossing the breadth of the empire and covering a vast expanse of topics – from the birth of feminism to the fate of freedom – he explores the forces that shaped British culture and character from 1776 to 2000.

  The story opens on the eve of a bloody revolution, but not a British one. The French Revolution never quite crossed the Channel, though its spirit of fiery defiance and Romantic idealism did, sparking off a round of radical revolts and reforms that gathered momentum over the coming century – from the Irish Rebellion to the Chartist Petition. The great question of the Victorian century was how the world’s first industrial society could come through its growing pains without falling apart in social and political conflict. Would the machine age destroy or strengthen the institutions that held Britain together, from the family to the farm? And if the British Empire helped to make Britain stable and rich, did it live up to its promise to help the ruled as well as the rulers? On the way to answering these questions, The Fate of the Empire makes stops at both celebrations, like the Great Exhibition, and catastrophes, like the Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny. Amidst the military and economic shocks and traumas of the 20th century, and through the voices of Churchill, Orwell and H. G. Wells, it asks the question that is still with us – is the immense weight of our history a blessing or a curse, a gift or a millstone around the neck of our future?

  It is a vast compelling epic, made more so by the lively storytelling and big bold characters at the heart of the action. But alongside flamboyant heroes, like Nelson and Churchill, Schama recalls unsung heroines and virtually unknown enemies. Alongside the grand ideas, he exposes the grand illusions that cost untold lives. Schama looks head on at the facts and asks, ‘What went wrong with the liberal dream?’ The answers emerge in The Fate of the Empire, which reveals the living ideals of Britain’s long history, ‘a history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty’.

  About the Author

  Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University and the prize-winning author of fourteen books, which have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution; Landscape and Memory; Rembrandt’s Eyes; the History of Britain trilogy and Rough Crossings, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written widely on music, art, politics and food for the Guardian, Vogue and the New Yorker. His award-winning television work as writer and presenter for the BBC stretches over two decades and includes the fifteen-part A History of Britain and the eight-part, Emmy-winning Power of Art. The American Future: A History appeared on BBC2 in autumn 2008.

  PREFACE

  READERS IN SEARCH of an exhaustive account of the careers of Sir Robert Peel or Reginald Maudling should put this book down right now. For, with this last volume of A History of Britain, it will be more than ever obvious that the cautionary indefinite article in the title is truly warranted, both in terms of the frankly interpretative reading of modern British history offered, and in the necessarily subjective judgements I have made about which themes to explore in most detail. As with the BBC2 television programmes, I have opted to concentrate on a smaller number of stories and arguments, but to treat them in detail rather than give equally cursory attention to everything bearing on the transformation of Britain into an industrial empire. As with the two previous volumes, this book gives space to many themes which could not be accommodated within the iron narrative discipline of the television hour. But even this does not mean there is any pretence at all to comprehensiveness. No one will be in any danger of confusing The Fate of Empire with a textbook. The last half of the 20th century is deliberately treated with essay-like breadth and looseness – partly, at least, because I have trouble treating any period contemporary with my own life as history at all (an illusion, no doubt, of the passing of years). As the title of this volume suggests, however, I have tried to do something not always ventured in histories of 19th- and 20th-century Britain: to bring together imperial and domestic history, trying at all times to look at the importance that India, in particular, had for Britain’s expansive prosperity and power, and at the responsibility that the Raj had for India’s and Ireland’s plight.

  New York, 2002

  And out you come at last with the sun behind you into the eastern sea. You speed up and tear the oily water louder and faster, sirroo, sirroo–swish–sirroo, and the hills of Kent – over which I once fled from the Christian teachings of Nicodemus Frapp – fall away on the right hand and Essex on the left. They fall away and vanish into blue haze; and the tall slow ships behind the tugs, scarce moving ships and wallowing sturdy tugs are all wrought of wet gold as one goes frothing by. They stand out bound on strange missions of life and death, to the killing of men in unfamiliar lands. And now behind us is blue mystery and the phantom flash of unseen lights, and presently even these are gone and I and my destroyer tear out to the unknown across a great grey space. We tear into the great spaces of the future and the turbines fall to talking in unfamiliar tongues. Out to the open we go, to windy freedom and trackless ways. Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes – London passes, England passes …

  H.G. WELLS, Tono-Bungay (1909)

  … the country houses will be turned into holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same …

  GEORGE ORWELL, England Your England (1941)

  CHAPTER

  1

  FORCES OF NATURE:

  THE ROAD TO

  REVOLUTION?

  WHILE BRITAIN WAS losing an empire it was finding itself. As redcoats were facing angry crowds and hostile militiamen in Massachusetts, Thomas Pennant, a Flintshire gentleman and naturalist, set off on his travels in rough Albion in search of that almost extinct species: the authentic natural-born Briton. Amidst the upland crags and chilly tarns of Merionedd, he thought he had discovered them: Britain’s very own home-grown noble savages, the descendants of the earliest tribes, whose simplicity had survived, somehow, the onslaught of modern ‘civilization’. At Llyn Irdinn he walked round two circles of standing stones, which he believed were undoubtedly the remains of ‘druidical antiquities’. Nearby, he discovered the human equivalent, at the house of Evan Llwd, where Pennant was treated to hospitality ‘in the style of an antient Briton’
with ‘potent beer to wash down the Coch yr Wdre or hung goat and the cheese compounded of the milk of cow and sheep. He likewise showed us the antient family cup made of a bull’s scrotum in which large libation had been made in days of yore … Here they have lived for generations without bettering or lessening their income, without noisy fame, but without any of its embittering attendants.’

  The harsh, rain-soaked countryside was full of such old British marvels, human and topographical. At Penllyn lake Pennant found the hut of the nonagenarian Margaret Uch Evans, although its locally famous resident was off somewhere, perhaps shooting foxes. This was a bitter disappointment, for Margaret, he had heard, was a Welsh Diana, a Celtic Amazon: a prodigious huntress and fisher who, even in her 90s, ‘rowed stoutly, was queen of the lake, fiddled excellently and knew all the old music, did not neglect the mechanic arts for she was a very good joiner’. She was also blacksmith, shoemaker, boat-builder, harp-maker, and well into her 70s had been ‘the best wrestler in the country’.

  Pennant became the specialist in documenting the remnants of ancient, outlandish, unpolished Britain: the wildcat and the ptarmigan; the mysterious, lichen-flecked megalith and the poor, tough people who lived among them. A few years after his ‘excursion’ into north Wales – and a year before James Boswell and Dr Johnson – he sailed through the Hebrides, taking with him Moses Griffith, his Welsh manservant and illustrator. There he beheld scenes that filled him, alternately, with melancholy and elation. The island people, like the shepherds of the Merionedd hills, were primitives, often dwelling in windowless hovels and surviving on oatmeal, milk and a little fish. Tens of thousands of them had been forced off their little farms in the 1760s and 1770s to make way for profitable herds of Blackface and Cheviot sheep. In desperation, many had made the Atlantic crossing as emigrants to the New World. Yet there were also little epiphanies: the sight of the herring boats at Barrisdale, ‘a busy haunt of men and ships in this wild and romantic tract’; or the view from the top of Beinn-an-oir, the Golden Mountain, one of the (disconcertingly, three) Paps of Jura, which laid out for Pennant’s exhilarated inspection the scattered pieces of outland Britain – the highland peaks all the way to Ben Lomond in the northeast; the isles of Colonsay and Oronsay in the western ocean; and, to the south, Islay and the distant hills of Antrim in Northern Ireland.

  The result of all this clambering and trotting and sketching and jotting made Thomas Pennant the first great tour guide of a Britain still waiting to be fully explored by the domestic tourist. Five editions of his A Tour in Scotland (1772) appeared before 1790. But he was not the only author making a modest fame and fortune from the rediscovery, the redefinition, of the nation. In 1778, while His Majesty’s forces were evacuating Philadelphia, and after Pennant’s description of Wales had been published, it was joined by the one of the first guides to the Lake District, written by Thomas West, a Scottish Jesuit living in Ulverston. West, like Pennant, was a scholar, much travelled through Europe. Tired of dragging bored milords through the beggar-infested Forum on their obligatory Grand Tour, he had returned and developed a second career, taking parties of intrepid and interested gentlemen and ladies through the lakes, cliffs and dales. Whether in person or through his guidebook, West would steer tourists to a successsion of visual stations, perfect for drinking in the British sublime.

  The message that both Pennant and West had to deliver was simple, but revolutionary: come home. The British had wandered too much, too promiscuously, too greedily, from Mysore to Naples. In forcing their native scenery to resemble Italy, tricked out with temples and statues and God knows what – or, just as bad, engineering it to resemble foreign paintings, so that they could stroll from the picture gallery to the picnic and not notice the difference – they had somehow lost touch with what made Britain Britain: its own unprettified landscape. By some miracle it had remained unspoiled in the remoter places of the islands, places thought too far, too ugly and too rude for polite excursions. But now the new turnpike roads had cut travel time to Chester or Edinburgh by half, so that the adventurous traveller could be whisked to the verge of sublime Britain – after which, it is true, simpler, rougher modes of transport such as the pony or the small ferryboat might have to suffice. And it was an unpleasant fact that exposure to the sublime meant being rained on a lot and being blown about by winds.

  But it would all be worth it, Pennant and West implied, because a trip to the true Britain was not just a holiday; it was a tutorial in the recovery of national virtue. The British needed roughness because they had wallowed too long in vicious softness. Inspecting all those Roman ruins, they had doomed themselves to follow the notorious example of that empire’s decay. Long before they had lost America, the Jeremiahs said, Britons had lost themselves. Old British virtues had surrendered to modern British vices. Liberty had been perverted by patronage; justice blinded by the unforgiving glare of money; country innocence contaminated by city fashion. The ‘Ancient Constitution’ that had kept the British free had degenerated into what its critics called ‘Old Corruption’ or, more bestially, ‘The Thing’. The triumphalists of empire had supposed that commercial robustness and Protestant plainness would immunize Britain from the usual laws of imperial decadence. But trade had become a euphemism for the crude gouging of revenue, enforced by British redcoats, or for the brutal traffic in African bodies. And God and history had inflicted their punishment at Saratoga and Yorktown.

  The antidote to rot was horror. ‘Horrid’ was – along with ‘bristling’, ‘shaggy’ and ‘precipitous’ – one of the terms of choice in the promotional literature of Romantic British travel. At Falcon-Crag in Lakeland, West promised, ‘an immense rock hangs over your head and upwards, a forest of broken pointed rocks, in a semicircular sweep towering inward, form[ing] the most horrid amphitheatre that ever eye beheld in the wild forms of convulsed nature.’ At the Falls of Clyde, an obligatory stop on the itinerary of the British sublime, according to another gentleman travel writer, Thomas Newte, ‘the great body of water, rushing with horrid fury seems to threaten destruction to the solid rocks that enrage it by their resistance. It boils up from the caverns which itself has formed as if it were vomited out of the lower region.’ But these frightening experiences were not just perversely organized as holidays in hell; they were a spa for the sensations. The agitation of the senses was meant to shock the visitor out of the jaded appetite and torpor that was eating away the national fibre. The crystal waters of Cumbria, Cymru and Caledonia would be the cure for the diseases, moral as well as metabolical, of empire. In the uplands, away from the noxious filth and polluted air of the metropolis, Britons would be able to breathe again. They would start a new life.

  Everything was to be stood on its head. The forces of ‘progress’ – Romans, Plantagenets – were now to be thought of as the bringers of greed and brutish power. Contemplating the archaeology of defeat brought the traveller into communion with lost worlds of old British virtue, an antiquity that might actually serve as a template for the future. The stone circles and Iron Age terraces that bore the footprints of a Britain flattened by the Romans; the shattered Welsh forts blitzed by Edward I; the ruined abbeys dispossessed by Thomas Cromwell and then burned by Oliver Cromwell – all became invested with tragic eloquence. As early as 1740 the antiquarian William Stukeley’s Stonehenge: A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids had argued that far from being the bloodthirsty barbarians described by Caesar, the Druids had actually been the descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel, transplanted to Britain to create a new Promised Land, and had survived as the priestly guardians of an ancient and sophisticated culture. Their Celtic tongue was not just the original British language but the fountainhead of all non-Latin European languages.

  Suddenly, being British was not the same as being English. Dolbadarn Castle, in the north Welsh fastness of Gwynedd, where Owain Goch, the son of the last independent Welsh prince, Llewellyn ab Gruffydd, took on the juggernaut army of Edward I, became a place of pilgrimage. Ini
tially those who found their way there were Welsh antiquarians like Pennant, eager to reclaim their patrimony as the ‘original Britons’, but soon enough Romantic English sympathizers followed. The shattered piles of masonry silhouetted against the dark sky were seen (and painted) as incomparably more ‘feeling’ than the brutally intact Plantagenet castles like Conwy and Harlech, called ‘the magnificent badges of our subjection’ by Pennant. Carrying their copies of Thomas Gray’s epic poem, ‘The Bard’ (1757), reciting the last curses hurled at the oncoming king by the last blind poet to survive the Plantagenet extermination, Snowdonian thrill-seekers would peer into the ravines and shudder as they imagined the bard hurling himself headlong in a gesture of suicidal defiance. If they were very lucky they might be invited by the likes of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn to an eisteddfod, one of the gatherings at his country seat of Wynnstay in Denbighshire, featuring choirs and old, preferably blind, harpists like John Parry who would sing the tunes and lyrics of his forebears. From the mid-1750s a group of London Welsh calling themselves the Cymmrodorion met in taverns, and between rounds of strong ale, committed themselves to rescuing those epics and ballads from oblivion by writing them down and publishing them.

  Wherever they looked, the Romantic enthusiasts of rough Britain believed, there were lessons to be learned that confounded the equation of cultivation with nobility. It was in the places furthest from corrupting fashion, in the heart of Britain’s oldest landscapes – the landscapes which gave ‘Capability’ Brown nightmares – that truly modern marvels were to be beheld. In 1746 a builder called William Edwards had attempted to throw a single 140-foot stone bridge across the river Taff. After two collapses, by 1755 he had succeeded – no one quite knew how – and the bridge was still standing. By the late 1760s and 1770s, the Pontypridd was being compared in prose and verse eulogies to the Rialto in Venice as a ‘monument of the strong, natural past and bold attempts of Antient Britain’.