In London and Edinburgh news of the Massacre at Glencoe was greeted by pious professions of shock ... If the intention had been to cower the Jacobites into submission it had all gone horribly wrong. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s2e3: Britannia Incorporated
Britannia Incorporated: It was one of the most astonishing transformations in European history ... Scotland and England were joined at the hip. ibid.
Money, drink, libels, gangs of toughs, this was all-out war at the Hustings. Tories accused the Whigs of being fanatics, the dregs of the populus, atheists, commonwealth men. Whigs accused Tories of being willing tools of the Jesuits and the French. ibid.
1714: Queen Anne died with no heir. To make sure of a Protestant successor no fewer than fifty-seven individuals with blood ties to Anne were passed over to arrive at the next King of England. An uncharismatic, middle-aged man who didn’t speak English ... George I of Great Britain ... his coronation was greeted with rioting in twenty towns. ibid.
The Union had failed to dampen the enthusiasm in Scotland for the Jacobite cause. In fact quite the opposite. ibid.
Robert Walpole ... In effect Britain’s first Prime Minister. And under his leadership the British economy boomed as never before. Walpole’s appeal was to shameless self-interest. ibid.
There had been philanthropy before of course but this was the first time that businessmen came together with high profile artists, writers and sculptors in a campaign to attack a hideous evil in what was supposed to be a Christian modern metropolis ... The Foundling Hospital was philanthropy with a purpose. ibid.
The Jacobite cause had refused to die ... Bonnie Prince Charlie ... He was a Stuart ... For Charles nothing less than the conquest of England would do ... The Jacobites defeated themselves ... The Prince lost the vote by a substantial margin. The Jacobites turned about and headed north, beginning the long tramp back to Scotland through dreadful winter weather pursued by those newly returned England regiments. ibid.
Villages were burnt to the ground. Captured men hanged or shot. Cattle were stolen. Thousands driven from their homes. Even the wearing of highland dress was banned in an effort to strip the clams not just of their possessions but of their identity. Ibid
In the decades following Culloden a transformation would take place in Scotland ... In the cities too a new Scotland was being born ... The flowering of the forward cult of modernity .. The world of science, commerce and industry. ibid.
Adam Smith, the son of a customs officer, had an exhilarating vision of the future ... It would be his revolutionary book The Wealth of Nations which would mark Scotland’s farewell to sentimental self-destruction. ibid.
So how was it that in little over a century the people that thought of themselves as the freest on Earth ended up subjugating much of the world’s population? How was it that a nation which had such a deep mistrust of military power ended up the biggest military power of all? How was it that the empire of the free turned into the empire of the slaves? How was it that profit seemed to turn not on freedom but on raw coercion? How was it we ended up with the wrong empire? Simon Schama, A History of Britain s2e4: The Wrong Empire
One commodity would be reaped by another: by slaves ... The economy in the Caribbean wasn’t just a side-show to Empire, it was the Empire. Three and a half million slaves were transported in British ships alone. ibid.
Victory in Quebec and then Montreal totally transformed the British empire in north America. ibid.
But the English counties weren’t the only place where it was said something had to be done to avert bloodshed. In Suriname, Guyana and in Jamaica a push to the edge by hope and desperation there had been slave rebellions put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look like a picnic. ibid.
The message of the Romantics: We are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin. We all share praise be to God the same nature could at last be embraced not as a cry for retribution, a call to the barricades, but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade. Abolitionism healed old wounds. It brought together Thomas Bewick and William Wordsworth under the same great tent of righteousness. ibid.
In 1834 Britain abolished slavery. And at a time contrary to some legends when the market for its products was becoming more not less lucrative, it was the first great nineteenth-century victory for the Party of Humanity. ibid.
For thousands of years the mountains, lakes and forests of Britain have been just geography. But in the late 1700s they became something much more – the face of our nation. The countryside became our country. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s2e5: Forces of Nature
And what fired Bewick’s radicalism wasn’t just anger, it was an emotion new to politics: sympathy. What moved him was an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering. A recognition that deep down we are all bonded by our shared human nation. It was a call to action echoed in pulpits up and down the country ... For the first time there was a politics of suffering. ibid.
William Wordsworth had been born in the lake district ... He too had grown up in love with nature; now that love would extend to all of downtrodden humanity. ibid.
But when the lynching started [Edmund] Burke decided the revolution was above all an act of violence ... Democracy? Mobocrasy more like, said Burke. Heads stuck on pikes, the law of the lynch mob – we don’t want that here. ibid.
In 1791 he [Thomas Paine] published his counterblast – The Rights of Man. ibid.
And you’d find women – articulate, intelligent and impassioned. And among those women the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft. She was the Spirit of the Times. Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution. ibid.
Britain confronted Napoleon’s empire: epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal. A world of conflict from India to the Caribbean. With spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar. During these rollercoaster years the country’s woes were muffled; patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint. The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo. ibid.
The poor and the unemployed were looking for anything to eat. ibid.
Eleven were killed. Hundreds more badly wounded. At least a hundred of the injured were women and small children. Peterloo struck old time radicals like Thomas Bewick with nauseated horror. Unnatural was the word which rang through the denunciations. ibid.
Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo by throwing themselves into campaigns of action. Crusades which they embarked on with religious fervour. Those that laboured for change did so now not only in secret political clubs, but in the light of churches and chapels. Their targets were unnatural institutions – the monopoly of the Church of England, the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland. In the manufacturing towns a hue and cry to have their own MPs ... In 1830 a new Revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside meant the votes for change could not be postponed. The Whigs took office for the first time since before 1789 as the champions of reform without revolution. ibid.
So how was it that in little over a century the people that thought of themselves as the freest on Earth ended up subjugating much of the world’s population? How was it that a nation which had such a deep mistrust of military power ended up the biggest military power of all? How was it that the empire of the free turned into the empire of the slaves? How was it that profit seemed to turn not on freedom but on raw coercion? How was it we ended up with the wrong empire? Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e1: The Wrong Empire
One commodity would be reaped by another: by slaves ... The economy in the Caribbean wasn’t just a side-show to Empire, it was the Empire. Three and a half million slaves were transported in British ships alone. ibid.
Victory in Quebec and then Montreal totally transformed the British empire in north America. ibid.
But the English counties weren’t the only place where it was said something had to be done to avert bloodshed. In Suriname, Guyana and in Jamaica a push to the edge by hope and desperation there had been slave rebellions put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look like a picnic. ibid.
The message of the Romantics: We are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin. We all share praise be to God the same nature could at last be embraced not as a cry for retribution, a call to the barricades, but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade. Abolitionism healed old wounds. It brought together Thomas Bewick and William Wordsworth under the same great tent of righteousness. ibid.
In 1834 Britain abolished slavery. And at a time contrary to some legends when the market for its products was becoming more not less lucrative, it was the first great nineteenth-century victory for the Party of Humanity. ibid.
Spring 1851: the word Victoria enters the English language and a very small woman enters a very big building. She is four-foot-eleven yet somehow she fills it. Her moment is so pregnant for the future it seems holy. Victoria herself is flooded with religious awe. Neither she nor anyone else has ever seen anything like this building before: a greenhouse the size of a palace with a difference that this is from the beginning a People’s Palace. A popular magazine calls it the Crystal Palace ... A huge showcase for Britain’s industrial empire. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e2: Victoria and Her Sisters
She was of course the most desirable catch in Europe ... Helped by that handsome, or as she put it, angelic German head, well she pretty much ran the show, virtually grabbing hold of her curly-haired intended and sprinting for the altar. It was Victoria who supplied the ring, asked Albert for a lock of his hair and wallowed in the kissing sessions. ibid.
Victoria simply melted away into the amazed bliss of conjugal love. ibid.
Victoria and Albert’s passion for each other was strictly a private matter. ibid.
Six million came to see the Show of Shows. ibid.
[Elizabeth] Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city, the gin-palaces and open sewers. Dark reeking alleys where skin-and-bones children played amongst the rats. ibid.
Pugin: a new generation of churches would be in the frontline in the war to save Victorian souls. ibid.
On April 10th 1848 a monster Chartist petition signed by around two million men and women, so huge it would take two Hackney cabs to bring it to Parliament, was brought to London. Around 150,000 Chartists converged. ibid.
Mary Seacole was West-Indian ... When Britain joined the Crimean War in 1854 she tried to volunteer her services at the front ... She was turned down by the likes of Nurse Nightingale ... Mary Seacole built her British hotel right on the front line ... Mortars would whiz past the big old woman trundling the front lines. After the war was over the soldiers feted her at a charity gala. She had become briefly an eminent Victorian. ibid.
In 1860 Elizabeth Garrett enrolled as a surgical nurse at Middlesex Hospital but her sights were set higher ... She was also cutting up body parts in her bedroom. This improvised education made her bold enough to take part in the hospital’s medical (not nursing) exam. And when the time came to publish the results, one E Garret had come top. Ordered to keep the outrage secret she went public instead. Nine years later the French gave her an MD. ibid.
What went wrong? Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Empire of Good Intentions
What made the scale of suffering so obscene was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India? But so fanatically devoted to the iron law of the market was the government that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices. So common sense not to mention common humanity were sacrificed to the fetish of the market and millions were abandoned to perish. ibid.