LICEO MUSICALE
V ANNO
INGLESE
Indice:
- Queen Victoria
- The Edwardian Era
- The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage in Britain
- First World War
- The War Poets: R. Brooke; W. Owen; S. Sasson; I. Rosenberg
- The Bright Lights of Sarajevo, Tony Harrison
- The Irish War of Independence and The 1916 Easter Rising
- Sigumnd Freud and his Theories
- Civil Rights Movement in the USA
- Francis Scott Fitzgerald / The Great Gatsby
- Don Delillo and the 9/11
QUEEN VICTORIA
Victoria, in full Alexandrina Victoria, (born May 24, 1819, Kensington Palace, London, England—died January 22, 1901, Osborne, near Cowes, Isle of Wight), queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britainand Ireland (1837–1901) and empress of India (1876–1901). She was the last of the house of Hanover and gave her name to an era, the Victorian Age. During her reign the British monarchy took on its modern ceremonial character. She and her husband, Prince Consort Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, had nine children, through whose marriages were descended many of the royal families of Europe.
Queen Victoria's reign
Overview of Queen Victoria's reign. Victoria first learned of her future role as a young princess during a history lesson when she was 10 years old. Almost four decades later Victoria’s governess recalled that the future queen reacted to the discovery by declaring, “I will be good.” This combination of earnestness and egotism marked Victoria as a child of the age that bears her name. The queen, however, rejected important Victorian values and developments. Although she hated pregnancy and childbirth, detested babies, and was uncomfortable in the presence of children, Victoria reigned in a society that idealized both motherhood and the family. She had no interest in social issues, yet the 19th century in Britain was an age of reform.
She resisted technological change even while mechanical and technological innovations reshaped the face of European civilization. Most significantly, Victoria was a queen determined to retain political power, yet
unwillingly and unwittingly she presided over the transformation of the sovereign’s political role into a ceremonial one and thus preserved the British monarchy. When Victoria became queen, the political role of the crown was by no means clear; nor was the permanence of the throne itself. When she died and her son Edward VII moved from Marlborough House to Buckingham Palace, the change was one of social rather than of political focus; there was no doubt about the monarchy’s continuance. That was the measure of her reign.
Lineage And Early Life
On the death in 1817 of Princess Charlotte, daughter of the prince regent (later George IV), there was no surviving legitimate offspring of George III’s 15 children. In 1818, therefore, three of his sons, the dukes of Clarence, Kent, and Cambridge, married to provide for the succession. The winner in the race to father the next ruler of Britain was Edward, duke of Kent, fourth son of George III. His only child was christened Alexandrina Victoria. After his death and George IV’s accession in 1820, Victoria became third in the line of succession to the throne after the duke of York (died 1827) and the duke of Clarence (subsequently William IV), whose own children died in infancy.
Victoria, by her own account, “was brought up very simply,” principally at Kensington Palace, where her closest companions, other than her German-born mother, the duchess of Kent, were her half sister, Féodore, and her governess, Louise (afterward the Baroness) Lehzen, a native of Coburg. An important father figure to the orphaned princess was her uncle Leopold, her mother’s brother, who lived at Claremont, near Esher, Surrey, until he became king of the Belgians in 1831.
Victoria’s childhood was made increasingly unhappy by the machinations of the duchess of Kent’s advisor, Sir John Conroy. In control of the pliable duchess, Conroy hoped to dominate the future queen of Britain as well. Persuaded by Conroy that the royal dukes, “the wicked uncles,” posed a threat to her daughter, the duchess reared Victoria according to “the Kensington system,” by which she and Conroy
systematically isolated Victoria from her contemporaries and her father’s family. Conroy thus aimed to make the princess dependent on and easily led by himself. Strong-willed, and supported by Lehzen, Victoria survived the Kensington system; when she ascended the throne in 1837, she did so alone. Her mother’s actions had estranged her from Victoria and taught the future queen caution in her friendships. Moreover, her retentive memory did not allow her to forgive readily.
Accession To The Throne
In the early hours of June 20, 1837, Victoria received a call from the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord chamberlain and learned of the death of William IV, third son of George III. Later that morning the Privy Council was impressed by the graceful assurance of the new queen’s demeanour. She was small, carried herself well, and had a delightful silvery voice, which she retained all her life. The accession of a young woman was romantically popular. But because of the existence in Hanover of the Salic law, which prevented succession by a woman, the crowns of Great Britain and Hanover became separated, the latter passing to William IV’s eldest surviving brother, Ernest, the unpopular duke of Cumberland.
The queen, who had never before had a room to herself, exiled her mother to a distant set of apartments when they moved into Buckingham Palace. Conroy was pensioned off. Only Lehzen, of whom Victoria was still in awe, remained close to the queen. Even her beloved uncle Leopold was politely warned off discussions of British politics. “Alone” at last, she enjoyed her newfound freedom. “Victoria,” wrote her cousin Prince Albert, who later married her, is said to be incredibly stubborn and her extreme obstinacy to be constantly at war with her good nature; she delights in Court ceremonies, etiquette and trivial formalities.…She is said not to take the slightest pleasure in nature and to enjoy sitting up at night and sleeping late into the day. It was, in retrospect, “the least sensible and satisfactory time in her whole life”; but at the time it was exciting and enjoyable, the more so because of her romantic friendship with Lord Melbourne, the prime minister. Melbourne was a
crucial influence on Victoria, in many ways an unfortunate one. The urbane and sophisticated prime minister fostered the new queen’s self-confidence and enthusiasm for her role; he also encouraged her to ignore or minimize social problems and to attribute all discontent and unrest to the activities of a small group of agitators. Moreover, because of Melbourne, Victoria became an ardent Whig.
Victoria’s constitutionally dangerous political partisanship contributed to the first two crises of her reign, both of which broke in 1839. The Hastings affair began when Lady Flora Hastings, a maid of honour who was allied and connected to the Tories, was forced by Victoria to undergo a medical examination for suspected pregnancy. The gossip, when it was discovered that the queen had been mistaken, became the more damaging when later in the year Lady Flora died of a disease that had not been diagnosed by the examining physician. The enthusiasm of the populace over the coronation (June 28, 1838) swiftly dissipated. Between the two phases of the Hastings case “the bedchamber crisis” intervened. When Melbourne resigned in May 1839, Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative leader, stipulated that the Whig ladies of the bedchamber should be removed. The queen imperiously refused, not without Melbourne’s encouragement. “The Queen of Englandwill not submit to such trickery,” she said. Peel therefore declined to take office, which Melbourne rather weakly resumed. “I was very young then,” wrote the queen long afterward, “and perhaps I should act differently if it was all to be done again.”
The Albertine Monarchy
Victoria’s wedding to Prince Albert served as a stage for displays of political partisanship: very few Tories received invitations, and the Tories themselves rejected Victoria’s request that Albert be granted rank and precedence second only to her own. Victoria responded violently, “Monsters! You Tories shall be punished. Revenge! Revenge!” Marriage to Albert, however, lessened the queen’s enthusiasm for Melbourne and the Whigs. She admitted many years later regarding Melbourne that “Albert thinks I worked myself up to what really became rather foolish.” Albert
thus shifted Victoria’s political sympathies; he also became the dominant figure and influence in her life. She quickly grew to depend on him for everything; soon she “didn’t put on a gown or a bonnet if he didn’t approve it.” No more did Victoria rule alone.
Marriage to Albert
Attracted by Albert’s good looks and encouraged by her uncle Leopold, Victoria proposed to her cousin on October 15, 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor on a visit to the British court. She described her impressions of him in the journal she kept throughout her life: “Albert really is quite charming, and so extremely handsome…a beautiful figure, broad in the shoulders and a fine waist; my heart is quite going.” They were married on February 10, 1840, the queen dressed entirely in articles of British manufacture.
Children quickly followed. Victoria, the princess royal (the “Vicky” of the Letters), was born in 1840; in 1858 she married the crown prince of Prussia and later became the mother of the emperor William II. The prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was born in 1841. Then followed Princess Alice, afterward grand duchess of Hesse, 1843; Prince Alfred, afterward duke of Edinburgh and duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 1844; Princess Helena (Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein), 1846; Princess Louise (duchess of Argyll), 1848; Prince Arthur (duke of Connaught), 1850; Prince Leopold (duke of Albany), 1853; and Princess Beatrice (Princess Henry of Battenberg), 1857. The queen’s first grandchild was born in 1859 and her first great-grandchild in 1879. There were 37 great-grandchildren alive at her death.
Victoria never lost her early passion for Albert: “Without him everything loses its interest.” Despite conflicts produced by the queen’s uncontrollable temper and recurrent fits of depression, which usually occurred during and after pregnancy, the couple had a happy marriage. Victoria, however, was never reconciled to the
childbearing that accompanied her marital bliss—the “shadow-side of marriage,” as she called it. Victoria explained to her eldest daughter in 1858:
What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.
At the beginning of their marriage the queen was insistent that her husband should have no share in the government of the country. Within six months, on Melbourne’s repeated suggestion, the prince was allowed to start seeing the dispatches, then to be present when the queen saw her ministers. The concession became a routine, and during her first pregnancy the prince received a “key to the secret boxes.” As one unwanted pregnancy followed another and as Victoria became increasingly dependent on her husband, Albert assumed an ever-larger political role. By 1845 Charles Greville, the observer of royal affairs, could write, “It is obvious that while she has the title, he is really discharging the functions of the Sovereign. He is the King to all intents and purposes.” Victoria, once so enthusiastic about her role, came to conclude that “we women are not made for governing.
Relations with Peel
The prince came into his own to negotiate with Peel a compromise on the bedchamber question after the Melbourne government had been defeated in the general election of 1841. The queen’s first interview with Peel went well, eased by Melbourne’s advice to his successor:
The Queen is not conceited—she is aware there are many things she cannot understand and she likes to have them explained to her elementarily—not at length and in detail but shortly and clearly.
If, as Lady Lyon once noted, “there was ‘a vein of iron’ which ran through the Queen’s extraordinary character,” the iron could bend; Victoria was able to revise her opinions and reevaluate her judgments. Peel’s very real distress when in the summer
of 1842 an attempt was made to assassinate the queen—together with the affinity between the prince and the new prime minister—soon converted the “cold odd man” of the queen’s earlier comment into “a great statesman, a man who thinks but little of party and never of himself.” Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary, also became a great favourite. “We felt so safe with them both,” she told King Leopold.
The departure of the possessive Lehzen for Germany in 1842 signaled Albert’s victory in the battle between the two for Victoria’s loyalty and for power in the royal household. He became effectively the queen’s private secretary—according to himself, “her permanent minister.” As a result of Albert’s diligence and refusal to accept the obstacles that ministers threw in his path, the management of the queen’s properties was rationalized and her income thus increased.
A visible sign of the prince’s power and influence was the building of the royal residences of Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Albert, who taught the once party-loving Victoria to despise London, played a central role in the acquisition of both properties as well as in designing the homes he and Victoria erected on them between 1845 and 1855. Victoria described Osborne as “our island home” and retreated there frequently; it was, however, at Balmoral that she was happiest. The royal pair and their family were able to live there “with the greatest simplicity and ease,” wrote Greville. The queen soon came to hold the Highlanders in more esteem than she held any other of her subjects. She liked the simpler life of the Highlands, as her published journal was to reveal: she came to make the most of the thin stream of Scottish blood in her veins; also, so long as the sermons were short enough, she came to prefer the Scottish form of religious service. “You know,” she was to tell her prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, “I am not much of an Episcopalian”; and she developed a comfort in the consolations of the Reverend Norman Macleod and also a delight in the plain speech of John Brown, the Highland servant who stalked with Albert and became her personal attendant.
The royal couple’s withdrawal to Scotland and the Isle of Wight bore witness to a new sort of British monarchy. In their quest for privacy and intimacy Albert and
Victoria adopted a way of life that mirrored that of their middle-class subjects, admittedly on a grander scale. Although Albert was interested in intellectual and scientific matters, Victoria’s tastes were closer to those of most of her people. She enjoyed the novels of Charles Dickens and patronized the circus and waxwork exhibitions. Both Victoria and Albert, however, differed from many in the middle class in their shared preference for nudes in painting and sculpture. Victoria was not the prude that many claimed her to be. She was also no Sabbatarian: “I am not at all an admirer or approver of our very dull Sunday.”
Victoria’s delight in mingling with the Scottish poor at Balmoral did little to raise the level of her social awareness. Although in 1846 she and Albert supported the repeal of the Corn Laws (protectionist legislation that kept the price of British grain artificially high) in order to relieve distress in famine-devastated Ireland, they remained much more interested in and involved with the building of Osborne and foreign policy than in the tragedy of Ireland. Victoria, moreover, gave her full support to the government’s policy of repression of the Chartists (advocates of far-reaching political and social reform) and believed the workers in her realm to be contented and loyal. In 1848, rejoicing in the failure of the last great Chartist demonstration in London, the queen wrote:
The loyalty of the people at large has been very striking and their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such worthless and wanton men—immense.
The consequences of continental revolutions led her to conclude:
Revolutions are always bad for the country, and the cause of untold misery to the people. Obedience to the laws and to the Sovereign, is obedience to a higher Power, divinely instituted for the good of the people, not the Sovereign, who has equally duties and obligations.
Yet, revolution or no revolution, many of her people lived in “untold misery,” a fact Victoria rarely confronted.
For both the queen and the prince consort, the highlight of their reign came in 1851, with the opening of the Great Exhibition. Albert poured himself into the task of organizing the international tradeshow that became a symbol of the Victorian Age. Housed in the architectural marvel of the Crystal Palace, a splendid greenhouse-inspired glass building erected in Hyde Park, the Great Exhibition displayed Britain’s wealth and technological achievements to a wondering world. To Victoria the success of the Great Exhibition provided further evidence of her husband’s genius: “I do feel proud at the thought of what my beloved Albert’s great mind has conceived.” Profits from the Great Exhibition funded what became the South Kensington complex of colleges and museums.
Victoria; Crystal Palace
Albert has been credited with teaching Victoria the importance of remaining above party. Certainly he saw the danger in the Whig partisanship she openly displayed before their marriage; more clearly than Victoria he realized the fine sense of balance required of a constitutional monarch. Albert’s own actions, however, such as his much-criticized appearance in the gallery of the House of Commons during Peel’s speech on the first day of the Corn Laws debates (and thus his open and partisan show of support for Peel), revealed his political sympathies. Gladstone noted in 1846 that the Prince is very strongly Conservative in his politics and his influence with the Q. is over-ruling; through him she has become so attached to Conservative ideas that she could hardly endure the idea of the opposite Party as her ministers.
Like the queen, Albert believed that the sovereign had an important and active role to play in British politics. The fluid political situation operating during the prince’s lifetime made such an active role seem possible. After the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) there was a period, not ending until the election of 1868, when politics tended to consist of a series of temporary alliances between splinter groups and no single group could guarantee its extended control over the House of Commons: the golden age of the private member, a condition rendering active political intervention by the
crown not only possible but sometimes even necessary. There was a role for the cabinet maker, especially in helping to compose coalitions. Its significance must not, however, be overemphasized; although Victoria probably would not have admitted it, the queen’s role, albeit“substantial,” was always “secondary.
Foreign affairs
The tradition also persisted that the sovereign had a special part to play in foreign affairs and could conduct them alone with a secretary of state. Victoria and Albert had relatives throughout Europe and were to have more. Moreover, they visited and were visited by other monarchs. Albert was determined that this personal intelligence should not be disregarded and that the queen should never become (as his own mentor the Baron Stockmar had indicated) “a mandarin figure which has to nod its head in assent or shake it in denial as its Minister pleases.” The result was a clash with Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, who could look back on a career of high office beginning before the royal couple was born. The prince distrusted Palmerston’s character, disapproved of his methods, thought his policy shallow, and disagreed with his concept of the constitution.
Even after Victoria insisted to Palmerston in 1850, “having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the minister,” the foreign secretary continued to follow policies disapproved of by both Albert and Victoria, such as his encouragement of nationalist movements that threatened to dismember the Austrian Empire. Finally, after Palmerston expressed his approval of the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III) in 1851 without consulting the queen, the prime minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed him. Within a few months the immensely popular Palmerston was back in office, however, as home secretary. He would serve twice as prime minister. After Albert’s death Victoria’s disapproval of Palmerston diminished; his conservative domestic policy and his insistence that Britain receive its due in world affairs accorded with her own later views.
On the eve of the Crimean War (1854–56) the royal pair encountered a wave of unpopularity, and Albert was suspected, without any foundation, of trying to influence the government in favour of the Russian cause. There was, however, a marked revival of royalist sentiment as the war wore on. The queen personally superintended the committees of ladies who organized relief for the wounded and eagerly seconded the efforts of Florence Nightingale: she visited crippled soldiers in the hospitals and instituted the Victoria Cross for gallantry.
With the death of Prince Albert on December 14, 1861, the Albertine monarchy came to an end. Albert’s influence on the queen was lasting. He had changed her personal habits and her political sympathies. From him she had received training in orderly ways of business, in hard work, in the expectation of royal intervention in ministry making at home, and in the establishment of a private (because royal) intelligence service abroad. The British monarchy had changed. As the historian G.M. Young said, “In place of a definite but brittle prerogative it had acquired an undefinable but potent influence.”
Widowhood
After Albert’s death Victoria descended into deep depression—“those paroxysms of despair and yearning and longing and of daily, nightly longing to die…for the first three years never left me.” Even after climbing out of depression, she remained in mourningand in partial retirement. She balked at performing the ceremonial functions expected of the monarch and withdrew to Balmoral and Osborne four months out of every year, heedless of the inconvenience and strain this imposed on ministers. After an initial period of respect and sympathy for the queen’s grief, the public grew increasingly impatient with its absent sovereign. No one, however, could budge the stubborn Victoria. Although Victoria resisted carrying out her ceremonial duties, she remained determined to retain an effective political role in the period after Albert’s death and to behave as he would have ordained.
Her testing point was, then, her “dear one’s” point of view; and this she had known at a particular and thereafter not necessarily relevant period in British political life. Her training and his influence were ill-suited to the “swing of the pendulum” politics that better party organization and a wider electorate enjoined after the Reform Bill of 1867. And since she blamed her son and heir for Albert’s death—the prince consort had come back ill from Cambridge, where he had gone to see the prince of Walesregarding an indiscretion the young prince had committed in Ireland—she did not hesitate to vent her loneliness upon him or to refuse him all responsibility. “It quite irritates me to see him in the room,” she startled Lord Clarendon by saying. The breach was never really healed, and as time went on the queen was clearly envious of the popularity of the prince and princess of Wales. She liked to be, but she took little trouble to see that she was, popular.
It was despite, yet because of, Albert that Victoria succumbed to Benjamin Disraeli and thus made herself a partisan in the most famous political rivalry of the 19th century. Albert had thought Disraeli insufficiently a gentleman and remembered his bitter attacks on Peel over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; the prince, on the other hand, had approved of Gladstone, Disraeli’s political rival. Yet Disraeli was able to enter into the queen’s grief, flatter her, restore her self-confidence, and make the lonely crown an easier burden. Behind all his calculated attacks on her affections there was a bond of mutual loneliness, a note of mystery and romanticism, and, besides, the return to good gossip. Disraeli, moreover, told the queen in 1868 that it would be “his delight and duty, to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your Majesty, as possible.” Since the queen was only too ready to consider herself overworked, this approach was especially successful. Gladstone, on the other hand, would never acknowledge that she was, as she put it, “dead beat,” perhaps because he never was himself; Disraeli, however, tired easily. The contrast between Disraeli’s gay, often malicious, gossipy letters and Gladstone’s 40 sides of foolscap is obvious. And there was no Albert to give her a neat précis. Gladstone, moreover, held the throne as an institution in such awe that it affected his relations with its essentially feminine occupant. His “feeling” for the crown, said Lady Ponsonby, was “always
snubbed.” The queen had no patience with Gladstone’s moralistic (and, she believed, hypocritical) approach to politics and foreign affairs. His persistent and often tactless attempts to persuade her to resume her ceremonial duties especially enraged her.
Over the problem of Ireland their paths separated ever more widely. Whereas “to pacify Ireland” had become the “mission” of Gladstone’s life, the queen (like the majority of her subjects) had little understanding of, or sympathy for, Irish grievances. She disliked disorder and regarded the suggestion of Irish Home Rule as sheer disloyalty.
The proposal of an Irish “Balmoral” was repugnant to her, especially when it was suggested that the prince of Wales might go in her place. To avoid the Irish Sea, she claimed to be a bad sailor; yet she was willing in her later years to cross the English Channel almost every year. In all, she made but four visits to Ireland, the last in 1900 being provoked by her appreciation of the gallantry of the Irish regiments in the South African War.
The news of Gladstone’s defeat in 1874 delighted the queen. “What an important turn the elections have taken,” she wrote.
It shows that the country is not Radical. What a triumph, too, Mr. Disraeli has obtained and what a good sign this large Conservativemajority is of the state of the country, which really required (as formerly) a strong Conservative party!
If, years before, Melbourne, almost despite himself, had made her a good little Whig, and if Albert had left her, in general, a Peelite, temperamental and subsequently doctrinal differences with Gladstone helped make it easy for Disraeli to turn Victoria into a stout supporter of the Conservative Party.
One of the bonds shared by Victoria and Disraeli was a romantic attachment to the East and the idea of empire. Although she supported Disraeli’s reform of the franchise in 1867, Victoria had little interest in or sympathy with his program of social reform; she was, however, entranced by his imperialism and by his assertiveforeign policy. She applauded his brilliant maneuvering, which led to the
British purchase of slightly less than half of the shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 (a move that prevented the canal from falling entirely under French control), especially since he presented the canal as a personal gift to her: “It is just settled; you have it, Ma’am.” The addition of “Empress of India” in 1876 to the royal title thrilled the queen even more. Victoria and Disraeli also agreed on their answer to the vexing “Eastern question”—what was to be done with the declining Turkish empire?
Even the revelation of Turkish atrocities against rebelling Bulgarians failed to sway the sovereign and her prime minister from their position that Britain’s best interests lay in supporting Turkey, the “Sick Man” of Europe. The fact that Gladstone took the opposing view, of course, strengthened their pro-Turkish sympathies. With the outbreak of a Russo-Turkish war in 1877, however, Disraeli found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to restrain his bellicose sovereign, who demanded that Britain enter the war against Russia. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878 Disraeli emerged triumphant: Russian influence in the Balkans was reduced, and Britain gained control of the strategically located island of Cyprus. The queen was ecstatic.
Victoria’s delight in Disraeli’s premiership made further conflict with Gladstone inevitable. When in September 1879 a dissolution of Parliament seemed imminent, the queen wrote to the Marchioness of Ely (who was, after the duchess of Argyll, perhaps her most intimate friend): Dear Janie,…I hope and trust the Government will be able to go on after the Election, as change is so disagreeable and so bad for the country; but if it should not, I wish the principal people of the Opposition should know there are certain things which I never canconsent to.…
I never COULD take Mr. Gladstone…as my Minister again, for I never could have the slightest particle of confidence in Mr. Gladstone afterhis violent, mischievous, and dangerous conduct for the last three years.
After the blow fell with the Conservative Party’s defeat in 1880, Victoria sent for Lord Hartington.
Mr. Gladstone she could have nothing to do with, for she considers his whole conduct since ’76 to have been one series of violent, passionate invective against and abuse of Lord Beaconsfield, and that he caused the Russian war.
Nevertheless, as Hartington pointed out, it was Gladstone whom she had to have. She made no secret of her hostility, she hoped he would retire, and she remained in correspondence with Lord Beaconsfield (as Disraeli had become). Gladstone, indeed, said that he himself “would never be surprised to see her turn the Government out, after the manner of her uncles.” The queen abhorred Gladstone’s lack of Disraelian vision of Britain’s role in the world. Over the abandonment of Kandahar in Afghanistan, in 1881, for example, Sir Henry Ponsonby had never seen her so angry: “The Queen has never before been treated,” she told him, “with such want of respect and consideration in the forty three and a half years she has worn her thorny crown.”
Victoria convinced herself that Gladstone’s government, dominated (she believed) by Radicals, threatened the stability of the nation:
No one is more truly Liberal in her heart than the Queen, but she has always strongly deprecated the great tendency of the present Government to encourage instead of checking the stream of destructive democracy which has become so alarming.…She will not be a Sovereign of a Democratic Monarchy.
Nevertheless, Victoria did act as an important mediating influence between the two houses to bring about the compromise that resulted in the third parliamentary Reform Act in 1884.
Victoria never acclimatized herself to the effects of the new electorate on party organization. No longer was the monarchy normally necessary as cabinet maker; yet, the queen was reluctant to accept her more limited role. Thus, in 1886 she sought to avoid a third Gladstone ministry by attempting to form an anti-Radical coalition. Her attempt failed. Irish Home Rule, not the queen, would defeat the “People’s William.”
In the Salisbury administration (1895–1902), with which her long reign ended, Victoria was eventually to find not only the sort of ministry with which she felt comfortable but one which lent a last ray of colour to her closing years by its alliance, through Joseph Chamberlain, with the mounting imperialism that she had so greatly enjoyed in Disraeli’s day when he had made her empress of India.
The South African War (1899–1902) dominated her final years. The sufferings of her soldiers in South Africa aroused the queen to a level of activity and public visibility that she had avoided for decades. With a demanding schedule of troop inspections, medal ceremonies, and visits to military hospitals, Victoria finally became the exemplar of a modern monarch.
Victoria absorbed a great deal of the time of her ministers, especially Gladstone’s, but after 1868 it may be doubted whether, save in rare instances, it made a great deal of difference. She may have postponed an occasional evil day; she certainly hampered an occasional career. And sometimes that “continuous political experience,” which Walter Bagehot remarked as a long-lived monarch’s greatest asset, was invaluable—in stopping “red tapings,” as the queen called them, or in breaking a logjam. Meanwhile—“a comparatively late growth”—she had gained the affection of her subjects. The sheer endurance of her reign in a time of swift change deepened her symbolic value and hence heightened her popularity. Lord Salisbury observed in the House of Lords (January 25, 1901) after her death that
She had an extraordinary knowledge of what her people would think—extraordinary, because it could not come from any personal intercourse. I have said for years that I have always felt that when I knew what the Queen thought, I knew pretty certainly what views her subjects would take, and especially the middle class of her subjects.
The queen, as the Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 showed, was popular. Gone were the days when pamphlets were circulated asking what she did with her money. More and more fully with advancing years, she was able to satisfy the imagination of the middle class—and the poorer class—of her subjects.
She remained, nevertheless, either aloof from or in opposition to many of the important political, social, and intellectual currents of the later Victorian period. She never reconciled herself to the advance of democracy, and she thought the idea of female suffrageanathema. The sufferings of an individual worker could engage her sympathy; the working class, however, remained outside her field of vision. After Albert’s death Victoria had little contact with intellectual and artistic subjects and so remained happily unaware of the unsettling new directions being explored in the world around her. Her reign was shaped by the new technology—without the railroad and the telegraph, her extended stays in Osborne and Balmoral would have been impossible—yet she never welcomed innovation.
Many of the movements of the day passed the aged queen by, many irritated her, but the stupendous hard work that Albert had taught her went on— the meticulous examination of the boxes, the regular signature of the papers. To the very end Victoria remained a passionate and strong-willed woman.
Those who were nearest to her came completely under her spell; yet all from the prince of Wales down stood in considerable awe. A breach of the rules could still make a fearsome change in the kindly, managing great-grandmother in black silk dress and white cap. The eyes would begin to protrude, the mouth to go down at the corners. Those who suffered her displeasure never forgot it, nor did she. Yielding to nobody else’s comfort and keeping every anniversary, she lived surrounded by mementos, photographs, miniatures, busts, and souvenirs in chilly rooms at the end of drafty corridors, down which one tiptoed past Indian attendants to the presence. Nobody knocked; a gentle scratching on the door was all that she permitted. Every night at Windsor Albert’s clothes were laid out on the bed; every morning fresh water was put in the basin in his room. She slept with a photograph—over her head—taken of his head and shoulders as he lay dead.
Queen Victoria had fought a long rearguard action against the growth of “democratic monarchy”; yet, in some ways, she had done more than anyone else to create it. She had made the monarchy respectable and had thereby guaranteed its continuance—not as a political power but as a political institution. Her long reign had woven a legend, and, as her political power ebbed away, her political value grew. It lay, perhaps, more in what the electorate thought of her, indeed felt about her, than in what she ever was or certainly ever believed herself to be. Paradoxically enough, her principal contribution to the British monarchy and her political importance lay in regard to those “dignified” functions that she was accused of neglecting rather than to the “business” functions that, perhaps sometimes, she did not neglect enough.
The queen died after a short and painless illness. “We all feel a bit motherless today,” wrote Henry James, “mysterious little Victoria is dead and fat vulgar Edward is King.” She was buried beside Prince Albert in the mausoleum at Frogmore near Windsor. Young said,
She had lived long enough. The idol of her people, she had come to press on the springs of government with something of the weight of an idol, and in the innermost circle of public life the prevailing sentiment was relief.
Her essential achievement was simple. By the length of her reign, the longest in British history until that of Elizabeth II, she had restored both dignity and popularity to a tarnished crown: an achievement of character, as well as of longevity. Historians may differ in their assessment of her political acumen, her political importance, or her role as a constitutional monarch. None will question her high sense of duty or the transparent honesty, the massive simplicity, of her royal character.
The Edwardian Era in its strictest form, lasted from 1901 to 1910, during which Edward VII (1841-1910) reigned as King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions and Emperor of India. However, in its broader interpretation, the spirit of the Edwardians—-which was indelibly inspired by Edward VII during his tenure as Prince of Wales—-stretched from 1880 until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. I also include WWI (1914-1918) into this equation, as well as the three years following Armistice (1919-1924), because, with the fall of Lloyd George and the decline of the Liberals, and the rise of Labour, I consider this to be the final break between society as the Edwardians knew it and Modern Britain.
In the Western world, this time period was both one of great social change and of a solidifying the power and luxury of the ruling elite. With their elegant and perceptive turns of phrase, the French characterized the years between 1880 and 1914 as La Belle Epoque(the beautiful epoch) and Fin de siècle (a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning), and certainly no other time has witnessed such decadence and pessimism, and optimism and hope.
Nevertheless, the appeal of the Edwardian era is expected: wealth was abundant and nearly income tax-free; society was no longer a small, exclusive circle confined to those of aristocratic birth; the arts (theater, opera, ballet, painting, literature, music, etc) produced genius and modern movements; travel was cheap and easy, since one needed no passport or visa until the Russian or Ottoman borders; and the technological advances were thrilling and amazing. More importantly, Great Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. The maxim coined originally for the Spanish Empire of the 16th and 17th centuries now ran true for the British Empire, and from Greenwich to Malta, to Cairo to Cape Town, to Aden to Bombay, to Sydney to Vancouver, and back again, the sun never set on the Union Jack waving with both vigor and sublime assurance. Granted, there were a number of small skirmishes throughout the nineteenth century, which tested the mettle of the British Army (and the Second Boer War was unpopular, unexpected, and embarrassing), but
Jolly Old England was still “Home” to millions of subjects of various creeds, colors, religions, and class.
In Europe, the winds of change arrived in 1870 when Napoleon III’s “carnival” Second Empire fell after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Prussia, the largest and most militarist German state, was steered to greatness by Otto von Bismarck, who smashed the former Holy Roman Empire (Austria-Hungary, which dominated Central Europe) into submission, unified Germany, and established the balance of power that kept the world at peace after 1871. Bismarck’s checkmates across Europe also resulted in the unification of Italy, as well as the decline of the Ottoman Empire after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. A weakened but still massive Austria-Hungary turned its gaze inward, as it looked to expand its influence in the Balkans, and like Russia, struggled with ruling over a nation of multiple languages, cultures, ethnicities, and religions.
Great Britain fell into a severe agricultural depression in the 1880s that lasted until Edward VII’s ascension. Farmers and manufacturers alike struggled to compete with the cheap corn and beef flooding the market from Germany, the United States, and Australia. Young people began leaving the countryside for jobs in factories and in cities. The British aristocracy sold land, houses, and treasures to stave off their decrease in income. Ironically, the 1880s and 1890s were the nadir of Anglo-American alliances, and Anglo-American millionaires simultaneously filled their homes with the treasures of the Old World and married their daughters into the very families from which the treasures derived!
The German Empire in particular became Britain’s bête noire. France had long been England’s traditional enemy, but under the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II, a bombastic, ambitious, saber-rattling monarch who also happened to be Queen Victoria’s eldest grandchild, they had much to fear. All of the Powers jostled for an equal “place in the sun,” but Britain held itself aloof in “splendid isolation,” secure in the might and reputation of its Navy to keep it safe. However, the disastrous Boer War (1899-1902) awakened Britain from its slumber, embarrassed and aghast at the antiquated military
tactics and arrangements, as well as the appalling physical condition of the nation’s elgible soldiers. As England set about reforming its armies, Germany set about building its own navy–an affront to the English, who saw the seas as their sole province–; a move which played itself out in the yachting rivalry between the Prince of Wales and Wilhelm II at Cowes Week throughout the 1890s, and furthermore through the rush to build Dreadnoughts in the 1900s.
After the Boer War, Britain cast about for allies to break its “splendid isolation.” America was too brash, too mercurial, and too new, Italy too volatile, Spain too poor and too weak, Russia too involved in Central Asia, Austria-Hungary too unpredictable, and Germany too arrogant. England’s alliance with Japan in 1902 raised many eyebrows, but its subsequent alliance with its traditional enemy France caused Europe to reel with shock. The Entente Cordiale, signed in 1904, was a loosely-defined treaty expression warmth and friendship between the two nations. In 1907, Britain entered into an alliance with Russia, who had been a longtime ally of France, which created a Triple Alliance between the three nations. Germany stewed in its paranoia: they assumed the familiar ties would draw them and Great Britain together, but Britain was unwilling to take secondary place!
The Edwardian era was also the Imperial Age. European powers carved chunks out of the “Dark Continent” during the “Scramble for Africa,” and the decay of the Ottoman Empire (aka “The Sick Man of Europe”) also brought out the vultures in Europe. They encouraged unrest in the Balkans and the creation of independent nations such as Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria, hoping to swoop down on the remains of the Osmanli dynasty. Germany staked its claim in the Ottoman Empire, sending hundreds of doctors, engineers, military leaders, etc to the Porte, and their meddling in Northern Africa nearly brought them to blows with France, who considered Morocco and Algeria their own. In the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Russia butted heads, for Russia viewed itself as a protector of the Slavic race, while Austria-Hungary saw the Balkan peninsula as their sole province. In Asia, China’s Boxer Rebellion was one of the first physical struggles against European domination, a
development which no doubt gave hope to the various independence movements across the globe.
In America this time period was known as the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. The youthful United States was on its first bender, and its rapid industrialization and the successful thrust westward (never mind the thousands of Native Americans bereft of ancestral lands) were encouraged by the concept of “Manifest Destiny,” or, the idea that “uncivilized” people could be improved by exposure to the Christian, democratic values of the United States. With this in mind, America also joined the scramble for colonial possessions, annexing Hawai’i and then smashing the Spanish Army in the Spanish-American War (both events in 1898) to obtain Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines.
Despite the series of financial panics which threatened the economy, the image of America was summed up by the marvelously wealthy financiers like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, and the aggressive, charismatic Theodore Roosevelt, whose Big Stick Diplomacy declared the US “had the right not only to oppose European intervention in the Western Hemisphere, but also intervene itself in the domestic affairs of its neighbors if they proved unable to maintain order and national sovereignty on their own.” The Progressive Era was also the era of social activism, with muckrakers and Yellow Journalism exposing the iniquities of American culture (the white slave trade, the evils of trusts, etc), all the while the law of the land attempted to prohibit African-Americans and Asian-Americans from partaking of the abundance of this “Gilded Age.”
This was also the nadir of race relations. During this period, African-Americans lost many of the civil rights gained during Reconstruction, and the fragile reconciliation between whites and blacks broke down as anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased. However, this was also a time of intense racial pride, which resulted in the foundation of various African-American advocacy and social groups including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National
Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), and the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (later the National Urban League). The ideological differences between Du Bois and Washington pushed black thought and uplift onto an international platform (the African Diaspora), and despite segregation and oppression, black Americans thrived in rural communities, all black cities like Eatonville, Florida and Boley, Oklahoma, or in the north.
On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, suffrage for both men and women moved increasingly towards violent demonstrations, and people began to challenge the right of rule for the “elite” in parliaments across the globe. Nationalism clashed with imperialism, and the oppressed chafed under the yoke of colonial expansion and began to question their status within their respective empires.
The overall image of the Edwardian age is that of an era of opulence, but once you scratch the surface, it was also an era of change, where the rumble of automobiles and planes, champagne and lavish ocean liners, the frenetic syncopation of ragtime, and the pomp of the aristocracy and royalty, coexisted with civil rights and independence movements, Socialism, immigration, and technological advances.
The Diplomacy, Tensions, and Issues of the Victorian & Edwardian Eras
The Players: Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Japan, and the United States.
The Treaties and Agreements: Treaty of Frankfurt, League of the Three Emperors, Treaty of Berlin, German-Austrian Alliance, Triple Alliance, Reinsurance Treaty, Franco-Russian Alliance, Treaty of Paris, Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Entente cordiale, Treaty of Björkö, Taft–Katsura Agreement, Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905, Anglo-Russian Entente, Triple Entente, Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, Racconigi agreement.
The Wars: Austro-Prussian War (1866), Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), Russo-Turkish War (1877-78), First Boer War (1881-82), First Sino-Japanese War
(1894-95), Spanish–American War (1898), Second Boer War (1899-1902), Philippine– American War (1899-1902), Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Turco-Italian War (1911-12), Balkan Wars (1912-1913)
The Events: The Great Game (1813-1907), Panic of 1873, Irish Home Rule (1873-1920), Congress of Berlin (1878), Scramble for Africa (1881-1914), Anglo-Sudan War (1881-1899), Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), Panic of 1893, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Fashoda Incident (1898), Annexation of Hawaii (1898), Boxer Uprising (1900), Venezuela Crisis (1902–03), Partition of Bengal (1905), First Moroccan Crisis (1906), Atlanta Race Riot (1906) Panic of 1907, Bosnian crisis (1908), Agadir Crisis (1911), The Sinking of the Titanic (1912), The Dublin Lock-Out (1913)
Society
Typically seen as the last hurrah of the aristocracy, the Edwardian period was full of social turmoil. Political groups abounded, some violent and some not: Anarchists, Nihilists, and Socialists, whose agitations of and attractions to the working classes upset the delicate balance of the haves and have nots. Not only was Parliament swiftly becoming to domain of progressive, Liberal politicians who had no pretensions to advancing into the aristocracy, as middle-class men formerly desired, but they were fighting to pass laws to shorten work hours, institute income tax, death duties and worst of all, in England at least, old age pensions, unemployment benefit and state financial support for the sick and infirm (per Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget”).
By the mid-1900s, there came a schism between the young and their elders, whose wants, needs and desires had long reigned supreme. This “cult of youth” found young men and women creating a separate life from that of their parents, disrupting the notions that only married, settled men and women mattered in society. The suffragist/suffragette movement helped to shatter the lingering ideals of womanhood. Though women entered into the workforce in the 1880s and 1890s, it wasn’t until the
1910s that young women from well-to-do backgrounds thought of attending college and striking out on their own.
Key Personalities
The influence of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) dominated this period. His manner of dress, speech, leisure, amusements–and those with whom he chose to befriend, were slavishly imitated by those who wished to be accepted as “smart.” It was he who threw open the doors of society, extending a welcome to wealthy Anglo-, Franco-, and German-Jewish families (the Rothschilds, Sassoons, and Cassells, among others), American millionaires, and the nouveaux riches derived from Britain’s many colonies. Progressive politics shaped the United States. Guided by the boisterous, charismatic Theodore Roosevelt, America began to take its place as a world power, and after WWI, amidst the shattered, charred fields of Europe, it became the dominant power in the world.
Science and Technology
Many people considered this period to be the “age of optimism.” So many things had been invented so quickly–telephones, typewriters, sewing machines, motorcars, aeroplanes, wireless–it was thought that war would be averted due to the surplus of helpful inventions.
Art, Literature and Music
Writers, artists and composers we consider “modern” had their roots in the Edwardian era. The Bloomsbury Group, included author E.M. Forster, whose first four novels were published between the years 1905 and 1910. Pablo Picasso moved to Paris in 1900, and Cubism was formed around 1909-1912. Authors like Galsworthy and playwrights like Shaw, Ibsen and Pinero challenged mid-Victorian
tastes, introducing themes such as venereal disease, fallen women, class, etc as the subject of their plays.
Religion and Spirituality
As society changed, so had society’s view of religion. The Anglican Church was still the mother church (it was divided into Low Church and High Church), but Dissenters, Catholics, and Jews were no longer barred from political roles. Some aristocrats and members of the upper-class even professed atheism and a tiny number converted to other religions, such as Islam or the Bahá’í Faith. During this time, the concepts of “Muscular Christianity” influenced colonialism and the tie of Christian faith to physical health, and American and European missionaries spread across all parts of the globe to convert and care for peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. However, many began to question God and Christianity in a second wave of Darwinism, and many felt, due to the rapid technological advances of the period, that man was nigh invincible.
Time Periods Proper
Gilded Age America: 1870s to 1890s Progressive Era America: 1890s to 1920s Belle Epoque Europe: 1880s to 1910s Victorian Era: 1837-1901
Edwardian Era: 1901-1914 World War One: 1914-1918 Paris Peace Conference: 1919
THE CAMPAIGN FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN BRITAIN
The struggle for women to be granted the parliamentary vote in Britain was long and hard and is usually dated from John Stuart Mill’s campaign to be elected to
Westminster, although the subject had been discussed for some years. Votes for women was part of Mill’s election address and three pioneers of the infant feminist movement – Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies and Bessie Rayner Parkes – campaigned on his behalf. The following year, in the context of the debates about a Second Reform Bill, these three women together with Jessie Boucherett, Elizabeth Garrett and Jane Crow formed a small committee to promote a petition which Mill, newly elected to parliament, was prepared to present.
The petition, which was not successful despite collecting 1,499 signatures, had called for ‘the representation of all householders, without distinction of sex, who possess such property or rental qualifications as your honourable House may determine’ (Crawford 1999, 756). Nonetheless, other women’s suffrage committees were soon established with Lydia Becker and Millicent Garrett Fawcett becoming central figures in the Victorian women’s suffrage movement. Both were ‘constitutional suffragists’ who advocated legal, peaceful means of campaigning, such as the holding of public meetings and lobbying MPs. In 1897 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which included both male and female members, was formed from a number of the smaller district societies and ten years later Fawcett became its president.
The aim of the NUWSS was to win the parliamentary vote for women on equal terms with men which under existing franchise laws required a property qualification. This goal was also adopted by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in Manchester in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel, together with some local socialist women. Emmeline and Christabel had been members of the NUWSS and were impatient that all its efforts had not brought success. The women-only WSPU, with its slogan ‘Deeds, not words’ became the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for votes for women and its members known as ‘suffragettes’. In its early years the WSPU engaged in peaceful agitation, but all to no effect: there was little newspaper coverage of their events and the issue did not grab the eye of parliament.
In 1905 after another women’s suffrage measure, introduced as a private member’s bill, had been talked out of the House of Commons by anti-suffragists who told silly stories and jokes that were greeted with laughter, Emmeline and Christabel decided that more assertive ‘militant’ methods were appropriate. On 13 October 1905, Christabel and Annie Kenney, a recent working-class recruit to the WSPU, attended a Liberal Party meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and heckled a leading Liberal politician with the question, ‘Will the Liberal Government give women the vote?’ (Purvis 2002, 75).
In the disturbance that followed, both women were ejected from the hall. Once outside, Christabel deliberately committed the technical offence of spitting at a policeman in order to court arrest. Charged with disorderly conduct, both women chose, as they had prearranged, short prison sentences rather than pay a fine. Such militant action had the desired effect in that women’s suffrage suddenly attracted the attention of the press in a way it never had before – and many women joined the WSPU. From now on, heckling of parliamentary candidates became a common tactic of the suffragettes as well as other forms of civil disobedience, such as demonstrations to parliament and the holding of Women’s Parliaments.
In contrast to the NUWSS, the WSPU opposed Liberal candidates in by-election campaigns and, from October 1906, also Labour candidates. Emmeline and Christabel, members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), had become disillusioned with its lukewarm attitude to the women’s question and finally resigned their membership during the autumn of 1907. By now WSPU headquarters had moved to London, the centre of parliamentary democracy, and continued to advocate its ‘anti-party’ strategy.
The election of a Liberal Government in 1906 did not bring success for the women’s cause. Over the next two years, two further women’s suffrage bills, introduced as private members’ bills, were again talked out. Herbert Asquith who had become
Liberal Prime Minister in April 1908, was an ardent anti-suffragist and one of his ministers, David Lloyd George, a cynical wheeler-dealer. The WSPU in particular took exception to the ‘dishonourable double-faced Asquith’, as they called him in one by-election poster. After Asquith failed to be moved by a WSPU procession of some 40,000 women in Hyde Park in June 1908, Emmeline Pankhurst felt that the suffragettes had ‘exhausted argument’. From now on, militancy which had largely involved civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations gradually broadened to include more violent, law-breaking deeds, initially in the form of uncoordinated acts such as window breaking. Fawcett believed such tactics were damaging to the women’s cause and publicly distanced the NUWSS from such militant acts, including the hunger strike which was introduced in July 1909 by Marion Wallace Dunlop, a member of the WSPU rank-and-file.
Wallace Dunlop had been sent to Holloway for printing an extract from the Bill of Rights on the wall of St. Stephen’s Hall, the House of Commons. She went on hunger strike as a protest against the refusal of the authorities to recognise her as a political offender rather than a common criminal. Political offenders were entitled to be placed in the First, rather than Second and Third Divisions, where they enjoyed considerable privileges. After ninety-one hours of fasting, Wallace Dunlop was released (Rosen 1974, 120). Other suffragettes soon adopted the hunger strike, seeing it as a way to secure early release. However, within a short time the Liberal Government began forcibly feeding the women.
Forcible feeding was a brutal, life-threatening and degrading procedure carried out by male doctors on struggling female bodies. The hunger-striking suffragette was usually held down on a bed by wardresses or tied to a chair which was tipped back. Two male doctors performed the operation, one pushing a rubber tube some three to four feet long up one of the nostrils or down the throat, into the stomach, the most painful method since a steel gag that cut into the sides of the lips was inserted into the mouth and screwed into place in order to keep the mouth open.
Although the word ‘rape’ was not used by the suffragettes to describe their experiences, the instrumental invasion of the body, accompanied by overpowering physical force, suffering and humiliation was akin to it and commonly described as an ‘outrage’ (Purvis 2009, 38).
Suffragette militancy was suspended for much of 1910 in order to allow a cross-party group of MPs, who formed a Conciliation Committee chaired by Lord Lytton, draft another private member’s women’s suffrage bill. The move was welcomed by the NUWSS which now had 200 branches and a membership of about 22,000. It also had its own journal, The Common Cause, edited by Helena Swanwick while Votes for
Women, edited by Fred and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, was the weekly newspaper
of the WSPU (up until October 1912 when it was replaced by The Suffragette).
The Conciliation Bill was narrowly drawn up, based on the existing local government franchise laws under which women had been voting since 1870. It passed its Second Reading with a majority of 109 and would have enfranchised about one million women. However, Asquith was determined not to allow this First Conciliation Bill proceed any further and it was killed off. On 18 November 1910, as the news filtered through, the WSPU sent a deputation of over 300 women, divided into detachments of twelve, to the Commons. As the women tried to push past the police, they were treated with a brutality they had not experienced before – faces were punched, legs were kicked, arms were twisted, breasts were pinched, and knees thrust between legs. The violence the women experienced on ‘Black Friday’ as it became known, much of it of a sexual nature, was frequently cited by the suffragettes as justification for the more violent forms of militancy they adopted from 1912 (Cowman 2007, 135).
Two further Conciliation Bills, in 1911 and 1911–1912, also failed to bring in votes for women (Bartley 2007, 105–106). Given the structure of party politics, the Conciliation Bills were doomed from the start. The two main political parties – the Tories and the Liberals – could not agree on what basis women should be enfranchised and sought party advantage from any such measure. A narrowly based
women suffrage bill, based on property qualifications, would bring propertied women onto the electoral role and benefit the Tories. A wider women’s suffrage measure that included non-propertied women would bring in working-class earners who were more likely to vote Liberal. Additionally there were widespread social and cultural fears, shared by many of the MPs – who were all men – that giving women the vote would upset the traditional gender order. If women were granted the parliamentary vote, would they want to stand for election to parliament, and even aspire to the role of Speaker in the House of Commons? If women were granted the parliamentary vote, would they challenge the traditional power of a husband within ‘his’ own home?
The lack of progress on a women’s suffrage measure led many suffragettes, from 1912, to engage in attacks on private and public property – including mass window smashing of shops in London’s West End, setting fire to empty buildings, destroying mail in post boxes, cutting telephone wires, and pouring acid on men’s golf courses. The aim throughout was never to endanger human life but to force the Liberal Government to act. As Emmeline Pankhurst frequently said, ‘Human life for us is sacred’ (quoted in Jorgensen-Earp 1999, 341). However, it is important to remember that alongside these law-breaking tactics, the suffragettes also continued in non-violent acts, such as interrupting theatre performances or services in the Church of England. Nonetheless, the NUWSS distanced itself from the WSPU, refusing to co-operate with it. In July 1912, Millicent Garrett Fawcett signed a public appeal to the WSPU, on behalf of the NUWSS executive. ‘Our best friends … are convinced that militancy is doing the greatest possible harm to the suffrage cause’ (Rubinstein 1991, 177).
The NUWSS now began looking for an alliance with the Labour Party which had passed a resolution committing itself to supporting women’s suffrage. An Election Fighting Fund was set up to support Labour Party members at by-elections, and this policy was followed over the next two years (Holton 1986, 177). Additionally, Liberal Party candidates who had consistently advocated women’s suffrage were not
opposed. Such party political alliances were not supported by the WSPU leadership which emphasised that women had to grow their own backbone and fight for equality in all areas of life, including employment and the law. As Christabel Pankhurst said when she supported the destruction of mail in letter-boxes, the burning of letters had as its object the abolition of the sexual and economic exploitation of women, including the stopping of ‘hideous assaults on little girls … [and] the sweating of working women’ (Pankhurst, 1912, 114). The WSPU wanted a radical transformation of women’s role in society.
In November 1912, Asquith announced that a Manhood Suffrage Bill would be introduced which would allow of amendment, if the Commons so desired, for the enfranchisement of women. However, in January 1913 the bill was withdrawn since the Speaker had ruled that a women’s suffrage amendment was out of order. ‘It is guerrilla warfare that we declare’, announced an angry Emmeline Pankhurst to enthusiastic crowds (Purvis 2002, 208). Later that year, on 8 June, suffragette Emily Wilding Davison died, four days after being seriously injured when she ran onto the race course at the Derby, trying to grab the reins of the King’s horse. A deeply religious woman she did not, in my view, deliberately commit suicide but was a risk taker who knew the consequences could be fatal (Purvis 2013b). Five thousand women marched in her funeral procession which drew large crowds. The circumstances of her death were related in all the newspapers of the day and caught on Pathe News so that people all over the world could read about it. The disapproving national leadership of the NUWSS refused to take part in the funeral or even send a wreath. That summer of 1913 it organised a suffrage ‘pilgrimage’ from various places in Britain that eventually converged on London (Liddington 2006, 283–284).
Meanwhile hunger striking suffragettes in prison continued to be forcibly fed, a process that became extended after the Liberal Government passed in April 1913 The
Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act, commonly known as the ‘The
Cat and Mouse Act’. The Act allowed a prisoner (a ‘mouse’) weakened through hunger striking to be released into the community on a license and nursed back to
