The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Illustrated Edition). Robert Thomas Wilson

of Baron Stockmar, who was in constant communication with Prince Albert, were evidently among the first to become sensitive to the change, but like Peel, Wellington, and Russell, they frankly acknowledged what must follow from it.

      England was in truth all through 1845 moving fast to that “total and immediate repeal” of the Corn Laws which Cobden demanded, and the county gentry, Whig as well as Tory, equally dreaded. When Russell and Peel were in fact waiting for what Prince Bismarck calls “the psychological moment” to proclaim the new departure, the “psychological moment” came with the terrible incident which caused the spectre of famine to stalk over Ireland. That incident was the failure of the potato crop, and it removed the question of the Corn Laws far away from the battle-ground of rival political or economic theories. The problem was no longer one of maintaining or abandoning a territorial system. At the beginning of 1846 it became a question of deciding whether so many hundred thousand of our fellow-creatures in Ireland should perish in the agonies of hunger, or whether, by removing the Corn duty, her Majesty’s Government at one blow would strike down the barrier that prevented bread from reaching the lips of a starving peasantry. For the wretched cotters in Ireland the winter of 1845-46 was, truly, one of extreme privation. “Those who had savings,” writes Mr. Greg,28 “lived off them, but among the really poor there was widespread destitution.” Forced to sell their clothes for food, the Irish peasantry refused to pay rent, and when rent was extorted by harsh process of law, retaliatory outrages immediately followed. The ghastly outlook in Ireland gave the Anti-Corn-Law agitators welcome leverage for their movement in England, and they increased their activity every day. Lord John Russell, on the 22nd of November, 1845, wrote the Edinburgh Letter to the electors of the City of London, warning them that the Whig Party, in view of the state of the country, were ready to put an end to a system which had been proved to be the blight of commerce and the bane of agriculture. This, we have seen, forced Peel’s hands. As Mr. Bright said to Lord John, whom he met, after the issue of his manifesto, on the platform of a railway station in Yorkshire, “Your letter has made total and immediate repeal inevitable; nothing can save it” (the Corn Law).29 Peel himself did not conceal from the Queen that he could perhaps keep the Whigs at bay for three years, and shortly before his death he told Cobden the same thing. But neither the monarch nor her Minister dared to procrastinate in the face of popular destitution, and they felt compelled to obey, no matter at what cost or sacrifice, the dictates of reason and humanity. For it was not from Ireland only that the moan of a suffering people broke upon the ear of a sorrowing Queen. It is true that the venal and factious press of that country at first attempted to deceive the world by denying the existence of wide-spreading potato-rot in the island. With the cries of the dying ringing in their ears, Irish journalists disputed with each other as to whether there actually was any famine in the land. But the facts could not long be concealed, either from the people or from the Queen. At the end of September, 1845, it had to be generally admitted that the staple food of Ireland had suddenly disappeared, and that even in England only the northern counties had escaped from the potato-disease. To such an extent did the rest of England suffer, that Professor Lindley declared there was hardly a sound potato to be found in Covent Garden Market.30 As Lord Beaconsfield has observed, “This mysterious but universal sickness of a single root changed the history of the world.”31

      The Corporations of London and Dublin, on the 3rd of January, 1846, memorialised the Queen on the subject. Their deputations, who waited on her at Windsor, received from her a gracious and sympathetic reply to their statements, which she heard with manifest interest. The Anti-Corn-Law League felt that it would be good policy to turn the prevailing distress to account, and it immediately renewed, with redoubled vigour, its agitation against the duties that kept up the price of bread. Its leaders organised a series of meetings all over England and Scotland, and although the Chartists rather held aloof from them, the Free Trade speakers at last fairly touched the heart of the nation. Extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm took place at these meetings. In the last week of 1845, at a meeting in Manchester, it was suggested to raise a quarter of a million pounds sterling to help the agitation that must strengthen Peel’s hands,32 and Mr. John Morley has described how men jumped up from their seats and cried out, one after the other, “A thousand pounds for me!” “A thousand pounds for us!” and so on, till in less than two hours £60,000 were subscribed on the spot.33 Of course, all this fervour provoked a movement on the other side. The Protectionists organised a counter agitation, but it was very badly managed. The speakers selected were persons, of high rank and ample fortune. But they lacked sympathy and sense, and this defect was fatal to their cause. Their favourite argument was that there was no famine at all to fear, and they revelled in demonstrating to people who had nothing to eat, that their continued prosperity depended on the maintenance of a Corn Law which made bread dear. The Duke of Norfolk covered the Protectionist agitation with odium and ridicule, by suggesting that if haply here and there a labouring man felt hungry, he might derive great benefit by taking at night, just before bed-time, a pinch of curry-powder as a comforting stomachic. The satirists of the Radical party made affluent use of this egregious imbecility, and the Examiner34 promptly printed a poem headed “Comfort and Curry,” in which the Duke and Duchess were cruelly quizzed.

      What contributed most to strengthen Sir Robert Peel was the agitation among the agricultural labourers. It was very difficult to resist such an appeal as theirs, when they pointed to their gaunt forms, and wan and haggard faces, and said, “Behold this is the result of the Protection that is kept up for our benefit.” They held meetings, in the beginning of 1846, in various parts of the country, and from the speeches at these we get a vivid idea of the sad condition of the English people at this time. One gathering may be cited as typical. It was held by some two hundred starvelings, who met in fear—for the gentry frowned upon the movement—on a bleak winter’s night, by the light of a clouded moon and a few flaring candles at a cross-road near Wootton Bassett. The chairman said he had six shillings a week, on which he

      MEETING OF AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS AT WOOTTON BASSETT. (See p. 216.)

      had to keep his wife and two children, and he complained that it was not half enough for them to live on. Another speaker, one William Burchall, said, “that though their wages had risen within the last few months a shilling a week, bread had risen two shillings, so that the difference was against them. He was past forty years of age, and he could say that he had never purchased a pound of good slaughtered beef fit to be carried into the market. As to mutton, he had purchased a little of that, but never as much as would average a pound a year in forty years. He knew what veal was, but never had any at all.” Another man said that, during thirty-nine weeks, ending 10th of June, 1844, he had earned only £5 19s. 8d., or 3s. 1d. a week; and that but for getting a little land to rent from Lord Carnarvon, he and his wife and eight children would have starved. His house rent came to £4 a year, and his bread bill alone came to from 7s. 7d. to 8s. 8d. a week. Another man said that he had so little bread to eat that he got weak, and was then discharged as unfit for service. James Pegler complained he had been “hunted down” under the Poor Laws, having been, with his wife and family, forced into the workhouse, and separated from them for eleven months. At last, he was turned away to get work, and because he went out of the district to find it, he was taken before the magistrate, charged with desertion, and sent to prison for a month. “God bless my heart and life,” exclaimed this poor creature, “I never see’d such a go, to be sure, as how I was served. I know enough of starvation and misery to make me say ‘God send us Free Trade.’” At this meeting the labourers declared they were thankful that Providence had put it out of the power of Government “to write taxation on the bosom of the streams and rivulets that were so bountifully spread around their neighbourhood.”35 They were unconsciously illustrating the wisdom of Paul Louis Courier, who once said that the rich are grateful to Providence for what it gives—the poor, for what it leaves them.

      The Queen, it has been reported, was deeply affected by these demonstrations of suffering. It is said that she will never forget, as long as she lives, that she began her reign when the wealth and power of England were waning. She was, on her accession to the throne, the object of the most chivalrous devotion that any Queen could inspire. Yet, when crowned, the tears fell from her eyes, as she thought of her own responsibility in the midst of a nation sinking deeper and deeper