tainted with the taquinerie, of which M. Bastiat complained so bitterly to Mr. Cobden some years afterwards, and which ultimately rendered him as obnoxious personally to the Queen as he became to his own colleagues. About the end of September the Royal Family returned home, the Queen carrying with her, despite the bad weather, the brightest memories of lonely Ardverikie.

How complete, restful, and enjoyable the change of scene and occupation must have been for the Queen is brightly indicated by Lord Palmerston. He

told Lord Campbell that her Majesty was greatly delighted with the Highlands, in spite of the bad weather, and “that she was accustomed to sally forth for a walk in the midst of a heavy rain, putting a great hood over her bonnet, and showing nothing of her features but her eyes. The Prince’s invariable return to luncheon at two o’clock, in spite of grouse-shooting and deer-stalking, is explained by his voluntary desire to please the Queen, and by the intense hunger which always assails him at this hour, when he likes, in the German fashion, to make his dinner.”[87] One is not surprised, then, that in some of her Majesty’s letters to her relatives abroad, a note of regret is sounded over the exchange of this life of perfect freedom, for the ceremony, constraint, and semi-publicity which make up the daily round of life at Court.

Out of the conversations and discussions with Lord Palmerston and Prince Leiningen at Ardverikie grew projects for a policy of alliance with Germany, and foreshadowings of the great movement towards Unity which the Fatherland was, in the opinion of the Prince, bound to make under the leadership of Prussia. Nothing can be clearer than the Prince’s prevision in discussing this theme, or sounder than his arguments for an Anglo-German alliance, based on geographical and ethnical considerations. Lord Palmerston apparently agreed that England and Germany had reason to fear the same enemies, France and Russia, and that they had therefore an obvious interest in strengthening each other. But the German Zollverein, excellent as it was as a means of paving the way for German Unity, imposed prohibitory duties on English goods, and Lord Palmerston stoutly held that an English Minister would neglect his duty to his country if he did not use his influence to prevent every German State not yet in the Customs Union from joining it. To sacrifice the Zollverein was to destroy the germ of German Unity, and here the divergence between Palmerston’s views and those of the Court became patent. He was quite prepared to sacrifice the Zollverein in the cause of Free Trade. The Court was not.

CHAPTER XVIII.

REVOLUTION.

During the autumn Session of Parliament, while the Irish Coercion Bill was under debate, the Queen and her family retired to Osborne. Pleasant experiments in landscape gardening there formed an agreeable diversion from the distracting anxieties of foreign politics in London. And truly by this time affairs on the Continent began to assume a more threatening aspect than ever. In Switzerland the rebellion of the seven Catholic cantons of the Sonderbund had been crushed by General Dufour, who commanded the forces of the other fifteen cantons. The rising was suppressed before the Cabinets of England, Austria, France, Russia, and Prussia had time to intervene. But in Italy the popular party, excited by rumours of Lord Minto’s sympathy with their movement, were stirring up the people against their Austrian masters. The Pope was growing afraid of his own diluted Liberalism. France was rapidly becoming demoralised. Sensational trials in the law courts revealed a shocking amount of corruption in official circles in Paris. The deficit in the Budget was greater than had been anticipated. Louis Philippe was accused of debauching the electorate and the Representative Chamber by bribery; his quarrel with England, and his futile attempt to win compensatory alliances elsewhere, destroyed his prestige; the Liberal Party, secretly encouraged by his enemy, Lord Palmerston, attacked his Government with every weapon of invective and ridicule; his Ministers had lost the confidence of the people, and the demand for a wide extension of the franchise accordingly became loud and deep. To this demand, perfectly reasonable in itself, the King and his Minister, M. Guizot, offered the most dogged and infatuated opposition.

The movement in North Italy against Austrian domination also created an agitation for reforms in the Two Sicilies, to which the King would make no concessions whatever. The Royal troops, in January, 1848, were beaten in an attempt to quell a revolt in the island of Sicily, and a futile compromise was scornfully rejected by the insurgents, who insisted on nothing less than the Constitution of 1812, and the assembly of a Parliament at Palermo. Naples in turn became restive, whereupon the terrified King dismissed his autocratic advisers, formed a Liberal Ministry, and granted a Constitution, with an amnesty, on the 12th of February. Even Lord Minto, Palmerston’s unofficial emissary to “Young Italy,” failed to persuade the Sicilians to accept it. But these concessions, barren as they were, forced the hands of the Pope and of the rulers of Tuscany and Sardinia, who in turn granted Constitutions. In fact, the tide of revolution was rising fast, and threatened to sweep everything before it in the Italian Peninsula.

Opinions differ as to what was the spark that lit the conflagration which made 1848 the annus mirabilis of Revolution. It has been customary to say it was the stupid opposition of Louis Philippe and M. Guizot to the Reform banquets in France, which were fixed for the 22nd of February. Lord Malmesbury, however, traces the origin of the outbreak to the popular disturbances in Munich early in the month. The people of Munich, it seems, were incensed against the King, who had dismissed his Prime Minister, Prince Wallenstein, for advising him to expel his mistress, Lola Montes, from Bavaria after her infamous influence had become paramount in the Royal councils.[88] Lola Montes had a most extraordinary career. She first appeared in society in London in Lord Malmesbury’s house, where she sang ballads—Spanish ballads—and was spoken of as the widow of a certain Don Diego Leon, who had been shot by the Carlists. His lordship, an easy, good-natured man, had made her acquaintance in a railway carriage coming up from Southampton, and that was the story she had told him. She was permitted to sell laces, veils, trinkets, and “curios” to Lord Malmesbury’s guests at his private concerts, so that she might earn a little money, while trying to dispose of some

“property,” about which there was much mystery. Then she went on the stage at the Opera House as a dancer, but was a failure. It ultimately turned out that she was a rank impostor, for instead of being the widow of a Spanish Don, she was a “Spaniard” from Cork, who had married an Irish officer called James, in the Company’s service in India. It was after her failure at the Opera House that she captivated the King of Bavaria, who used to permit her to review the Royal army, and amuse him by slashing the faces of his veteran generals with her riding-whip, when their troops failed to reach her standard of smartness. On the 19th of February she was driven from Munich—the troops refusing to fire on the people. Her house was sacked, and her collection of pictures destroyed.

M. Guizot, on the 21st of February, prohibited the Reform banquet in Paris. On Tuesday the 22nd the National Guard had revolted, and the mob from behind barricades attacked the troops. On Wednesday not one-tenth of the National Guards answered the roll-call. The Government was paralysed with panic; Ministers resigned, and M. Odillon Barrot impeached M. Guizot. The insurrection rapidly made headway, and on the 24th Louis Philippe abdicated in favour of his son, the Comte de Paris, and fled from his capital.

As soon as the Royal Family had left the Tuileries, the mob gutted the Palace, smashing everything in it but the throne, which they carried through the streets, amidst shrieks of derision. M. Lamartine formed a Provisional Government, which proclaimed a Republic. The King and Queen, it seems, made their way to Dreux, where, thanks to a friendly farmer, they procured disguises. After wandering to Trouville and Honfleur, they ultimately embarked in a fishing-boat, and were picked up by the Southampton steamer, Express, which had been hovering off Havre to meet the fugitives. On the 3rd of March, about midnight, his Majesty, under the name of “Mr. Smith,” was shivering in a little public-house at Newhaven, called the “Bridge Inn.” On the 4th they reached London, and immediately drove to Claremont. Other members of the Royal Family of France arrived by devious ways, after much variety of perilous adventure, and were received by the Queen with a generous hospitality, the warmth of which was indeed far from pleasing to the English people.

England had neither forgotten nor forgiven the hostile duplicity of Louis-Philippe’s foreign policy, and even Prince Albert had to beg her Majesty—whose heart has always been easily touched by the spectacle of sorrow or misfortune—to moderate her expression of sympathy for the dethroned monarch. In the House of Commons some of the Radicals, alarmed at the Ministerial proposals to increase the military expenditure of the country, professed to see in these courtly demonstrations of compassion additional proofs of hostile designs, on the part of England, against the French Republic. Cobden, in a letter to his friend, Mr. George Combe, of Edinburgh, said he dreaded the revival of the Treaty of Vienna, for he suspected that the Court and the aristocracy were eager to make war on the Republic. So far as Prince Albert was concerned this, as we have seen, was an unjust suspicion. But it was equally unjust to the Queen. “We do everything we can for the poor family,” she wrote to King Leopold, “who are indeed sorely to be pitied. But you will naturally understand that we cannot make common cause with them, and cannot take a hostile position to the new state of things in France.”[89] In truth, Louis Philippe—who complained to the Queen that Palmerston’s intrigues with the Liberals in France had upset his Government—deserved his fate. The outbreak which followed the foolish prohibition of the Reform banquet was only that of a turbulent mob. The King had a large and loyal army at his back, and the proverbial “whiff of grapeshot” would at the outset have quelled the rising. Louis Philippe, however, lacked the courage to defend his crown, and his flight transformed a riot into a revolution. At the same time the French people acquiesced in the Revolution of ’48 for various reasons, which have been very fairly stated by two of the shrewdest observers of the day, Sir Robert Peel and M. Alexis de Tocqueville. When Mr. Hume crossed the floor of the House of Commons one evening, and carried the news of Louis Philippe’s fall to Peel, the latter whispered to Hume:—“This comes of trying to govern the country through a narrow representation in Parliament, without regarding the wishes of those outside. It is what the Party behind me wanted me to do in the matter of the Corn Laws, and I would not do it.”[90] M. de Tocqueville, three weeks before the Revolution, predicted the catastrophe in a speech in the Chamber, in which he warned the Government that it was trembling on a volcano of Socialism.[91] In a letter to Mr. Senior he says that the real cause of the Revolution was “the detestable spirit which animated the Government during this long reign; a spirit of trickery, of baseness, and of bribery, which has enervated and degraded the middle classes, destroyed their public spirit, and filled them with a selfishness so blind as to induce them to separate their interests entirely from those of the lower classes, from whence they sprang,” who were thus delivered over to the quacks of Communism, and the tyranny of ideas, destructive not merely of ministries and dynasties, but of moral order and civil society.[92] An elected legislature, springing from a narrow franchise, and a strong centralised Government, were both manipulated for dynastic, as distinguished from national, purposes, by a selfish monarch, who had not the courage to defend his throne. The vast increase in material wealth which Louis Philippe’s reign brought to France, held as it was by a limited class, who had forfeited the respect of the nation, failed in these circumstances to avert the calamity that gave birth to the Second Republic.

England, more fortunate than France, was but lightly touched by the edge of the Revolutionary cyclone. It caused a few Chartist riots in Great Britain, and the rising of the Nationalist Party in Ireland, headed by Mr. Smith O’Brien.

On the 6th of March, whilst the Budget controversy was raging in the House of Commons, Mr. Cochrane, a defeated candidate for the representation of Westminster, organised a popular demonstration against the proposal to increase the Income Tax. A misguided mob, who had no incomes to tax, converted the meeting into a riot in Trafalgar Square, which the police suppressed. On the 5th of March Glasgow was surprised by a mob of unemployed workmen, and it took three days ere the police and the military forces, reinforced by special constables, restored order. Riots were also suppressed in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Newcastle. In London, however, the Chartists threatened to assemble on Kennington Common 150,000 men. Under the leadership of Feargus O’Connor they were to march to Westminster, ostensibly for the purpose of presenting to the House of Commons a monster petition, explaining their grievances, and demanding reform.

The grievance of the Chartists was really the grievance of the working classes. Their alliance and support enabled the middle classes to wring from the Crown and the Peers the Reform Bill of 1832. But the middle class alone profited by that Bill, which transferred political power from the aristocracy to the shopocracy, leaving the artisans and manual toilers unenfranchised. Why their persistent agitation for political privileges since 1832 should have led people to believe that revolution was impending in 1848, has been considered a mystery, especially as the outbreak on Kennington Common was a fiasco. Yet there was good reason for this panic. From Lord Grey’s correspondence it is now clear that the country was on the brink of civil war in 1831, when the King resisted Reform. But from 1831 to 1848, the resistance to an extension of the franchise had come not from the Crown, but from the House of Commons. When, however, the House of Commons obstructs progress in England—and it is apt to do so whenever it gets the chance—the situation becomes serious. Obstruction from the Sovereign, if unreasonable and malignant, can always be met by the power of the Commons to stop supplies. Obstruction by the Upper House can be met by the power of the Crown to create new Peers. For obstruction by the House of Commons,

however, it was felt that there was no real remedy but argument or revolution—argument if the people were comfortable and patient, revolution if they were hungry and impatient.

The Chartist organisation of 1839—which collapsed with the Newport riots—was really a gigantic secret society. It was organised by Major Beniowski, a Polish teacher of mnemonics, three working men—Cardo, a shoemaker, Warden, a gardener, one Westropp (occupation unknown)—and a mysterious individual, said to be a foreign police spy. On a given hour, on a given day, twenty cities were to be burned to the ground, and a reign of terror was to be inaugurated. The late Mr. David Urquhart claimed to have discovered the conspiracy, and to have broken it up by demonstrating to some of the leading workmen implicated that two of its chiefs were Russian agents, who had some time before planned a similar outbreak in Greece. Suspecting they were being used as tools of a Foreign Power, the English conspirators countermanded the order for a simultaneous rising, and thus it came to pass that the outbreak in Wales, where Beniowski was in command, was the sole result of the movement. There is good reason to believe that the Chartists were working

with Continental revolutionists, but it must not be forgotten that Mr. Urquhart suffered from a monomania, which took the odd form that everybody who differed from him was a Russian spy.[93] The political position of the Chartists was rather curious. The Tories were the only Party who showed them any sympathy, for they shared their antagonism to the Reform settlement of 1832, which was essentially a Whig settlement. Then the Chartists were always suspicious of the Free Trade movement as a capitalists’ agitation, the real object of which was not to give the people cheap bread, but to get them to work for low wages on the strength of reducing the price of food. Mr. Cobden’s friends often complained that the Anti-Corn-Law League meetings were broken up by Chartist roughs, who were incited to violence by Tory Protectionists.

After the collapse of the conspiracy at Newport, the Chartists formed a purely political organisation, whose objects were admirably described in the able and moderate speech in which Mr. Sharman Crawford, in 1842, attempted, without success, to pledge the House of Commons to take the People’s Charter into consideration. The motion was contemptuously rejected by 226 to 67. The Chartists were then divided into two parties—the London Convention, representing the “physical force” Chartists, and the smaller Birmingham Convention, identified with Mr. Joseph Sturge. He aimed at reconstructing the alliance between the working and middle classes, that had carried Parliamentary Reform in 1832, and at starting an agitation for an extension of the Franchise, and for triennial Parliaments. Both factions joined in bringing the pressure of agitation on Parliament in 1848, an agitation which it now seems was quite peaceful in its intent, though the revolutionary excitement in France naturally induced the well-to-do classes to see in it an anarchical conspiracy. The first check the Chartists received was the intimation that their meeting and their procession would be prohibited because both were likely to lead to disturbances.

It is amusing to look back now on the panic that smote the upper and middle classes at this time. On Friday, the 7th of April, Lord Campbell wrote to his brother, declaring that “many people believe that by Monday we shall be under a Provisional Government.” It is only fair to say that the Duke of Wellington scoffed at all these alarmist rumours—in fact, he told Lady Jersey that there was no reason to be alarmed, and he advised ladies who consulted him to drive about as usual.[94] “I suppose,” writes Lord Campbell again, “we shall all fly to Hartrigge—if I can escape in disguise.” On the 9th of April Campbell again writes:—“(Yesterday) we were considering in the Cabinet how the Chartists should be dealt with, and when it was determined that the procession should be stopped after it had moved, we agreed that the particular place where it should be stopped was purely a military question. The Duke of Wellington was requested to come to us, which he did very readily. We had then a regular council of war, as upon the eve of a great battle. We examined maps and returns and information of the movements of the enemy. After long deliberation, plans of attack and defence were formed to meet every contingency. The quickness, intelligence, and decision which the Duke displayed were very striking, and he inspired us all with perfect confidence by the dispositions which he prescribed. There are now above 7,000 regular troops in London, besides a train of artillery. The special constables are, as you will see, countless. We are most afraid of disturbances after the procession is dispersed, and of the town being set fire to in the night.” This was a memorable Cabinet meeting, and Macaulay said he should remember it to his dying day.[95]

The demonstration, which frightened everybody except the Duke of Wellington, took place on Monday, the 10th of April—a hot spring morning favouring the objects of the agitators. The delegates first of all met in convention at 9 a.m. in the Literary and Scientific Institution, John Street, Fitzroy Square, and received an intimation from the Commissioners of Police that the “Monster” Petition might be taken to the House of Commons, but that no procession would be allowed to accompany it. Mr. Feargus O’Connor gave the delegates prudent and pacific advice, but they resolved to adjourn to Kennington Common, hold their meeting, and then proceed in procession with the petition to Westminster in spite of all opposition.

Gradually the ever-increasing mass of agitators marched on, crossing the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge, and reaching Kennington Common at 11.30 a.m. A communication was then made to Mr. O’Connor by the police authorities, the result of which was that a compromise was arrived at. Mr. Mayne, the Commissioner of Police, agreed to permit the prohibited meeting to be held, and Mr. O’Connor agreed to abandon the idea of a procession, and to pass his word that the demonstration would be conducted in an orderly manner. The authorities had arranged to block the bridges with police and, if need be, troops. Even “physical force” Chartists like Mr. Ernest Jones could only accept the situation, whilst regretting that the meeting had not been held on the other side of the river, in which case they would not have had to recross the bridges to march on the House of Commons. Mr. Jones admitted, however, that they were not prepared to fight the authorities, and he, too, advised the meeting to disperse peacefully. Spasmodic outbreaks of horseplay and demonstrations of displeasure from isolated groups of agitators took place. A man called Spurr, supported by Mr. Cuffey, insisted on going on with the procession until they were stopped, whereupon they could withdraw the petition on the ground that they had met with illegal resistance.

During the day the streets presented the appearance of a holiday. The police were withdrawn from their beats, and concentrated on special points, the town being patrolled by special constables—among whom, by the way, Prince Charles Louis Bonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III., was enrolled—who wore white bands on their arms, and carried truncheons as emblems of authority. These patriotic citizens were mercilessly ridiculed by their ungrateful fellow-citizens, who passed rude remarks on their awkward appearance and their incongruities of stature and costume. People were extremely unfeeling in their comments on the appearance of certain “specials” who wore spectacles or eyeglasses, and who carried umbrellas in addition to their staves. All the public buildings were garrisoned with troops; the clerks in the public offices formed special corps of defence, and many gentlemen of rank brought up their gamekeepers from the country, armed them, and prepared their mansions for a regular siege.[96] Trafalgar Square was occupied by 200 police. The parks were closed; a corporal’s guard of the Household Troops held each entrance to them, and patrols of the Guards

marched up and down the Mall. Apsley House was barricaded, and Mr. Carlyle says Piccadilly was almost deserted, the Green Park shut, “even the footpaths of it;” and “in the inside stood a score of mounted Guardsmen, privately drawn up under the arch—dreadful cold, I daresay. For the rest, not a single fashionable carriage was in the street, not a private vehicle, but, I think, two surgeons’ broughams all the way to Egyptian Hall, omnibuses running, a few street carts, even a mud-cart or two; nothing else; the flag pavements also

nearly vacant, not a fifth of the usual population there, and those also of the strictly business kind.”[97] Buckingham Palace was protected by a strong force under arms at Wellington Barracks, ready to march on it the moment it was threatened. The Bank was fortified by a company of Sappers and Miners, who built on the roof platforms for cannon, and guarded them with loopholed breastworks of sandbags, &c., so that a mob could be swept away by grapeshot at a moment’s notice. Special constables, organised by Aldermen of the wards, guarded the City. Hardly a single red-coat, however, was to be seen anywhere, but at various strategic points troops were in readiness, to be let loose if the mob showed signs of fighting. There was a fight between the police and the mob at Blackfriars Bridge. But the police who guarded Waterloo Bridge were able to amuse themselves as they pleased. No Chartists came near it—the bridge being guarded by something much more formidable to them than troops, namely, the man who kept the toll-bar.

When the events of the 18th ended with the contemptuous treatment which the House of Commons gave to the Chartist petition, two things happened. The upper middle class burst into a chorus of triumph over their successful suppression of anarchy. The working classes who joined the Chartist movement were flung into the arms of the “physical force party,” who pointed to the failure of the petition and the demonstration, as a proof that the methods of agitation favoured by Mr. Sturge and the Birmingham Convention were futile. It is important to keep these facts in view, for the transformation of the Chartist movement into a movement of violence after the 10th of April, has led many writers to assume that the peaceful agitation which culminated in the Kennington meeting was truly a revolutionary conspiracy, which was put down by the courageous demonstration made by the Party of Order. The facts that the meeting at Kennington was unarmed, that its numbers, so far from reaching 100,000, did not exceed 20,000, that the existence of a toll-bar on one of the bridges was sufficient to determine the direction which the “revolutionary” procession should take, and, above all, the fact that the meeting was held on the Surrey side of the river, thus leaving the police and troops in complete command of the bridges in rear of the Chartists—all indicate that up to the 10th there was no serious idea of appealing to arms. It was absurd to argue that the event was dwarfed by the preparations which were made to meet it, for these preparations were kept secret. On the other hand, a good effect was subsequently produced by these preparations, for they showed that the Party of Order, though quite willing to give Mr. Feargus O’Connor full liberty to play the braggart and the fool, were also determined to maintain the law against any mob of law-breakers, however strong or however turbulent. They gave agitators fair warning that in England, at least, the resources of civilisation against anarchy were by no means exhausted. The Queen had with some hesitation yielded to the advice of the Cabinet, and had removed the Court to Osborne during this anxious period. But she and Prince Albert both kept a vigilant eye on events as they unfolded themselves in the metropolis. Writing to King Leopold on the 11th of April, she says:—“Thank God, the Chartist meeting and procession have turned out a complete failure! The loyalty of the people at large has been very striking, and their indignation at their peace being interfered with by such wanton and worthless men immense.”[98] Albany Fonblanque had the fairness to admit that it was “clear that the bulk of the London Chartists have no disposition to commit themselves to the chances of involving it in outrage;”[99] and Mr. Cobden says, in one of his letters:—“In my opinion the Government and the newspapers have made too much fuss about it (the Chartist rising).”[100]

The two men who got and deserved most credit for the happy termination of the Chartist meeting were Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, and the Duke of Wellington, whose opinions on the affair had the greatest weight with the Queen. On the 11th of April, when all was quiet, the Duke of Wellington met Lord Campbell, and the following conversation took place between them:—“I went up to him,” writes Lord Campbell, “and said, ‘Well, Duke, it has all turned out as you foretold.’ Duke—‘Oh, yes, I was sure of it, and I never showed a soldier or a musket. But I was ready. I could have stopped them wherever you liked, and if they had been armed it would have been all the same.’ Campbell—‘They say they are to meet next on the north side of the town, and avoid the bridges.’ Duke—‘Every street can be made a bridge. I can stop them anywhere.’ Campbell—‘If your Grace had commanded Paris on the 25th of February, Louis Philippe would still have been on the throne.’ Duke—‘It would have been an easy matter. I should have made the Tuileries secure, and have kept my communications open.’ Then, more suo, laying hold of my arm, and speaking very loud, and pointing with his finger, he added—‘Always keep your communications open, and you need have nothing to fear’”[101]

When the fiasco of the 10th of April put the Chartist organisation under the control of the “physical force” party, the first step was initiated by Mr. Ernest Jones in the National Convention. It was to reconstruct the whole Chartist body as a secret society, on the pattern of the United Irishmen. Moderate men were removed from the Executive Council, and agitators like Dr. Macdowall, who had taken a prominent part in the troubles of ’39 and ’42, were elected in their places. The change in their methods was first illustrated by the sudden assemblage, without warning, of a vast meeting of 80,000 men on Clerkenwell Green and Stepney Green, on the evening of the 29th of May, when processions from all parts of London also moved by converging routes to Smithfield, and then marched along Holborn, Oxford Street, Pall Mall, the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, to Finsbury Square, where they dispersed. This was a demonstration arranged to test the working of the new secret organisation. Rifles and pikes began to appear in the lodgings of the Chartists. An alliance was formed with some of the turbulent leaders of the “Young Ireland” Party. Spies were swarming in every city, and a

Secret Committee, consisting of seven men, named Cuffey, Ritchie, Lacey, Fay, Rose, Mullins, and a man named Powell, alias Johnson, who, though pretending to be a workman, was really a professional pedestrian, known in sporting public-houses as the “Welsh Nurse,” began to plot a regular insurrection. Powell joined the Committee to betray it, and his counsels breathed of fire and slaughter. Ernest Jones had by this time been imprisoned for proclaiming to a meeting that the green flag would soon wave over Downing Street; and another man had also been imprisoned—one Williams—because in a speech he had insinuated that the Government was brutalising the people by letting the police beat them with truncheons, when they came into collision with Chartist meetings on Clerkenwell Green. Whit Monday, the 12th of June, was the day fixed on for the Revolution, and on that day the Metropolitan branches of the Society were to assemble on Blackheath and Bishop Bonner’s Fields—meetings which were prohibited by the police as illegal. When warrants were issued for the arrest of Macdowall and the leaders, the Blackheath meeting was abandoned, and orders were given to concentrate a Chartist gathering on Bonner’s Fields, so as to divert a large police force from the

City. On the evening of the 12th the Chartists resolved to abandon the meeting on Bonner’s Fields, not because the authorities at Scotland Yard prohibited it, but because it was raining, comforting themselves with the reflection that they had detained a large force of police and troops there to watch them. They were then in hopes, as Rose, one of the leaders, said to Mr. Frost, that in London by that time “they are at it hammer and tongs.”[102]

But when the time came for striking, the conspirators were unprepared, and nothing was done. Some of the leaders—like Cuffey—now felt that it was hopeless to attempt an armed revolt, yet the forces behind them were too strong to be controlled, and they were compelled to go on when they would have drawn back. They accordingly fixed the 15th of August for the grand effort; but on that day, when waiting in the “Orange Tree” public-house, in Orange Street, Bloomsbury, they were suddenly arrested by a small body of armed police. “A sword,” writes Mr. Frost, “was found under the coat of one, and the head of a pike, made to screw into a socket, under that of another. One had a pair of pistols in his pocket, and the fourth was provided with a rusty bayonet, fastened on the end of a stick. Some were without other weapons than shoemakers’ knives. A pike, which no one would own, was found under a bench.”

At this moment groups of surly-looking labourers were lounging in the streets and at the bars of public-houses in the Seven Dials. Suddenly a man with haggard eyes and a face pale with fear was seen to rush into the midst of a group at the corner of St. Andrew’s Street, and whisper a few hurried words to a labourer, who with a pickaxe was fumbling about a loose stone in the causeway. He was then seen darting from group to group, from public-house to public-house, and very soon the police began to hover in the distance. In a few minutes the groups of loungers had almost entirely disappeared, and the public-houses were mysteriously emptied. There is reason to believe that the flag of revolution was to have been first raised in the Seven Dials, where the first barricades were to have been flung up, the spot, says Mr. Frost, who was a leading Chartist, being chosen “on account of its contiguity to Whitehall, and the facilities offered by its narrow streets, radiating in so many directions from a common centre, for a rapid advance.” The pale-faced man, whose appearance was the signal for the dispersal of the loungers round the Seven Dials, was an emissary from the “Orange Tree,” bringing tidings of the arrests there. Cuffey, Ritchie, Lacey, and Fay were tried for sedition, and sentenced to transportation for life. Mullins received a long term of imprisonment. Powell, the spy, instead of a handsome reward, only got a free passage to Australia, where, being an idle fellow, he did not remain long. What became of him is not known. The other spy, a constable named Mullins, was subsequently dismissed from the police force for misconduct, and after a career of crime was hanged for murdering an old woman called Elmsley, at Hackney, for the sake of a few pounds she had in her house. The Chartist organisation broke up. Its members, finding that the working classes alone could effect nothing, sensibly reverted to the programme of Mr. Sturge and the Birmingham Convention. They accordingly joined the Parliamentary Reform Association, which was launched into existence by the middle-class Radicals, under the auspices of Mr. Joseph Hume and his political associates.

Writing to Baron Stockmar about the collapse of the Chartist meeting at Kennington, Prince Albert says, in one of his letters—“I hope this will read with advantage on the Continent. Ireland still looks dangerous.” It had looked so “dangerous” at the end of 1847 that its condition, together with the commercial panic in England, had caused Parliament to be summoned in the November of that year. Now the country, under the misguidance of the “Young Irelanders,” was drifting into civil war.

It is not difficult to be generous to a “lost cause,” and in the “Young Ireland” movement, which ended in the disaster of ’48, there is much that enlists the sympathies of liberal-minded liberty-loving men. It sprang from a reaction among the youth of the educated and literary classes, against the coarse vulgarity of O’Connell’s methods of agitation. His favourite weapon was race-hatred. This he roused by passionate appeals to bitter memories of the past, when “the base, bloody, and brutal Saxon” trod the Celt under foot, tortured his priests, desecrated his altars, and proscribed his faith. The “Young Irelanders,” especially after Catholic Emancipation, felt that no practical good was done to the rack-rented peasantry by denunciations of Cromwell’s tyranny. Moving diatribes against Elizabethan oppression, in their opinion, did still less to reform the bad government, the weak executive, and alien bureaucracy of Ireland in the Victorian era. O’Connell’s aim was to pit the Celtic Catholics against the Protestant Anglo-Irish. The “Young Ireland” Party aimed at uniting all Irish patriots, irrespective of creed or caste, in a purely political and secular movement for emancipating the peasantry from landlordism, and Ireland from English government. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy,[103] one of the founders of the movement, says that its leaders favoured constitutional agitation, but, if compelled to adopt stronger measures, they were ready to accept the arbitrament of the sword. Their mistake lay in committing themselves to this latter part of their programme, without possessing the means of carrying it out. When they did that, success could alone distinguish their policy from treason.

The “Young Irelanders” were led by Thomas Osborne Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy, John Blake Dillon, and several other young men of enthusiasm and talent, and their movement was literary as well as political. They became an organised party in 1842, when the Nation newspaper was started, under Duffy’s editorship—a paper, says the late Mr. P. J. Smyth,[104] which was “filled with a spirit of intense nationality.” Its articles, political and historical, its ballads and lyrics, both pathetic and humorous, were all devoted to glorify the achievements of Irishmen in the past, or give voice to their passions, aspirations, and demands in the present. All hereditary feuds, the “Young Irelanders” said, must be forgotten. Ireland was to be Irish—not Anglo-Irish or Celtic. All men who loved her were to be ranked as Irishmen. Hereditary party spirit they regarded, wrote Sir C. Gavan Duffy, as an ignis fatuus in a country “where the lineal descendants of the O’Neils, O’Briens, and O’Connors were Ministers, and where Philpot Curran, Wolfe Tone, and Theobald Mathew sprang from Cromwellian soldiers.” The agitators were a little hazy and vague and self-contradictory as to the precise amount of

allegiance which they would yield to the Imperial Government; and Davis, in his correspondence with Daniel Owen Maddyn, rails as much at English ideas—English Utilitarianism, Materialism, and “Sensualism”—as at the supremacy of the Pope or Protestant ascendency. Just before the outbreak of ’48, too, Mr. Smith O’Brien’s avowed object, as leader of the “Young Irelanders,” was to set up in Ireland an independent Republic. On the land question, however, they were sound and moderate. They demanded security of tenure, fair rents, free sale of tenant-right, and reasonable facilities for the natural growth of peasant proprietors. But, said they in their manifesto in the Nation, “we are not ready to jump into a servile war for this purpose,” and, as Mr. P. J. Smyth has observed, they taught that “expropriation, if it could be realised, would be disastrous.” Davis, who was poet-laureate of the movement, was a Protestant of Welsh descent, Duffy and Dillon were Catholics.

“Young Ireland” soon fell out with O’Connell and the patriots of Conciliation Hall. O’Connell’s organ, the Pilot, attacked the Nation for its