The World полностью

British manufacturing was booming, aided by the first railways, which used steam power to transport passengers and goods at perilous new speeds: on 15 September 1830, Wellington opened the Manchester–Liverpool line. Former cabinet minister William Huskisson was chatting to the duke in his official locomotive, when another, The Rocket, careened towards him. Huskisson tried to climb into the ducal train, but fell under Rocket’s wheels, his leg smashed as the duke watched. ‘I’ve met my death,’ said Huskisson. ‘God forgive me!’ The accident did not act as a deterrent, and railways quickly united Britain: train journeys rose from 5.5 million in 1838 to 111 million twenty years later. In Manchester, Wellington was booed by millworkers, but he still refused parliamentary reform – a policy which destroyed his ministry just as the fat old king, George IV, died. His only child, the adored Charlotte, had died in childbirth at twenty-one in 1817. So his heir was his brother, the Duke of Clarence, a bluff former sailor, with ten illegitimate children by his actress paramour, who was doubtful about reform and abolition. He became William IV aged sixty-four and was forced to offer the premiership to Charles, Earl Grey, a veteran advocate of reform and abolition. Out of power since 1807, this septuagenarian Regency roué and landed magnate boasted that ‘The acreage of his cabinet surpassed any previous record.’ Yet Grey would revolutionize the British world in two acts.

LORD CUPID AND THE LADY PATRONESSES

Grey’s partner was his irrepressible foreign secretary, the Anglo-Irish landowner Harry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, now forty-six. Originally notable for his tireless sexual adventures, Palmerston, who dominated governments from 1830 to 1865, was more than anyone else the architect of British world power in a new age of empire.

As a Harrow schoolboy, he had been known as a philistine boxer; as a young man, he was nicknamed Lord Cupid, an unreconstructed Regency buck who had first attracted attention as the lover of three of the five lady patronesses of the elite Almack’s club, starting with the Russian ambassador’s wife, Dorothea Lieven, who had also been Metternich’s paramour. Now, unrestrained by being foreign secretary, he kept a diary of his almost daily sexual encounters, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening and often in the middle of the day, with a diverse cast of courtesans, prostitutes and countesses, scarcely concealed, in a very English code, as reports of the weather. ‘A fine night in the garden’ was a typical entry.

Lord Cupid had been in Tory governments since 1809 as secretary at war, but in 1828 he switched to the Whigs as a protégé of Canning, a supporter of cautious reform and the abolition of slavery. From now on, serving almost permanently as foreign secretary, he backed liberal measures at home while implacably promoting British power abroad. ‘We have no eternal allies, no perpetual enemies,’ he declared. ‘Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ He insisted, ‘Those who desire to see the principles of liberty thrive and extend through the world should cherish, with an almost religious veneration, the prosperity and greatness of England.’ When a Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston, ‘If I weren’t a Frenchman, I’d wish to be an Englishman,’ he replied, ‘If I weren’t an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.’ His endurance in detailed negotiations earned him another nickname: Protocols Palmerston. A mediocre speaker, the exuberant, shrewd and bewhiskered ruffian became a public icon, portrayed in the press as Pam the prize fighter. It was Lord Pumicestone who now forged Britain’s idiosyncratic combination of liberal mission and gun-toting imperialism – a policy which resembled that of the US in the second half of the twentieth century. It was built in his own image. He first coped with the aftermath of the 1830 revolutions in which the former Austrian Netherlands rebelled against the Dutch king. Palmerston created a new kingdom, Belgium, that he hoped would restrain France and guard the balance of power.

He offered its throne to a favourite prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, widower of the British heiress Charlotte. Leopold became the first king of Belgium, where his family still reign.

Metternich was shaken by 1830 – ‘My entire life is destroyed’ – and he hated Palmerston: ‘Palmerston is wrong about everything.’ Palmerston enjoyed baiting the old chancellor. ‘I’d like to see Metternich’s face,’ he said. But the 1830 revolutions proved less disastrous than first feared: the tsar crushed the Poles, Metternich held Italy; Louis Philippe and Leopold stabilized France and Belgium, where both proved vigorous patrons of industry, and both were intimate allies of the Rothschilds. Louis Philippe appeared the very model of a modern monarch; the Bonapartes were clearly finished.^*