So how was it that in little over a century the people that thought of themselves as the freest on Earth ended up subjugating much of the world’s population? How was it that a nation which had such a deep mistrust of military power ended up the biggest military power of all? How was it that the empire of the free turned into the empire of the slaves? How was it that profit seemed to turn not on freedom but on raw coercion? How was it we ended up with the wrong empire? Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Wrong Empire
One commodity would be reaped by another: by slaves ... The economy in the Caribbean wasn’t just a side-show to Empire, it was the Empire. Three and a half million slaves were transported in British ships alone. ibid.
Victory in Quebec and then Montreal totally transformed the British empire in north America. ibid.
For thousands of years the mountains, lakes and forests of Britain have been just geography. But in the late 1700s they became something much more – the face of our nation. The countryside became our country. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Forces of Nature
And what fired Bewick’s radicalism wasn’t just anger, it was an emotion new to politics: sympathy. What moved him was an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty and suffering. A recognition that deep down we are all bonded by our shared human nation. It was a call to action echoed in pulpits up and down the country ... For the first time there was a politics of suffering. ibid.
William Wordsworth had been born in the Lake District ... He too had grown up in love with nature; now that love would extend to all of downtrodden humanity. ibid.
But when the lynching started [Edmund] Burke decided the revolution was above all an act of violence ... Democracy? Mobocrasy more like, said Burke. Heads stuck on pikes, the law of the lynch mob – we don’t want that here. ibid.
In 1791 he [Thomas Paine] published his counterblast – the Rights of Man. ibid.
And you’d find women – articulate, intelligent and impassioned. And among those women the most striking of all was Mary Wollstonecraft. She was the Spirit of the Times. Mary Wollstonecraft was a one-woman revolution. ibid.
Britain confronted Napoleon’s empire: epic campaigns in Spain and Portugal. A world of conflict from India to the Caribbean. With spectacular naval victories like Trafalgar. During these rollercoaster years the country’s woes were muffled; patriotic propaganda drowned out any voices of complaint. The symphony of cannon and drum reached its climax on the rain-sodden fields of Waterloo. ibid.
The poor and the unemployed were looking for anything to eat. ibid.
Eleven were killed. Hundreds more badly wounded. At least a hundred of the injured were women and small children. Peterloo struck old time radicals like Thomas Bewick with nauseated horror. Unnatural was the word which rang through the denunciations. ibid.
Thousands of people reacted to Peterloo by throwing themselves into campaigns of action. Crusades which they embarked on with religious fervour. Those that laboured for change did so now not only in secret political clubs, but in the light of churches and chapels. Their targets were unnatural institutions – the monopoly of the Church of England, the ban on Catholic voters in Ireland. In the manufacturing towns a hue and cry to have their own MPs ... In 1830 a new Revolution in France and a wave of violence in the English countryside meant the votes for change could not be postponed. The Whigs took office for the first time since before 1789 as the champions of reform without revolution. (Great Britain & England & Oppression & Revolution & Reform) ibid.
But the English counties weren’t the only place where it was said something had to be done to avert bloodshed. In Suriname, Guyana and in Jamaica a push to the edge by hope and desperation there had been slave rebellions put down with a ferocity which made Peterloo look like a picnic. ibid.
The message of the Romantics: We are all brothers and sisters beneath the skin. We all share praise be to God the same nature, could at last be embraced not as a cry for retribution, a call to the barricades, but as the anthem of a great and peaceful crusade. Abolitionism healed old wounds. It brought together Thomas Bewick and William Wordsworth under the same great tent of righteousness. ibid.
In 1834 Britain abolished slavery. And at a time contrary to some legends when the market for its products was becoming more not less lucrative, it was the first great nineteenth-century victory for the Party of Humanity. ibid.
Spring 1851: the word Victoria enters the English language and a very small woman enters a very big building. She is four-foot- eleven yet somehow she fills it. Her moment is so pregnant for the future it seems holy. Victoria herself is flooded with religious awe. Neither she nor anyone else has ever seen anything like this building before: a greenhouse the size of a palace with a difference that this is from the beginning a People's Palace. A popular magazine calls it the Crystal Palace ... A huge showcase for Britain’s industrial empire. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: Victoria and Her Sisters
She was of course the most desirable catch in Europe ... Helped by that handsome, or as she put it, angelic German head, well she pretty much ran the show, virtually grabbing hold of her curly-haired intended and sprinting for the altar. It was Victoria who supplied the ring, asked Albert for a lock of his hair and wallowed in the kissing sessions. ibid.
Victoria simply melted away into the amazed bliss of conjugal love. ibid.
Victoria and Albert’s passion for each other was strictly a private matter. ibid.
Six million came to see the Show of Shows. ibid.
[Elizabeth] Gaskell took herself right into the lower depths of the city, the gin-palaces and open sewers. Dark reeking alleys where skin-and-bones children played amongst the rats. ibid.
Pugin: a new generation of churches would be in the frontline in the war to save Victorian souls. ibid.
On April 10th 1848 a monster Chartist petition signed by around two million men and women, so huge it would take two Hackney cabs to bring it to Parliament, was brought to London. Around 150,00 Chartists converged. ibid.
Mary Seacole was West-Indian ... When Britain joined the Crimean War in 1854 she tried to volunteer her services at the front ... She was turned down by the likes of Nurse Nightingale ... Mary Seacole built her British hotel right on the front line ... Mortars would whizz past the big old woman trundling the front lines. After the war was over the soldiers feted her at a charity gala. She had become briefly an eminent Victorian. ibid.
In 1860 Elizabeth Garrett enrolled as a surgical nurse at Middlesex Hospital but her sights were set higher ... She was also cutting up body parts in her bedroom. This improvised education made her bold enough to take part in the hospital’s medical (not nursing) exam. And when the time came to publish the results, one E Garret had come top. Ordered to keep the outrage secret she went public instead. Nine years later the French gave her an Md. ibid.
What went wrong? Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Empire of Good Intentions
What made the scale of suffering so obscene was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India. But so fanatically devoted to the iron law of the market was the government that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices. So common sense not to mention common humanity were sacrificed to the fetish of the market and millions were abandoned to perish. ibid.
Three years later the empire would ask its loyal subjects to line up for King and Country. Millions did from Ireland and India. ibid.
Turner wanted to paint that England too. For this was the early 1800s – the rockiest years in all modern British history. The time when the distance between the fantasy Britain and the reality was at its widest. The kingdom was supposed to be a model of political and social stability, but there was massive unemployment, hunger and anger ... There are hard times. Radical times. Simon Shama’s Power of Art: Turner, BBC 2006
Henry spent more money on palaces than any other monarch before or since. David Dimbleby, Seven Ages of Britain III: Age of Power, BBC 2010
During the early years of his reign, England and France were at war. ibid.
It is said this is the waistcoat that King Charles I wore when he knelt for the executioner’s axe on 30th January 1649, the day this country killed its King. David Dimbleby, Seven Ages of Britain, Age of Revolution
James actually believed he was as a god. He told his parliament, Even God calls Kings god. ibid.
Events moved so quickly that few predicted the outcome. It began with the protests of the Puritans – extreme Protestants who set themselves against the luxury of the court. (Great Britain & England & English Civil Wars) ibid.
It all came to a head in the winter of 1642. ibid.
In the early hours of Sunday 2nd September 1666 fire broke out at a Pudding Lane bakery. ibid.
He [Wren] wanted to create a monumental structure to rival St Peter’s in Rome. ibid.
Prosperity led to the creation of the Bank of England. A storehouse of the nation’s wealth. David Dimbleby: Seven Ages of Britain: Age of Money
The potters used to suffer from terrible diseases – partly the lead in the glaze which gave them lung disease called potters rot. ibid.
Chippendale published catalogues of his work to enable consumers to choose exactly which ornate design would look right in their homes. ibid.