Political Stability through Gradual Reform in Great Britain

In contrast to the turmoil on the continent, Great Britain appeared the ideal of liberal progress. By the 1850s, the monarchy symbolized domestic tranquility and propriety. Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) and her husband, Prince Albert, portrayed themselves as models of morality, British stability, and middle-class virtues. (See “Seeing History: Photographing the Nation: Domesticity and War.”) Britain’s parliamentary system steadily brought more men into the political process. Economic prosperity supported peaceful political reform, except that politicians did little to relieve Ireland’s continued suffering. A flexible party system helped smooth governmental decision making: the Tories evolved into the Conservatives, who favored a more status-oriented politics but still went along with the emerging liberal consensus around economic development and representative government. The Whigs became the Liberals, so named for their commitment to progress, free trade, and an active role for industrialists as well as the aristocracy. In 1867, the Conservatives, led by Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), passed the Second Reform Bill, which extended voting rights to a million more men. Disraeli proposed, like Bismarck somewhat later, that the working classes would choose “the most conservative interests in the country”—not the business ones.

Both political parties supported reforms because citizens had formed pressure groups to influence national policies. Women’s groups advocated the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which facilitated divorce, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which allowed married women to own property and keep the wages they earned. The Reform League, another pressure organization, had held mass demonstrations in London to bring about passage of the Second Reform Bill. Plush royal ceremonies united critics and activists and masked political conflict but, more important, involved all social classes. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, with their newly devised celebrations of royal marriages, anniversaries, and births, promoted the monarchy so successfully that the term Victorian came to symbolize almost the entire nineteenth century. Yet Britain’s politicians were as devoted to Realpolitik as those in Germany, Italy, or France. Their policies included the use of violence to expand their overseas empire and, increasingly, to control Ireland, where reform stopped short. This violence occurred beyond the view of most British people, however, allowing them to imagine their nation as peaceful, advanced, and united.