The Popular Will: Reformism, Radicalism, Republicanism & Unionism in Britain 1815-1960

Will we see native backlash against missionaries? I mean East India company more or less able to rule due to not involved in conversion in any major way. Will a forceful imposition of Christianity increase hindu reform movement bit early? Will Vedanta and Vivekananda more influential in long run?

Will there be more Intermarriage between natives and British?
 
Will we see native backlash against missionaries? I mean East India company more or less able to rule due to not involved in conversion in any major way. Will a forceful imposition of Christianity increase hindu reform movement bit early? Will Vedanta and Vivekananda more influential in long run?

Will there be more Intermarriage between natives and British?
The East India Company has transferred power to the Raj and the SoS for India, although this has been centralised into the Colonial Office.

I don’t imagine that it will have too much of an effect on mixed marriage, although I haven’t got that far yet, I think the only biproduct will be a slightly earlier autonomy for India. Possibly.
 
Part 4, Supplemental - Constitutional Laws
Supplemental: The Constitutional Laws, Examined

The passing of the Constitutional Laws gave us a new form of Government, one heavily inspired by previous forms and doctrines of Parliamentary politics. It is the ultimate expression of Parliamentary Sovereignty. The Executive Authority Act, States Act and the Union Act (or Parliament Act, or Act or Union, or less commonly the Reform Act), provided the constitutional makeup of the state and while individual reforms have occurred since, it’s basic structure remains unaltered. In this supplemental, we’ll examine each of the Acts and their effect on the constitution of the states.

Executive Authority Act

The Executive Authority Act, as mentioned in the previous book, was by its nature the most controversial of the Acts passed during the Grand Committee because of what it dealt with. The Grand Committee was tasked with choosing either a Republic or a Monarch - in the end it played twister with the concepts of both to contort a compromise that could allow both to feel, somewhat, at ease. It allowed a Regent with a term of office. Quite the revolutionary concept. While it’s fudge was evident, it did the job of tying up loose ends in the state and allowing all to claim victory. Section 1 meant no more United Kingdom, as the lack of a King meant that title was moribund, but did not proclaim a United Republic either - simply a ‘Union of Great Britain and Ireland’, something which could handily be converted quite easily into a Kingdom once again if everyone thought that would be a sweet idea. Section 2 & 3 gave power to a Regent who could rule until his death, but could also be removed by the expiry of his term after six years and also form the legal basis for the concept of direct rule of a state by the President-Regent. In reality, Sections 4, 5, 6 & 7 placed power in the hands of the Union Council, made up of Parliamentarians designated as Secretaries of State from either House theoretically appointed at the pleasure of the Regent and the High Chancellor, who is responsible for the courts and is established as the Speaker of the Senate. In reality, the High Chancellor notwithstanding, they were subject to the confidence and tolerance of the Houses of Parliament, balancing power to create a form, dubbed by A.V Dicey as “Presidential Monarchy” - leaving as much of the elements of the old customs and conventions of the centuries of Parliamentary rule untouched, but replacing the Monarch as an institution. “Do not turn over the stones that do need be overturned” said Henry James in referencing the transition to the Union in an essay for the National Review. Further to this, Section 8 further centralised Union Power in the hands of the Union Council giving the Regent the power to appoint all other Union Ministers only on the advice of the Union Council, in essence delegating most Government work to the Departments represented by Secretaries of State. Section 9 & 10 would prove to be the most controversial element outside of that of Section 1-3, giving the Regent the role of Supreme Commander in Chief of the Armed and Naval Forces - requiring the Armed Forces, Yeomanry and Naval Forces to swear allegiance to the Regent - and allowing the Regent to declare war, make peace, sign treaties and appoint ambassadors, with the advice of the Union Council and Parliament, further clarified in the Act of Union’s Reserved Power Section.
  1. It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Union of Great Britain and Ireland
  2. The executive power of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, its Union and its States, is vested in the Regent, and extends to the execution and maintenance of the laws of the Union and to the Presidency of the Parliament, including its convenance, dissolution and conduct and the convenance, dissolution and conduct of the Legislatures of the States.
  3. A Grand Committee of all members of the Commons House of Parliament and Senators shall be convened at the occurrence of a vacancy in the role of Regent or in the sixth year from the beginning of his appointment.
  4. There shall be an Council of the Union to advise the Regent in the Government of the Union, and the members of the Council shall be chosen and summoned by the Regent and sworn as Union Councillors, and shall hold office at his pleasure, and will also include the High Chancellor, who is appointed by the Regent.
  5. The provisions of this Act referring to the Regent in Council shall be construed as referring to the Regent acting with the advice of the Council of the Union.
  6. The Regent may appoint officers to administers such departments such as the Regent in Council may establish. They shall be the Regent's Secretary of State of the Union, and shall be members of the Council of the Union.!
  7. Of the Union Councillors, none shall hold office form more than one session of either Commons House of Parliament or Senate without becoming a Senator or Member of the Commons House of Parliament.
  8. Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the appointment and removal of all other officers of the Executive Government of the Union shall be vested in the Regent in Council, unless the appointment is delegated by the President-Regent in Council or by a law of the Parliament to some other authority.
  9. The command in chief of the naval and military forces of the Kingdom is vested in the Regent.
  10. The Regent is vested with the power to declare war and sign treaties and receive ambassadors and representatives from external Governments, acting on the advice of the Union Council and Parliament.
The Executive Authority Act is defined by its simplicity in the context of the other two Constitutional Laws, the Act of Union (or Union Act or Parliament Act) which constituted the formalities of the new Union. This Act was designed and constructed this way to do one very important thing domestically and one very important thing on a Foreign Policy stage. Domestically, it quietly and peacefully transferred Monarchical power into the hands of the Regent as quickly and painlessly as possible, which allowed the Parliamentary reforms to be treated as domestic reforms, rather than a Revolutionary Breach of Legal Continuity. In Foreign Policy, that lack of a Revolutionary Breach allowed the state to retain nominal control over its Colonies, and retain Colonial Administrators for the time being. It was building upon the tradition of constitutional reform and amending the power structures, rather than replacing them. It did not approach the matter of the Church and allowed any future Parliament to address that matter and was in that sense not a revolutionary document, like the United States Constitution, but more an intended reform built into existing legal apparatus, like the Constitutional Laws passed at a similar time in the French Third Republic or the 1871 German Constitution, which while heavily reformed, remains in place today and built new apparatus upon existing Constitutions and Legislation in an overarching state, rather than a legally specific breach of authority. These two are particularly compatible in the context of naming and titles, with the King of Prussia, although significantly less powerful today, presiding of the legislative branch (where the comparison falls short is the nature of the legislative branch overseen, as the Kaiser presides over the Bundesrat, while the Regent oversees Parliament as a whole). This is where the title of President-Regent derives from: the Regency is the Authority exercised by the Presidency of the Parliament as invested in Section 2, meaning the President is Regent, and the Regent is President.

States Act 1875

The States Act redrew the political map of the Union without redrawing the political map at all. It empowered the Regent to create new states, appoint Lord Lieutenants in the states created and to grant a Charter of Government for each, which can solely be amended, with the consent of the Regent, by the Legislatures in the State. It established reserved powers for States and generally set the division of Labour between the States and the Union that exists today. Section 1 builds upon the Executive Authority Act, defining the Union as a “binding perpetual union of the States established by the Regent composing the Great Britain & Ireland, with executive power vested in the His Excellency the Regent”. Section 2, 3 & 4 empowered the President-Regent to create the legislative apparatus for Home Government, through allowing a Charter of Government to bell created and reestablishing the concept of the Lord Lieutenant, an actor appointed at the pleasure of the Regent to conduct legislative affairs in the absence of the Regent, and took away the power of the Parliament to amend the Charters from the Union Parliament, allowing States Sovereignty in the confines of the rest of the Act, with Section 4 making special provision for the Metropolis and Cornwall, two areas that were deemed unique constituent units. Section 5-8 handles the governance of territory not granted Statehood and the provisions for the creation of new states on the sole order of the President-Regent. Sections 9 & 10 govern the financial aspects of the new states.

While the Act did not prescribe any boundaries or form any States, in reality the States proposed by the Harrison Plan were quickly adopted, and the Charters of Government would be drafted in the time between the founding of the Provisional Union Council and the first elections in 1878, with little change.

  1. The Union of Great Britain and Ireland is a binding perpetual union of the States established by the Regent composing the Great Britain & Ireland, with executive power vested in the His Excellency the Regent.
  2. It shall be lawful for the Regent to established the legislatures for any constituent unit, herein prescribed, unless specifically stated, as the States herein through the proclamation of a Charter of Government for the constituent unit, which shall be only amendable by the Legislature of the constituent unit with the authority of the Regent.
  3. For each of the States composing the Union of Great Britain & Ireland, the Regent may appoint a Lord Lieutenant, or other chief executive officer or officers for the time being appointed in his place on behalf of His Excellency shall exercise prerogatives or other executive power of the Regent the exercise and discretion of which may be delegated to him by His Excellency, in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant.
  4. In the Metropolis, executive power shall be vested in the equivalent Lord Mayor or other chief executive officer or officers for the time being appointed in his place on behalf of His Excellency shall exercise prerogatives or other executive power of the Regent the exercise and discretion of which may be delegated to him by His Excellency and in Cornwall, to be vested in the equivalent Lord Warden under the same conditions.
  5. The Parliament may establish new States, and may upon such admission or establishment impose the terms and conditions, including extent of representation in either House of the Parliament as it thinks fit.
  6. The Parliament may make laws for the government of any territory surrendered by any State to and accepted to the protection of the Union, or any additional territory under the authority of the Union, or acquired to the Union, and may allow the representation of such territory in either House of the Parliament to the extent on the terms which it thinks fit.
  7. The Parliament may with the consent of the Legislature of a State, increase, diminish or otherwise alter the limits of the State, upon such terms and conditions as may be agreed on, and may with the consent, make provision respecting the effect and operation of any increase of diminution or alteration of territory in relation to the State affected.
  8. The Parliament may decided that a new State be formed by separation of territory of a State, with the consent of the Legislature thereof, and a new State may be formed by the union of two or more States or parts of State, but only with the consent of the Legislatures affected.
  9. Such portions of the duties and revenues over which the respective Governments of the States had before the union power of appropriation as are by this Act reserved to the respective Governments or Legislatures of the States, and all duties and revenues raised by them in accordance with the special powers conferred upon them by this Act, shall in each State form one Consolidated Revenue Fund, to be appropriated for the public service of the State, with revenues appropriated with the consent of the Legislature of the State. In the event of the creation of new states, then the Consolidated Revenue Fund shall be divided into separate Consolidated Funds for each of the states in question, with a Commission, appointed by the Union Parliament, to decide the division of costs and liabilities between the new states.
  10. No money shall be drawn from the Consolidated Revenue Fund except under appropriation made by law.
Sections 11-26 form the legal concept of reserved state power. Section 11 affirms the sole right of the Regent and Legislatures, free from Union Parliament intervention, to amend and determine their Charters of Government. Sections 13, 14 & 15 built upon Section 9 & 10’s establishment of credit and financial independence of the States and allowed the sole management of credit and taxation, in addition to Section 20 of the act which sole control of licenses was given to the states along with the revenues raised by them. Section 16, 17 & 18 granted control of the Police, Education and Management of Poor Law institutions to the States while Section 19 gave the control of municipal institutions and their establishment therein to the authority of the Legislature and Regent. Sections 21, 22 & 23 are linked in that they all limit power - 21 & 22 establishing boundaries to the licensing powers of the State to “generally advantageous Public Works” to the Union Parliament, but limiting the Union Government to respect Property Rights insofar as allocating that discretion and the protection of property (including that of the aforementioned generally advantageous works) to the State. This combined with 26, forms the “protective realm” legal aspect of the state against the Union Government, protecting aspects of law of a purely local nature - enshrining a sort of subsidiarity within the confines of the reserved state power. Section 24 & 25 grant the right of States to maintain their own courts within the confines of this power.

In each State, the Legislature may exclusively make laws in relation to matters concerning the following subjects next herein-after enumerated;

  1. The amendment from time to time of the composition, with the approval of the Regent, of the Charter of Government of a State and it's election, notwithstanding the delegation of extra subjects of exclusive power to legislate over any area not strictly defined within the boundaries of this Act and not in regards to the Governor.
  2. Direct taxation within the state, in order to the raising of revenue for state purposes
  3. Borrowing of money on the sole credit of the State
  4. The establishment and tenure of state offices and the appointment and payment of state officers
  5. The management of sale and Union lands within the State
  6. Establishment, maintenance and management of police & public and reformatory prisons
  7. The establishment, maintenance and management of Poor Relief and the provision of funds for the services of poor relief therein.
  8. The establishment, maintenance and management of Educational establishments and the provision of funds for services therein.
  9. Municipal institutions and approval of letters patent to be passed onto The Regent for royal assent.
  10. Shops, saloon, tavern, auctioneer and produce licences, in order to the raising of revenue for state, county or municipal purposes
  11. Local works and undertakings other than the following classes; lines or steam or other ships, canals, telegraphs and other works and undertakings with any other or others of the States, or extending beyond the boundaries of the State, lines of steam ships between the State and any foreign country
  12. Such works as, although wholly situated within the State, are before or after their executive declared by the Parliament to be for the general advantage of the Union or the advantage of two or more of the States.
  13. Property and civil rights of the State
  14. Administration of justice in the province, including the Charter of Government, maintenance and organisation of civil and criminal courts, including procedure in civil matters in those courts. In the States of Scotland and Ireland, this extends to the maintenance of existing civil and criminal courts.
  15. The imposition of punishment, by fine, penalty or imprisonment, for enforcing any law of the State made in relations to any matter coming within any of the classes of subjects enumerated in this section.
  16. Generally, all matters of a merely local or private nature in the State.
The States Act created a more durable autonomous local power and importantly did not create differing tiers Statehood and protected their reserved power from central interference. It devolved the responsibility of the inner workings of the Government to the individual States and granted only establishing power to the Regent, not Union Government as had previously been the case. This was to prevent the disestablishment of 1867 being repeated, creating a binding perpetual Union between states, rather than a state of constituent entities that could be divided up and disestablished by the President-Regent, although that power can be prorogued or dissolved by the President-Regent through Section 2 of the Executive Authority Act and Section 37 of the Act of Union, which establishes Direct Rule. Those scholars in Irish History will know what I mean. Altogether, along with the corresponding Sections of the Act of Union, form the basis of the legal rationale for federalism in the Union, and remain an important construct for the division of power in the country today.

Act of Union, Union Act or Parliament Act or Reform Act

The Act of Union (or Union Act, or Parliament Act or Reform Act) consists the final part of the Constitutional Laws of 1874 to actually establish Government Institutions. It reformed the Union Parliament to eliminate aristocratic input in the process, and established a purely civilian and democratically controlled Government, replacing Aristocratic power with State Power in the Legislative Process. The introductory Sections 1 & 2 vested in the Union Parliament consisting of a Presidency & Regent of the Parliament, the Senate and a Commons House of Parliament and stipulates the need for annual sessions.

  1. The legislative power of the Union shall be vested in a Union Parliament, which shall consist of the Presidency & Regent, the Senate, and a Commons House of Parliament, and which is herein-after called "The Parliament"
  2. There shall be a session of the Parliament once at least in every year, so that twelve months shall not intervene between the last sitting of the Parliament in one session and its first sitting in the next session
Part 1 of the Act concerns the Senate as a body of Senators appointed for each of the constituent States of the Union as individual constituent units, as clarified in Section 3 of the Act. Section 4 provides the limitations of constituent unit’s membership, at least two each (to provide the necessary rotation), no more than fourteen and no more than members per State represented in the Commons but in Section 5 allows that this can be changed for an individual State as long as it adheres to Section 4. Sections 6, 7 & 8 constitute procedural functions of the selection of Senators and their qualification therein, including the method of division for Senators in the first term whose selection would be limited to maintain a rotation. Section 9 creates the stipulation that the failure of a State to select its Senators constitutes an incomplete or impartial Senate which prohibits it from attending to its business, but Section 10 & 11 compels the Lieutenant of a State to issue writs for appointment in the event of a dissolution and allows casual vacancies to be proposed by the Lieutenant which combined with Section 6, allowed the Lieutenant to protest decisions through the non certification of Senators, which occurred prominently in the 1885 Ulster Crisis. Section 12 creates the stipulations of nomination of Senators, and creates an internal nominating procedure for the States. Sections 13-17 stipulate basic procedure, the most important being Section 17 which stipulates the quorum of a third of Senators.

Part 1 - The Senate

  1. The Senate shall be composed of senators for each of the constituent States of the Union, until Parliament provides otherwise as one constituent unit.
  2. Until the Parliament otherwise provides, there shall be at least two Senators for each state, and no more than fourteen for any one State, with no State holding more Senators than it has members of the Commons House of Parliament.
  3. The Parliament may make laws increasing or diminishing the number of senators for each State.
  4. The senators shall be chosen for a term of six years, and the names of senators chosen for each State shall be certified by the Governors to the Regent
  5. After each first meeting of the Senate following a dissolution thereof, the Senate shall divide into two classes of equal number. After three years, the places of the senators of the first class shall become vacant, and the places in the second class shall become vacant in the sixth year. For the purposes of this section, the term of a senator shall be taken to begin at the first meeting of the Senate.
  6. The Parliament may make laws prescribing the method of choosing senators, but so that the method shall be uniform for all the States. Subject to any such law, the Legislature of each State may make laws prescribing the method of choosing the senators for that State. The Parliament of a State may make laws for determining the times and places of appointment of senators for the State.
  7. The Senate may proceed to the despatch of business, notwithstanding the failure of any State to provide for its representation in the Senate.
  8. The Lieutenant of any State may cause writs to be issued for appointment of senators for the State. In ease of the dissolution of the Senate the writs shall be issued within ten days from the proclamation of such dissolution.
  9. The Lieutenant of any State may appoint casual vacancies of senators whose term will expire with the class of the nearest available election.
  10. The qualifications for senators are to be of 21-years of age, a resident in the State and nominated by either the Lieutenant of the State, a member of the legislature of the State or a member of Parliament, or have previously served a full term with any of the aforementioned bodies and officers of the Union. Sitting senators will automatically qualify for election, and for the purposes of the first election, nominations by Governors of the State, members of the Provincial Order, Lord Senators or Members of Commons House of Parliament or having served a previous term of the aforementioned bodies will be sufficient qualification.
  11. The Senate shall before proceeding to any other business first choose a senator to be the President of the Senate, and as the office becomes vacant shall choose again a senator to be President. The President shall cease to hold his office if he ceases to be a senator.
  12. The President of the Senate may be removed be a majority vote of senators, by resigning his office or his seat by writing addressed to the President-Regent.
  13. Before or during an absence, The Senate may choose a deputy to preside in the absence of the President
  14. Questions arising in the Senate shall be settled by a majority of votes, with each member having one vote, including the President, who may vote in the negative in the event of a tie.
  15. The Senate may present a quorum only when a third of members shall be present
Part 2 pertains to the Commons, and establishes the number of Members to be apportioned in accordance with the populations of the States, in accordance with universal suffrage and finally establishes the nexus, designed to keep the apportionment in check of Commons Members and Senators, of the Commons being as close as practically possibly, double the number of Senators to ensure the voting power in the Grand Committee is not too skewed to the Senate. Attempts the break the nexus in accordance with Section 21, in 1936 and 1974, by Unionists proposing to decrease the influence of State Governments in the Grand Committee, failed. Section 20 both compels the Union to conduct a Census, as in the Parliament Act 1832, to apportion seats to the Commons and to compel States to compile a regular registrar of voters, each year updating their records. Section 23 establishes the need of a subject to be 21-years-old and above to attain candidacy, but places no other bars to candidacy, removing the seizure of candidature of the old Parliament, while Sections 24-28 consist of similar procedural rules to Sections 13-17 concerning the Senate, with Section 27, proscribing all appropriation bills originate in the Commons, the most important, with the nexus, in determining the Commons’ slight superiority over the Senate.

Part 2 - The Commons House of Parliament

  1. The Commons House of Parliament shall be comprised of members chosen directly by the people on the basis of universal suffrage and the numbers of members should be as close as possible to twice the number of senators.
  2. The members should be divided among the States in accordance to their population, and should be reapportioned every ten years using the latest census of the Union and States should compile a registrar of voters each year.
  3. The Parliament may make laws increasing or diminishing the number of members of the Commons House of Parliament.
  4. Whenever a vacancy occurs in the Commons House of Parliament, the Regent-in-Council may issue writs for the election of a new member.
  5. The qualifications for members are to be of 21-years of age, a subject of the Union.
  6. The Commons House of Parliament shall before proceeding to any other business first choose a member to be the Speaker of the House, and as the office becomes vacant shall choose again a member to be Speaker. The Speaker shall cease to hold his office if he ceases to be a member of the house.
  7. Before or during an absence, the Commons House of Parliament may choose a deputy to preside in the absence of a Speaker.
  8. A member may by writing addressed to the Speaker, or to the Regent if there is no Speaker or if the Speaker is absent from the Union, resign his place, which thereupon shall become vacant. If a member is vacant for two successive sessions, his place shall become vacant.
  9. All Bills appropriating money or imposing taxation should originate from the Commons House of Parliament
  10. Questions arising in the Commons House of Parliament shall be settled by a majority of votes, with each member having one vote, including the Speaker, who shall have the casting vote in the event of a tie.
Part 3 concerns three elements; disqualification from the either House, the Standing Orders and self regulation of the Houses of Parliament and the conditions that can arise as a result of disagreement between the Houses in the form of the calling of a Grand Committee to settle disputes.

Part 3 - Both Houses of Parliament

  1. Every senator and every member of the Commons House of Parliament shall before taking his seat make and subscribe before the Regent, or some person authorised by him, an oath or affirmation of allegiance in the form set forth by the Parliament.
  2. A member of either House of the Parliament shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a member of the other House.
  3. Any person who Is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power: or Is attainted of treason, or has been convicted and is under sentence, or subject to be sentenced, for any offence punishable under the law of the Union or of a State by imprisonment for one year or longer : or Is an undischarged bankrupt or insolvent: or shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the Commons House of Parliament.
  4. Until the Parliament otherwise provides, any question respecting the qualification of a senator or of a member of the Commons House of Parliament, or respecting a vacancy in either House of the Parliament, and any question of a disputed election to either House, shall be determined by the House in which the question arises.
  5. Each House of the Parliament may make rules and orders with respect to the mode in which its powers can be exercised and upheld and the order and conduct of its business and proceeding either separately or jointly with the other House.
  6. If any Bill or any provision of a Bill adopted by the Commons House of Parliament is lost by the disagreement of the Senate and after a dissolution, or a period of two years from such disagreement, such Bill or a Bill for enacting the said provisions is again adopted by the Commons House of Parliament and falls within three months afterwards to be adopted by the Senate, the same shall forthwith be submitted to the members of the two Houses deliberating and voting together thereon, and shall be adopted or rejected according to the decision of the majority of the members present and voting on the question.
Part 4 determined the legal construct of Reserved Union Power, including the power of the Parliament to legislate on the future of the Union in Section 35 (which would be the main bugbear of Irish Separatists after the Quiet Revolution), making of peace and war in accordance the Executive Authority Act, the declaration of martial law and states of emergency and siege (again, of particular note to Ireland) Section 37, the control, supply and building of armed forces of militia within the confines of the Executive Authority Act in Section 38 & 39, and a surrounding package of controls over important infrastructure, held in check with Section 23 & 26 of the States Act. It also protected weights and measures, trade marks and the endowment or establishment of religion, which would come to dominate the lead up to and aftermath of the Oath Crisis. Section 48 established the principle of Shared Reservation, where an element of legislation of the States would be in statute until a corresponding piece of Union Legislation was passed which contradicted it, ultimately giving jurisdiction over all powers not explicitly mentioned in Part 2 of the States Act to the Union, unless it chose not to legislate on the matter. Finally Part 5 mandated a free and equal economic Union between the states, controlled the revenues of the Parliament and its appropriation of those revenues and ensured that the Union could not disadvantage any constituent unit economically.

Part 4 - Exclusive Powers of the Parliament

  1. The Union, or the succession of the Union, or Regency, or any representative Lieutenant of State of the Union.
  2. The making of peace or war or matters arising from the state of war, or the regulation of the conduct of any portion of His Excellency's subjects during the existence of hostilities between foreign states with which His Excellency is at peace, in respect of such hostilities.
  3. The declaration of martial law and states of emergency and siege.
  4. Navy, army, militia, volunteers, and any other military forces, or the defence of the realm, or forts, permanent military camps, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings or the erection thereof.
  5. Authorising either the carrying or using of arms for military purposes for military purposes, or the formations of associations for drill and practice in the use of arms for military purposes
  6. Treaties or any relations with foreign States, or the relations between different parts of His Excellency's Dominions.
  7. Dignitaries and titles of honour
  8. Treason, treason-felony, alienage, aliens as such and naturalisation
  9. Trade, quarantine, navigation, merchant shipping (except in respect to inland waters, local health and harbour regulations)
  10. Lighthouses, buoys and beacons
  11. Coinage, legal tender and standard weights and measures
  12. Trade marks, design, merchandise marks, copyright and patent rights.
  13. The establishment or endowment of religion, whether directly or indirectly or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
  14. Any authority not granted to the Union can be legislated on by each of the individual States unless such legislation contradicts legislation passed by the Parliament.

Part 5 - Finance & Trade

  1. No money shall be drawn from the Consolidated Revenue Fund except under appropriation made by law.
  2. When any department of the public service of the States & Metropolis becomes transferred to the Union, all officers of the department shall become subject to the control of the Executive Government of the Union. Any such officer who is not retained in the service of the Union shall, unless he is appointed to some other office of equal emolument in the public service of the State, be entitled to receive from the State any pension, gratuity or other compensation payable under the law of the State on the abolition of his office.
  3. Collection and control of duties of customs and of excise, and the control of the payment of bounties, shall pass to the Executive Government of the Union.
  4. Uniform duties of customs shall be imposed across the Union.
  5. On the imposition of uniform duties of customs the power of the Parliament to impose duties of customs and of excise, and to grant bounties on the production or export of goods, shall become exclusive. No legislature shall pass a law of the several States imposing duties of customs or of excise, or offering bounties on the production or export of goods.
  6. The Parliament may provide, on such basis as it deems fair, for the monthly payment to the several States of all surplus revenue of the Union.
  7. The Parliament may grant financial assistance to any State on such terms and conditions as the Parliament thinks fit.
  8. Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the laws in force in any State which has become or becomes a State with respect to the receipt of revenue and the expenditure of money on account of the Government of the State, and the review and audit of such receipt and expenditure, shall apply to the receipt of revenue and the expenditure of money on account of the Union in the Slate in the same manner as if the Union, or the Government or an officer of the Union, were mentioned whenever the State, or the Government or an officer of the State, is mentioned.
  9. The Parliament shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, or revenue, give preference to one State or any part thereof over another State or any part thereof.
  10. The Parliament shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation.
  11. The Regent shall from time to time appoint a Council, upon the imposition of such powers of adjudication and administration as the Parliament deems necessary for the execution and maintenance, within the Union, of the provisions of this Constitution relating to trade and commerce, and of all laws made thereunder.
  12. The Parliament may take over from the States their public debts as existing at the establishment of the Union, or a proportion thereof according to the respective numbers of their people as shown by the latest statistics of the Union, and may convert, renew, or consolidate such debts, or any part thereof; and the States shall indemnify the Union in respect of the debts taken over, and thereafter the interest payable in respect of the debts shall be deducted and retained from the portions of the surplus revenue of the Union payable to the several States, or if such surplus is insufficient, or if there is no surplus, then the deficiency or the whole amount shall be paid by the several States.

The Union Act was the most significant expression of radicalism in the Constitutional Laws, creating a new legislature designed to improve and streamline the legislative process. It’s enactment was the least controversial among Radicals, who wished to rid the legislative process of aristocracy and replace it with an experienced, managerial approach to legislation - an almost Peelite view of the legislature. It was the most important piece of legislation until the passage of the Act of Constitution bound it, the State and Executive Authority Act as well as a number of statutes, Orders-in-Council and Standing Orders into the ‘protected law’, Britain’s last Constitutional Reform to protect the Constitutional Laws from acts of constitutional vandalism and from the ability of Parliament to override Human Rights. While Constitutional Law remains a hotly debated topic, many reforms have been made to these laws as have been discussed here - some will be within the confines of this book - the establishment of principles set out in these three pieces of statute provide the basis of the Constitution of the Union of Britain, and understanding them as they were passed allows you and I to view the actions of the Provisional Parliament in the context of the strict constructional, and pragmatic divide that Unionism straddled in its attempts to build “the great civilisation”, as Chamberlain often mooted and take the model of Unionism to the world stage through his Federalisation plan. Many of these laws and the interpretation therein have had great impacts on the society we live in. Many important laws would come, a significant amount passed by the Provisional Union Council headed by Gladstone and Chamberlain, a number by Disraeli and a number by Chamberlain in his Unionist Ministry, but the ethos of the laws have been scarcely challenged. Did the Grand Committee solve the Constitutional Question? Not ubiquitously, but it provides the mainframe for solutions to come. That, in itself, is the reason the Union would survive the short-term crisis, and long-term opportunity that lay ahead of it.
 
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We’ll be looking at the issue of the Church next, then we’ll look at State and Colonial Governance. @souvikkundu25140017, I appreciate your patience, you’ll get your answers soon but it’ll take the form of an outline that will allow for further discussion later in the book.
Hope the rest of you are enjoying it!
 
Part 4, Chapter III
IV, III: The Church Schism

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Archibald Tait, Archbishop and first patriarch of the Church of England post-Union

While Nationals and Radicals, Liberals and Conservatives and Democrats and Monarchists formed the formal divisions in politics in the Union, pre and post Constitutional Laws, the highest division in British Life was Religion. Chamberlain, a Unitarian, was the first non conformist Prime Minister since the emergence of the role and this was not lost on Conservative and Anglican Society. The influence of the non conformists on the drafting and passing of the laws was significant, even if a deeply religious and Anglican Chairman-Regent, Gladstone, was at the new regimes head. The Executive Authority Act specifically avoided the topic of religion and the established Churches in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland to kick the can down the road, but the passing of the laws and the removal of Church of England officials from the legislative process brought the can right back to Chamberlain and Gladstone’s feet.

The principle that all governance afforded to the Crown now in perpetuity passed to the Regent, and therefore the Presidency of Parliament, was such a controversial thing that it was hoped by many would not pertain to a permanent solution. The Church in Wales was moribund as an effective religious authority for the state from the moment the 1861 Census revealed that 80% were nonconformist, and the Church of Ireland was a hated institution that subjected Irishmen to tithes against the majority Catholic population. Various private attempts to draft and pass legislation to disestablish the Churches in these states had failed, due in a large part to the efforts of the Queen’s Party and the Lords Spiritual in the Senate - but the removal of both of these influences from the Senate opened the door, it was hoped, to finally achieving the disestablishment of at least these two organs of State Religious power. Liberal ideals had long asserted the need for separation of religion and state, after all. This assertion put Chamberlain and Gladstone, as ideological leaders of the new Union, in a bind for differing reasons. Chamberlain, as the aforementioned Unitarian, did not believe he could command the support of the Commons to legislate on a church to which he did not adhere. He relied then on Gladstone, who didn’t want to let go of the political influence of the Church, and wanted to first make appointments securing its future and protecting various wings from persecution by others in the Church of England. He saw his intervention as welcome and needed to prevent the Church of England to descend into a schism from which it would not be able to overcome. In the end, this is exactly what would happen.

Gladstone soon made the decision for Chamberlain, resisted the urge to disestablish the Church for now and met with Archbishop Tait, the Archbishop of Canterbury, soon after his ascension to his Presidential Regency, to discuss his intention to continue the Union Government’s intervention into the Church. Tait was initially warm to the intervention, but they differed in their intentions on the main ideological break within the Church - so called “Anglo-Catholicism”. Tait was ostensibly a liberal, and while he did not support the formation of the Union (or more specifically the abdication of the Monarchy), he did understand the reasons behind it and was willing to work with the new Government, so wanted to come to accord with the new regime to protect the Church of England, and the over 9,000,000 followers of the faith in England and Wales. Anglo-Catholicism was the split waiting to happen within the Church, with the increasing muscle of the Church of England over the final years of the Monarchy leading to a prominent Anglican Archdeacon of Chichester, Henry Edward Manning, defecting to the Catholic Church to become Primate of England and Wales. The difference in doctrine were prominent and Tait wanted to eliminate and unite these factions into a Protestant Doctrine, free from perceived influence of the Pope. This split was between the High Church and Low Church, essentially between those who held onto the Catholic traditions, and the Low Church who held further to the Protestant, evangelical traditions. These High Church followers believed in the branch theory - that the one church was divided between the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant “branches”. Low Church believed, to put it simply and to under appreciate the minutiae of the issue, that this was not true and the Church of England belonged to the family of Protestant Churches. This was not a new conflict, and defections to the Catholic Church including John Henry Newman’s in 1841 had been a prominent part of the ideological debates within the established Church.

Tait wanted to put the Low Church firmly in control and repel the Church Union, a key Anglo-Catholic institution, by asserting the Churches right to punish those who deviated from approved doctrine, and had intended to introduce a Bill, the Public Worship Regulation Bill, as a private member before the dissolution of Parliament and the formation of the Grand Committee. When he read the Constitutional Laws, he assumed that he would retain his right as Archbishop to use the President-Regent to enact this law. Gladstone and Chamberlain were both hostile to this Bill, and refused to sponsor it before Parliament, so Tait used the Conservative leader, Disraeli, to submit a Private Members Bill, written by Tait soon after the disagreement. Gladstone was furious and the Bill died in the Provisional Parliament soon after, being roundly defeated in the Commons in December 1875, just a month after Gladstone’s ascension, before a second attempt by a Conservative Lord Senator in the Provisional Senate saw it defeated again in February 1876. Gladstone used this scandal of sorts to pressure Tait into resigning, and threatened to use the Executive Authority Act to get his way. He didn’t believe that liturgy should be within the extent of Parliament, and freedom of religion should be an intrinsic freedom of the new state but nevertheless believed that his influence should be taken into account on measures of the church. Tait and Gladstone finally came to an agreement in March, with Tait agreeing to withdraw his support for the Bill. Nevertheless, he still retained the support of the Loyalists and Conservatives, who equally believed that Gladstone through his action had intervened in the Religious Matter unwarranted. Instead of legislating, Tait invested his time into the founding of the Church Association, a counterweight to the Church Union of High Anglicans, which proved to be a casus belli for the two warring factions. As part of the agreement, Gladstone allocated Union funds to develop the Association, which in turn led boycotts of ‘ritualistic’ High Churches and protests between the two groups, some of which turned violent when Arthur Tooth, an Anglo-Catholic priest, was murdered on Christmas Eve 1875 by an armed gang of Ultra Loyalists. Loyalist Groups attached themselves to the organisation and began to act as unofficial foot soldiers for the creeping Papal influence on liturgy, despite the two organisations (Church Union and Papacy) being completely separate. Tait proclaimed that the killings were abhorrent and that those responsible were not responsible to his Church or to god at all.

The Church Union responded with public pressure and support for acts that disestablished the Church, to remove Union influence from the matter of religious pluralism. The High Church also received support from across nonconformism and from Catholics within the Union, who hoped that the High-Low schism would allow the rapprochement between the Anglo-Catholics and the Holy See. Manning made a personal appeal for the High Church to come into the Catholic fold and while the independence of the High Church wasn’t in question, good relations continued therein. Gladstone finally attempted to settle the influence question totally by agreeing with Tait to devolve responsibility for Church matters to the Lords Spiritual, who would convene each year in a new body, the General Synod, that would select new Bishops and manage church affairs, in exchange for not curbing pluralism within the Church. While this was acceptable for most congregations and most of the Lords Spiritual (even Disraeli regarded the compromise as fair), both the High Church and the evangelical Low Church were unsatisfied with their protections, with the Low Church especially uninterested. This was because of their attachment to the Loyalist Movement, and their support for the King. When the General Synod appointed new Bishops in May 1876, these Low Churches gathered in a separate Synod, refused to accept the General Synod’s authority and proclaimed their allegiance to the King, bringing a not unsubstantial 1,000,000 members with them - forming what they called the Legitimate Church of England, or COE-L. These congregations led an oath of allegiance to the King in their services on Sunday 11th June and refused to accept the authority of the new appointments made by the Synod and only appointments made by the King. Soon after, Churches and congregations affiliated with the Church Union similarly split off in the week after’s service to disaffiliate with the Synod and respect the Authority of the Church Union, under the leadership of Edward Bouverie Pusey. This Union Church declared its affiliation to the “one, holy, Catholic and apostolic” church, similar to the Catholic creed with Pusey calling on Gladstone to disestablish the Church to prevent “the unfair persecution of the so called ritualistic”. Great work for not causing a schism, Will.

The remaining congregations accepted the the General Synod and Archbishop Tait’s governance of the Church, and signed a concordat with the Union Government to recognise themselves as the Established Church or Continuity Church of England (COE-C), but this ‘compromise’ satisfied no one. The Union Church was discontented with the privileged position of the Church of England, the Legitimist Church discontented with the privileged position to what was in their eyes an illegitimate Church. The COE-C wasn’t happy either, as it had lost nearly 4,700,000 members, and for the first time was a minority religion in the Union. Finally, the nonconformists and Catholics weren’t happy as Gladstone had broken the doctrine of disestablishment, even in Wales and Ireland. Scotland was just about the only element in the country where there lacked discontentment on Religion, as the Church of Scotland signed a concordat fairly quickly and quietly which transferred the governance to a similar body to the Lords Spiritual. The split created the fault lines between those who would accept the Union, and those who wouldn’t, as the link between the COE-L and the Loyalist Movement grew stronger and stronger over time. These Loyalists were in the military, in the Civil Service and in State Government, and now were actively hostile to the state. It had an upside, however.

The concordat settled the religious question for the group of Abstentionists who were more moderate and pragmatic. Disraeli called upon those “of good faith and good conscience” to rejoin the Parliamentary process. They did. 67 MPs and a further 25 Lord Senators returned to the Provisional Senate, but the complete split between the Legitimists and Continuity COE congregations was complete, and this was formalised with the intervention of the King, who sent a letter to the National Review from his vacation home in France in which he denounced Gladstone and Disraeli, the returning MPs and Senators, Archbishop Tait and the Continuity Church as well as the Union Church as traitors. The people voted with their feet - within 2 months, attendances at Legitimist Churches doubled, leaving the Continuity Church in further minority and roughly half the whole nonconformist churches in total. At this stage, Disraeli still regarded himself, and the new influx of Parliamentarians as provisionalists, or those who supported the rule of law but wishing to bring the Crown back to the Head of State and the Church, believing that it would be the deciding factor in bringing together the two warring factions, accepting that the Anglo-Catholics would never be reconciled. This split between the provisionalists and totalists would be the divide between those Continuity Church members who supported Gladstone, and those who supported Disraeli. Those who believed the Regency was a temporary measure, and those who believed it was the permanent solution.
 
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Part 4, Chapter IV
IV, IV: Fawcett’s Colonial Tour, 1875-1877

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Henry Fawcett, Colonial Secretary of the Union

One of Joseph Chamberlain’s pet peeves was the haphazard and informal nature of British rule in its colonial holdings. In the context of the Union, this problem became significantly more acute and required the Colonial Office to become a key ally in the formation of the new state. Colonial Secretary Henry Fawcett was therefore appointed due to his energy and reforming spirit his first task was to conduct a review of the administrations of colonial governance and make recommendations for their better functioning. Fawcett and his aides (he was blinded at 25 in a shooting accident and required assistance in travelling) was tasked in late 1875 in spending around eighteen months making trips around the Colonies and reporting back in the loyalty, efficiency and overall function of the Colonial Administrators, starting on a tour of the holdings in North America, before travelling down to Guiana, across to Australasia, through Hong Kong and finally joining up with the Minister of State for India, Senator George Campbell for a trip to Aden, Burma and India to investigate the work of the Indian Office and finally visiting the African colonies and possessions. Campbell was a monarchist, of that there is no doubt, but he was able to set aside this and advance his career with his strong association and friendship with Gladstone. Chamberlain however was sceptical and believed that he should be assisted by a proven Radical to sure up the loyalty of Britain’s prized colonial possession.

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Senator George Campbell, Minister of State for

Gladstone assured Chamberlain of his loyalty and stressed the need for experience in the role, but Chamberlain’s needs were met with the rest of the Indian Office, whom he staffed with loyalists within his faction of the Democratic Federation, including the former Conservative and Provincialist, George Sclater-Booth as Undersecretary of State for the Colonial Office under Senator Campbell. Sclater-Booth, a converted supporter of the Constitutional Laws after working on the Local Government Board, conceived the policy of “Colonial Lustration” with Chamberlain which ended in his appointment to the Colonial Office. Colonial Lustration involved the effective banishing of Conservative and Monarchist elements within the British Political Sphere by partnering and hampering them with Radicals as essentially powerless Colonial Governors, which Chamberlain and Sclater-Booth believed would achieve two things: sending the opposition far away and wrapping them up in internal debates with Radicals and to aid the calls from Colonies to devolve more power to the Colonial Parliaments, which would, he hoped, generate more loyalty and revenue. Chamberlain and Gladstone both understood the need to secure the loyalty of the Colonies for their economic benefit and also knew their administration was haphazard at best. Gladstone instructed that a Colonial Administration Act would need to be passed to reconstitute many of the roles that the Monarch had appointed and many of the people who served under her pleasure. The trip from Granville and Fawcett was designed to co-opt local support, secure the Empire and ensure that no exile or vassal regimes would be established.

Arriving first in Canada, Granville and Fawcett spoke to Canadian Prime Minister, Alexander Mackenzie and Lord Dufferin, the Governor-General. Dufferin was popular with Victoria and equally popular in Liberal circles and was regarded as a competent administrator who had recently intervened in a scandal that caused the fall of a Conservative-led Government after a court found them guilty of financial impropriety, in the Pacific Scandal. He had enriched and established many institutions, and was regarded well by both French and English speaking subjects alike. After a few days, Fawcett wrote to Chamberlain and said “Dufferin is warm, intelligent and kind-hearted and has shown the benefit and poise to retain his role within the Union in service of his motherland”. The passing of Victoria and establishment of the Regency had left the Governor-General in somewhat of a nervous position, however, with John MacDonald, the opposition leader, wishing to replace him and call on the abdicated Monarch to become King of Canada. For fear of imminent invasion by the United States, Dufferin had seen the rapid expansion of his guards to protect against Internal and External threats and had notably been targeted by Irish Immigrants who formed bands of militias to raid York and areas of the border between Ontario and the US border. While US President Hayes indicated no support for the annexation of territory, several Democrats revived the concept of Manifest Destiny to incorporate the Canadian Provinces into the United States after Victoria’s death. Dufferin, therefore, required and desired the support of the Union to maintain the Colony’s independence. Fawcett agreed on the instruction of Gladstone that Canadian Administrative Independence would be strengthened and, wishing to prevent the loss of territory in North America, that the British would defend Canada’s Government from attacks from the US, and would send troops and payment to raise local forces which would be under the command of Dufferin. This secured the loyalty of the Canadian Government, and Dufferin and Mackenzie presented a Union Act to the Parliament of Canada, which secured support in 1876 to the Union of Britain and recognised the President-Regent in perpetuity as their Head of State.

Guiana was the next stop, and Guiana represented the haphazard nature of the British Imperial Administration pre-Union. It was ruled by a Legislative Council or Council of Elders, which selected a Financial Representative and was an overhang from the Dutch administration of the province under the Batavian Republic. After the abolition of slavery, the economy of the colony shifted from the Slave trade to the Sugar trade. Sir Robert Longden, the Governor was extensively experienced but had reservations about the delegation and the Union, being an avowed Monarchist and a loyalist. He was, however, if nothing else, a pragmatist and felt that he could swap his loyalty for a better post - wishing to progress to India. Luckily for Chamberlain, after the dispatch revealed this, Sclater-Booth identified Langdon as the perfect candidate for his Colonial Lustration program and promised him commission with the Indian Office and proposed that he was sent to Ceylon to secure his loyalty. Longden agreed and passed a resolution through the Legislative Council that the Colony would remain in British hands. This did not reveal the whole truth, however as a week into Fawcett and Granville’s stay in South America, Venezuelan forces invaded to assert their dominance over the Essequibo region, an area they had claimed control over for many years. Parliament was informed of the incursion on 22nd April 1876 with Undersecretary of State for the Foreign Office, the Liberal Henry Fowler, with a Statement written by Granville to the House of Commons. Both the Commons and the Senate approved the dispatch of troops to the region, and after a short border war the British Army and a Naval detachment supporting them, the British troops, allied with locals, had pushed the Venezuelans to well beyond the Orinoco River, which incited outrage by the other South American states and also by the United States, who claimed the incursion had violated the Monroe Doctrine. After staying near the site of the battle for 3 months, delaying the trip, Granville travelled to Washington and calmed tensions which Gladstone felt may incur the wrath of a US invasion of Guyana to incorporate it into Venezuela and settled the dispute to hand over the gained territory in exchange for the recognition of the Schomburgk Line, a dividing line between the two states that had been set in the 1840s. The press in Britain sent correspondents and illustrators to the conflict and Granville’s stature was greatly enhanced by the harrowing accounts of tropical warfare in the name of the Union, and Britain had avoided the indignity of losing to the South American forces within their first few years of existence. Venezuela was one of many countries that would attempt to take advantage of the perceived instability, but the growing unity between the colonies at outside threats, especially those of fellow Imperialist Democracy France, meant that the further sections of the trip saw Granville and Fawcett significantly more welcome than anticipated.

Many of the colonies feared expulsion due to the supposed weakness of Britain, but as news of the conflict in Venezuela spread, it reassured many that Britain would continue to stay in control of its colonies. Granville was recalled after the conflict to speak to the Senate, and Fawcett was joined by Sclater-Booth for the remainder of the trip as Minister Plenipotentiary, representing the President-Regent and the Union. After visiting Australia, Fiji and New Zealand first, he witnessed the effect on the colonies of the technology that was underpinning the Empire: telegraphy. Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales had spoken to Fawcett about the transformative effect that Railways and Telegraphy had in uniting the disparate elements of the Polynesian holdings of the British Empire, and spoke of his concept of a Union between the Colonies under a single Governor-General. This proposed Federal Council was built on the experience of Canada, the United States and the small matter of the Constitutional Laws which had transformed the Union into a Federal State. Parkes had an outsized effect on Fawcett and Sclater-Booth, who were swayed by the growing sense of Australian Nationalism that was different from the Nationalism developing in Britain. A joint communication from the delegation first introduced Chamberlain to the term ‘federalisation’ as a method of reorganising the Colonies into more manageable series of units. Having visited Perth, Melbourne and Wellington, they set sail for India to complete the penultimate leg of the trip.

Dufferin met with them and Senator Campbell as they arrived in Ceylon, an independent Colony separate from the British Raj, the ruling entity of the subcontinent since the end of the East India Company’s rule at the end of the Sepoy Rebellion. The reforms had seen the establishment of the Indian Civil Service, which brought Indians into the administration of the Colony and its economic exploits. The Raj brought together two elements: the direct-ruled Raj and the subsidiary alliances called the Princely states, which were ruled by coopted into the British sphere of influence. British reforms after the Rebellion had focused on three elements: a greater communication and camaraderie between Britons and Indians, rewarding the states that remained loyal and punish elements (especially peasants) who had joined the rebellion and thirdly to slow the pace of social change in India for fear of inciting hatred against the British colonial administrators. The latter two influenced the policy of the slowing of land reform to punish peasants in the states that had allied with the rebellion and all major land reforms ceased.

India however had changed since the rebellion of 1857. A growing middle-class had emerged since the introduction of natives in the Indian Civil Service, who had been, although thinly spread, grown in confidence since the 1867 Confederation of Canada and the Constitutional Laws, as well as the perception that the new Union would be more amiable to the concerns of Indian Self-Rule. In 1867, Dadabhai Naoroji had founded the East India Association, which aimed to put this point of view in front of the British Public. He found an ear of many within the left of the Democratic Federation, including Charles Dilke, who met Naoroji after the 1871 Election. Naoroji returned in 1873 and became Prime Minister of Baroda, where he instituted reforms. A desire for self-rule found influence within the Democratic Federation, who felt self-rule would be key to reducing costs in the Empire and guaranteeing stability. The Union Council except for Dilke was unequivocally opposed to Indian Self-Rule, however, and felt that the country was not ready for the reforms that had been brought to the Union in the previous years. Despite that, as a Prime Minister of the state, Naoroji met with Fawcett and Sclater-Booth and spoke to the delegation about the desire amongst Indians for reforms to the administration. Naoroji and an academic, Anandamohan Bose as well as one of the early English knowing Indians, Shib Chandra Deb, wrote a series of essays in 1876 demanding the same reforms for Indians as the Britons had enjoyed: universal suffrage, a federal Indian state under the protection of the Empire and civil rights. Bose went further and called for the Union to end child marriages and introduce social reforms. These essays became known as the Indian National Decrees and would form the basis of the movement for Indian Self-Rule in the form of the Indian National Congress, which would form later. For now, Senator Campbell brought the Union Delegation to meet the ex-Viceroy, Thomas Baring, who wished to retain his role. He felt his job was not complete in India, believed that the Monarchy would be restored in due course and wanted to continue the reforms that he had begun. Campbell however disagreed. Baring had urged Campbell and Fawcett to conclude the discussions that had been ongoing with the Emir of Afghanistan, which Campbell responded should wait until their meeting. At the meeting, Campbell shouted down Baring, and Fawcett wrote to Chamberlain to indicate that out of the two, he had been more convinced by Baring who, it was felt, had a greater grasp of the situation on the ground and that discussions with the Amir should continue. Chamberlain privately asked Granville his opinion on removing Senator Campbell, but he insisted he was the right man for the job. Gladstone then intervened that Campbell, a close personal ally of both Gladstone and Granville, should remain and ordered Chamberlain to remove Baring from his role as Governor-General, much to the dismay of the moderate Democrats who considered the work of Baring to be legitimate and were growing discontented with the rumours of Government interference from Gladstone.

Finally, the delegation arrived in the African colonies and saw that the acute problem of the perceived weakening of the Colonial hold by the Union was most acute in Africa. Touring Egypt (occupied by the British), Gambia, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the South of Africa, they found haphazard, weak governance mainly at the whim of the individuals involved. The Governor of the Gold Coast, George Strahan, was an aide-de-camp to Gladstone when he served briefly as High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands before he became Chief Secretary of Northumbria. Gladstone had been communicating with Strahan and he had expressed his concern at a growing number of incursions by the French Colonial Forces along the coastline. Intelligence revealed that in seeking to reestablish their pride after the Franco-Prussian War, French President Patrice MacMahon had identified the Union and its empire as a potential weakness and seen the British Gold Coast, in cahoots with the Ashanti Empire as a potential vehicle for expansion at the expense of the British. The British had expanded at the expense of the Dutch themselves and only gained nominal control after a purchase, which had disturbed the peace between the colonial administrators and locals and combined with the instability of the British Empire over the Grand Committee, and the Ashanti were approached by the French Colonial Minister, Louis de Montaignac de Chauvance, about a political alliance to expel the British from the Gold Coast entirely. Preparations for this were made between 1875 and 1876 and when Fawcett and Sclater-Booth arrived into the Winter, nominal incursions had increased many times over, attempting to lure the Colonial Administrators into a war. As Plenipotentiary, Sclater-Booth was tasked with finding a solution, so guaranteed that the Colony would be defended by the already stretched Army.

Another point of conflict was the British Gambia Colony & Protectorate, nominally under the control of the Sierra Leone Company but had cause for concern due to the proximity of French Senegal. Like in the Gold Coast, they had been making incursions into the territory for a significant period, and upon hearing a dispatch of further incursions by both local tribes and French troops, the Minister Plenipotentiary Sclater-Booth invested powers in a joint Sierra Leone/Gambia Military Governor and Civilian Governor, Captain TM Moore and Samuel Rowe respectively. These two were to coordinate to provide a report on the administration of the Colony, and Rowe was due to return as Agent-General to report to a Joint Committee on the question of the North-Western Holdings. This report was delivered in 1877, just before dissolution and already in a fraught environment in the House, and recommended that more steps were taken to co-opt locals into Government. The Rowe-Moore Report, written almost exclusively by Rowe, helped formulate a more coherent political structure for the colony and would become a model for others as the Scramble for Africa occurred in the pre-Great War period. Finally, the two arrived in the Cape Colony in January 1877, which would be the last stop on the Tour. Here the political climate was fraught with frustration as locals believed the British rule was corrupt, lax and inefficient. An Independent Member of the Cape Parliament, John Molteno, had been coordinating a campaign for some time to make the Cape Executive Council responsible to the Parliament, but the delays and inertia of the Parliament in the Mother Country had led to this desire being knocked back repeatedly. The lack of movement to appoint a new Colonial Governor had left the long-serving and much disliked Phillip Edmond Woodhouse to remain as the Executive, and his priority was wealth extraction and the maintenance of British interests in Southern Africa. Woodhouse was also an avowed Monarchist, and before departure, Fawcett had received instruction from Chamberlain that Woodhouse was in dire need of removal. It was therefore obvious to Woodhouse that he would declare the Head of State ahead of his arrival as King Edward, not the President-Regent. Chamberlain and Gladstone were prepared for this, however, and on the approval of the Union Council, Commons and Senate, sent troops to meet the delegation in Cape Town and arrived on a gunboat with a new Governor, Sir Henry Barkly, with an arrest warrant for Woodhouse. Woodhouse took a series of militias and attempted to hold himself up in his mansion, but Fawcett, Sclater-Booth and Barkly extended an invitation to Molteno and two other liberals, Saul Solomon and William Porter, to draft laws to bring Responsible Government to the Colony. They did so, and after about two days of fighting, British and South African troops stormed his mansion, and in the fighting Woodhouse was killed on January 22nd, 1877.

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John Molteno, Leader of the Responsible Party, Cape Colony

The death of Woodhouse was a scandal in Britain, with the Loyalist press decrying the bloodthirsty Liberals in South Africa fighting against British Interests in the Colony. Disraeli decried the actions of the delegation after Woodhouse’s death and coined a new term for the new Regime’s dealings with the Colonies only guilty of patriotism and respect for the Crown. Chamberlain attempted to paint Woodhouse as a terrorist who had held the Popular Will of the Colony back. In a statement that formed the basis of what was known as the Chamberlain Doctrine, explaining that as a society gained the ability to govern itself, it should be given the ability to have responsible government. This would form the basis of Liberal-Democratic Colonial Policy until its replacement by the Federalisation Doctrine in 1885, which would contribute to the Unionist Majority in 1887.
 
Part 4, Chapter V
IV, V: Establishing the States

After the passing of the Constitutional Laws, the matter of Charters of Governments for the constituent States was one of the first matters to be addressed. Article 2 of the States Act gave the authority of the Regent to establish Legislatures at the Regent saw fit. The Harrison Plan gave the structure for said states but it was still unclear how the initiation for said establishment would occur. Some units, such as Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Metropolis, with established civic politicians, organised quickly to convene assemblies to draw up the Charters and some had been making preparations for the model of Government below the Lieutenant for some time. Isaac Butt, the presumptive Premier of Ireland, had convened a body of Nationalists to draw up such a Charter as early as three weeks after the passing of the Constitutional Laws to design a model for Government. His model, with a lower house called the Assembly and an upper house Senate, made up of four electorates from the Provinces with 32 County Councils fulfilling the municipal arrangements, was designed to bring a balance to the significant minorities opposed to Home Government into the fold. The bicameral model was popular amongst the states with Scotland also adopting the model with an upper house elected from the county. Eventually, when the Charters were all written, all but the Metropolis and Cornwall took the Bicameral model with Upper Houses, typically called either Senates or Legislative Councils, elected by county. This separated it from the Senate at the Union level, which was appointed. The Metropolis took the form of a Unicameral House with 32 City and County Council’s performing the municipal functions. Cornwall was a small state, so it was not felt required needed either municipal functions (although the Charter provided the Warden with the ability to issue letters-patent to establish such municipal functions in the future) or an Upper House. States Executive functions were similarly uniform, with an Executive or State Council, made up of State Legislators from either House who advised the Lieutenant and would be able to issue Orders-in-Council similarly to the Union Legislature. A majority of both houses (or the sole house) voting to pass a piece of State Legislation would, in turn, allow the President-Regent to consider a bill for assent, which in practice would be exercised by the Lieutenant as the Regent’s representative but a backstop was created to resolve legislative gridlock in bicameral States in the form of a Grand Committee, similar to the Grand Committee of the Union. Exceptions to this State Council model were the States who operated with Chancelleries: the Metropolis, Cornwall and the Palatinates. In their Charters, the Lieutenant would appoint a Chancellor who would, in turn, nominate Vice-Chancellors who would perform the duties of Ministers. There, the whole State Council was referred to as the Chancellery but in practice operated in the same vein as the State Council with collegiality amongst its members and would act as one body.

The Lieutenant would also have the right to nominate a High Sheriff, who would exercise the judicial functions and appoint magistrates and could only be removed by the President-Regent or on the advice of the Lieutenant. This was except for Ireland and Scotland, who retained their old legal systems and saw the appointment of an Advocate and Chancellor respectively. Later, as judicial reforms would come to the forefront, the Sheriffs, Advocates and Irish Chancellors would hold nominating power for the State’s High Courts. The Lieutenant would, unlike the Regent, have no term or limits on their term, and would serve at the pleasure of the President-Regent, but informally, conventions began to emerge in individual states about an accepted term of office, ranging from 10 years in Ireland to each year in the Metropolis, borrowing from the City of London tradition. Each of the first Lieutenant’s appointed, however, would except for those who died in office, would remain in position for a decade until 1885, when the Unionist Government under Chamberlain decided to replace a significant proportion in what is still controversial in many parts of the Union.

On May 18th 1876, Chamberlain presented 13 Charters of Government to the President-Regent for his consent and he signed each of them, establishing the legislature to be convened after the end of the Provisional Parliament’s term. To bridge the gap and prepare for the handover of power, Gladstone appointed the Lieutenants immediately and using an Order-in-Council granted the right for Provisional State Councils to be convened, allowing a Ministry for each State to be formed. Each State had placed upper and lower limits on the size of these councils in their Charters, so Gladstone’s only limit placed on these Provisional Councils was the numerical limits placed in the State Constitutions. Lieutenants appointed included some familiar names; Chichester Fortescue was appointed Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir Robert Peel, son of the founder of the original Liberal Party, was appointed as Lieutenant of Northumbria and William Brougham, brother of Lord Brougham was appointed Lieutenant of Greater Yorkshire. Edward John Stanley was appointed Lieutenant of the Palatinates, and the serving Lord Mayor of the City of London, James McGarel Hogg, was appointed Mayor of the Metropolis. In General, the Lieutenants were more drawn from minor dignitaries of ceremonial roles; Lord Mayors, Lord Lieutenants from the old regime or political appoints meant to reward and glorify former heroes of Liberal Britain, in the case of Brougham, Peel and Fortescue. When a statement was read to the Commons on the appointments, Disraeli called those named “beneficiaries of the spoils system”, accusing Gladstone of rewarding his friends. This was furthered during the ongoing appointments to the Provisional State Councils, as Lieutenant Edward John Stanley appointed Gladstone’s son to the role of Undersecretary of the Chancellery who at just 22 years old was responsible for the preparing reports for the Government. Conservatives decried the spoils system more when Jesse Collings, Government Secretary of State, resigned to head up the new Mercian administration. Some were however unavoidable - Isaac Butt was drafted unsurprisingly to lead the Irish State Council, and W. P Adam, Liberal whip and Gladstonian who headed the Scottish Liberal committee in Parliament headed the Scottish State Council. While the minutiae of the appointments are important, these appointments, along with the appointment of Thomas Farrer as Chancellor of the Metropolis and the mustard magnate Jeremiah Colman as the leader of the State Council of Greater Anglia, would be the most important going forward.

The Provisional State Councils and Chancelleries organised their Governance of their respective states in roughly similar ways. They abolished and proclaimed the formation of departments, began to organise the collection of taxes and rates in line with the Order-in-Council, which allowed them to rule and appropriate funds with the consent of their Lieutenants wishes. The Departments established by the States followed the same pattern: An Internal Affairs or Home Office, A Trade Department, a Poor Relief and Public Health Department which took over the responsibilities of County Health Boards and Poor Law Boards (sometimes together, sometimes separately), an Education Department, a Public Works and Lands Department, Licensing Departments and each of them, by Order-in-Council, was required to nominate an Agent-General, whose role would be to represent their State in the Union Parliament through either the Senate or the Commons. Those who could not nominate a member of the Commons were able to nominate each a Lord Senator for the Provisional Parliament, but it was understood that for the initial nominations for the first Senate after the election, one would be nominated as Agent-General. They nominated Attorney-Generals and the Lieutenants nominated their first High Sheriffs at this time also, which allowed the State Governments to run essentially as they would after the election, establish best practice, make nominations to courts and represent the State until elections were concluded. They also nominated secretaries to the Public Records Office, who would be charged with updating and maintaining voter rolls following the Union legislation on suffrage, which was due to be debated in the Provisional Parliament with a deadline set of the end of 1877 to allow a completion of the voter rolls. These departments purchased and constructed offices that remain State Government offices today, and each was granted a section of Public Land, or given the right to seize buildings for use as State Houses. Lieutenants were given homes, often meagre, to live in and conduct their business from. Finally, each was given access to their respective Great Seals, Ireland and Scotland given their historical Great Seals and 11 states receiving their own, which gave them sole authority in their reserved powers over the legislative process in their States.

Elsewhere, chains of command were established in the Police, which allowed, by June 1876, for State Police to begin patrols for the first time, relieving many of the centrally allocated police forces that had patrolled much of the North and the whole of Ireland since 1867-68. Local control had been restored. Most State Governments refrained from anything but emergency Orders-in-Council and the passing of very light touch budgets, as the Union Parliament had done. This inertia was different to the inertia of the Kingdom, however, as all knew that the State and Union Governments would spring into action once elections had been completed. Many were happy to bide their time, some were restless to act. Most were more content with the course of action taken and relieved to see the Home Government restored or established. This was their Government, and they would not see it disestablished like in 1867. For most States, this began the unobstructed path of self-rule that had been the desire of many since the 1830s and 1840s, since the Great Charters, through the haphazard Orders and Secretariats, through the Outrages. For one state, in particular, this would just be the beginning. While soon they would find themselves nominally suspended by putschists in a year, they would see that the people would rally to their state governments, still today, despite the memes and videos of brawls and the colourful life, remaining the most popular branch of the Constitution. They would never be disestablished again. They would mostly be prorogued on their terms, and while one state would have to spend the next few decades continuing to fight for their authority in their State, the vast majority would settle in as a permanent feature of life. That was the lasting legacy of the States Act, and it began right here, with Gladstone signing the Charters of Government which still sit proudly in each State House.


Lieutenant of Ireland - Chichester Fortescue
Premier of Ireland - Isaac Butt
Lieutenant of Scotland - Edward Gordon
Premier of Scotland - W.P Adam
Lieutenant of Wales - Alfred Thomas
Premier of Wales - Owen Morgan Edwards
Mayor of the Metropolis - James McGarel Hogg
Chancellor of the Metropolis - Thomas Farrer
Lieutenant of Northumbria - Henry Grey
Premier of Northumbria - William Edward Foster
Lieutenant of Greater Yorkshire - William Brougham
Premier of Greater Yorkshire - Sir John Barran
Lieutenant of the Palatinates of Lancashire & Cheshire - Edward John Stanley
Chancellor of the Palatinates - Edward Whitley
Lieutenant of Mercia - George Dixon
Premier of Mercia - Jesse Collings
Lieutenant of Southern England - John Townshend
Premier of Southern England - Sir Charles Tilston Bright
Lieutenant of West England - Edward Seymour
Premier of West England - Samuel Morley
Warden of Cornwall - Edward Portman
Chancellor of Cornwall - Coleman Rashleigh
Lieutenant of Wessex - John Paulet
Premier of Wessex - Frederick Perkins
Lieutenant of Greater Anglia - Sir Thomas Burch Western
Premier of Greater Anglia - Jeremiah Colman
 
Part 4, Chapter VI
IV, VI: The Oath Crisis & the OMC

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Prince George, Grand Master of the Loyal Orange Institution

The trouble with the changing of a generation in a Parliamentary coup is that you have to bring a lifetime of thought up to date while treading the line of acceptability for those who may, even secretly, be wishing things were just the way they used to be. Most just get on with their lives, and as long as their needs are met, they are placid and compliant. In these situations, often the unexpected provokes the biggest reaction. For the new Union, this came when the first recruits were sworn in. Some companies in the Army swore allegiance to the nation, some to the President-Regent, some even to the Crown. But the proposal to swear loyalty to the Union & Its Republic, proposed by Charles Dilke in 1877, ignited the discontent of commanding officers and cadets alike. It was quickly dropped, but the lasting effect stirred up tension especially amongst the Officer Corps. The Union Government did however bring forward a new oath, swearing allegiance to the Nation and Union, which was immediately more popular. But a minority refused and were let go from the army. Ultimately, FitzGerald controlled the armed forces, but a movement around Prince George, the Commander in Chief gained support from and large numbers of the dismissed soldiers and as this happened, Loyalist senior army officers were still in regular contact with Prince George, commander in chief, awaiting the collapse of the Union and the return of the Monarchy. Most Monarchists were content with biding their time and felt the opportunity would come round. Conservative press mocked and wanted the Government to delegitimise it, and in the mind of some, it worked. By 1877 there were thousands of Loyalist Clubs, Patriots Clubs, Victorian Clubs, as the effects of a protracted recession left many in precarious work and fearing for their future. These clubs would usually swear not to engage with the Union, dedicate their lives to the restoration of the Monarchy and reversing the constitutional laws. They practised overwhelmingly in the Legitimist Church, but gained followers from all over the social classes and country and spanned politically from a left, who wanted to restore the Monarchy but retain the changes, to the right, who wanted to restore the Monarchy and pursue the putschists with a patriotic vigour.

This stemmed their adherence to the old order, but their occupation of many Governmental, and more importantly Military posts, caused a headache for the Government in the search for legitimacy. This manifested itself with the application of a new oath for the military. Chamberlain and Gladstone needed to administer a new oath but did not want to ruffle feathers amongst the fragile relationship with the military. In Government, the Civil Service was forced to administer, en masse, a new oath swearing to the Union from the day the Constitutional Laws has been passed, which caused several bureaucrats to leave their posts. Gladstone insisted to Chamberlain that they should receive pensions and full payouts, which he agreed to despite pressure from Dilke to cancel any windfall should civil servants fail to administer the oath. This was politically motivated, and it removed civil servants who were aligned with the Legitimists in their droves, most of whom were happy to be paid off to do so. In the military, the measure was taken much more seriously, and the lightness of the treads made by Joseph Chamberlain and Edward Cardwell was evident. A meeting between the two and Field Marshall FitzGerald was convened on what to do about the matter. FitzGerald was concerned that if it was deemed too political, it may stir feelings in the camp and push sympathy away from the state. He suggested that an oath to the “Union and Empire”, which would not specifically declare allegiance to the current constitution, but a general will to protect the State and its possessions, which could be more eternal and he felt was less likely to disrupt the different beliefs about the State amongst the numbers in the Army. Cardwell reported back to the Union Council that the matter is “complicated but settled” after the FitzGerald oath began to be administered across the Army and the Empire throughout 1877. After about six weeks, the newspapers began to report that senior officers were refusing to administer the new oath and would only offer to resign or even in some cases, they offered to receive the death penalty. Cardwell intervened after the reports began to grow, and asked FitzGerald to stop administering the new oath, but asked senior officers to resign, again offering full pensions. This conciliatory approach was hoisted upon the more vociferous Parliamentarians within the Democratic Federation, who decried those who wouldn’t accept the new order with scorn in Commons debates on the oath. The Liberals, smaller and more tightly controlled by Gladstone, were unanimously in support of a conciliatory approach, which some within the Democrats accused of being “Provisionalist” - meaning in favour of the Republic only as long as a viable Monarch wasn’t around. FitzGerald’s death in March 1877 saw the Constable of the Tower, Sir Charles Yorke promoted to Field Marshall and Chief of the British Army, who held a much more conciliatory line to the Government and supported the efforts to introduce the oath, and the Oath Repeal Act and a new Oath Act was passed in April 1877.

1868 Oaths (Repeal) Act

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.

- The original oath of office as set out in the 1868 Oaths Act:

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will well and truly serve Her Majesty Queen Victoria in the office of (Insert office of). So help me God.

- The original judicial oath as set out in the 1868 Oaths Act:

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria in the office of (Insert judicial office of), and I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will. So help me God.

1877 Oaths Act

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the Union and the Nation, according to law. So help me God.

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will well and truly serve our Union in the office of (Insert judicial office of), and I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will. So help me God.

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Sir Charles Yorke, Commander in Chief after the death of Field Marshall FitzGerald

Despite the rhetoric, Radical Democrats were wary of the military. The unrest in the military, it was felt, would need to be nipped in the bud. This also extended to the Navy, which had suffered from somewhat of a loss of discipline and around 5% of the fleet had failed to return to port, as was ordered by Milne in 1875. Colonial patrols only heard of the death of Victoria and the political strife in early 1875, and the developments struggled to filter through and conflicting reports were abound. The unrest in the military on the Home Front was fuelled by stories that many of Britain’s colonies had already been lost to France, and stories of the wars in the Ashanti and the Gambia. Morale collapsed and desertions skyrocketed as Soldiers didn’t want to align with a chaotic, collapsing regime as more and more officers left their posts. To arrest the decline, loyal units were sent to protect bases against mutiny and put down any trouble. Yorke confined all non-active soldiers to barracks and ordered that all personnel report to their nearest regiment. Police also suffered several desertions and resignations, but significantly less - as the Provisional State Administration control was welcomed in much of the country and the restoration of County and City Police meant the return of respected local police forces. By January 1878 87% of the Police across the Union had given the updated, full oath with further provision to swear an oath to their constituent state. This last element of the oath meant that police numbers dwindled in North Eastern Irish counties, with Loyalists en masse resigning their posts in the Police, usually whole constabularies at a time, ransacking the armouries in the process. This lawlessness further intensified growing tensions between the Protestant Majority and Catholic Minority, especially as Catholics rushed to join the ranks of the police in those Counties.

This uneasy feeling across the Union of enemies within was intensified with the murder of two members of the Irish Provisional Government in Lisburn, which was followed by a massacre in Belfast of Orange Order members at a meeting house by the Belfast City & County Police, allegedly on the orders of the Provisional Irish Department of Internal Affairs. Premier Butt was forced to intervene to condemn the massacre, but a report found that the Institution in question did have a connection to the murder of the Ministers. William Harcourt, a prominent Liberal, was shot outside Manchester’s Free Trade Hall by an ex-Army officer who resigned after the Oath Crisis. Remarkably, he survived. The assassination attempt caused Gladstone, a key ally of Harcourt, to demand a new Coercion Act to control the mutinous elements. He asked Henry Bruce to draft such a law to present to the Provisional Union Parliament and instructed that it grant State Police power to intern elements that would be suspected of treasonous activity. Utilising an old National piece of legislation, the Treason-Felony Act, he sought advice from the High Chancellor to establish whether the act could be utilised to transfer treason against the Crown, to treason against the Union. Sir Henry James indicated that it could, and the men were tried and transported to British Guyana, one of the colonies with the most Union control. This led to further protestations within the Army, as previously only Irish Terrorists had been tried under the act. Trying a monarchist, it was felt, flew in the face of the conciliatory approach that Chamberlain, Gladstone and his fellow moderates were taking to avoid any uncomfortable situations for those not truly at ease with the regime. Republicans scorned, and after a Bill was presented to the House to authorise action against assassinations, a coalition of Conservatives, Liberals and the moderate Democrats quashed it on the first reading. In response, Charles Dilke threatened to resign from the Union Council but was persuaded to stay by Chamberlain, who abstained from the voting. Irish members, hailing from Butt’s Irish National Party poured scorn on the failure to pass the bill, given the forceful nature of action taken against Irish Nationalists in the past, and a rift opened up between the Radical Republicans and Irish Nationalists, and the Moderates within the Government. The affair made the Provisional Union Council seem ever more provisional, and the Government seeming weaker.

After a second, more successful assassination attempt on the Vice Commissioner of the Manchester City & County Police, Robert Peacock on February 13th, 1878, a group of Northern Democratic Federation MPs demanded greater action. They presented a Protection of the Union Bill two days later and called upon the Home Secretary to support the Bill which proscribed a number of organisations, many of which were linked to the Legitimist Church, to be designated as acting against the Union. Radical Republicans supported it, as well as Irish Nationalists and some in the Liberal Party who believed that these organisations were causing a serious disturbance to the peace. These included voices within the Union Council, like Senator Granville, who gave a speech in the Senate defending the rights that individuals have to voice their opposition to the Governmental System of the state, but concluding that the spirit of the debate should be conducted in peaceful means and supported the suppression of organisations wishing to disturb that peace, in a line consistent with his rebuttal of Irish Fenians. Granville’s intervention swung the mood of the Senate, and the Bill received Presidency Assent on 15th March 1878 after it was sped through Parliament. One such organisation suppressed to much controversy within Legitimist circles was the Loyal Orange Institution, along with 30 other regional groups. What it did not do, however, was expel or transport any members or leaders of the group, providing only for arrest or temporary holding of suspected Loyalist Terrorist Groups, or expelling any members of the Aristocracy, crucially leaving Prince George legally in the country.

Legitimist cells were temporarily forced underground, but the complex web of individuals and organisations led to several organisations coalescing in a new political philosophy that encapsulated the Evangelical Christians of Ulster, Legitimist Churches in Britain, Militant Protestantism and the ‘political Martyr Cult’. It has taken a great period to reach William Murphy in this study, as the focus has remained on the resolutely reformist and radical elements within British Politics at this time. With a deep breath for all involved, it’s time to turn the focus on the so-called “Father of Orangeism”.

The twin concerns of Irish Immigration in the North of England and the growing restructuring of the Catholic Church in Britain from the 1840s onwards had been covered by the growing resentment of delays to reform uniting various sections of the working-class in Britain throughout the Chartist, Reformist and Radical Periods of ascendency in the Union. Anti-papal oration had grown in increasing relevance in areas of the North-West where Irish immigration, bringing Catholicism into the public eye, had been twinned with traditional stereotypes about the nature of Irish workers as strikebreakers, disease-spreaders and violent. The support of the Catholic Church for reform in the prism of creating a safe space for Catholics to function in society had initially seen Catholic Labour Organisations form to participate in the First and Second General Strikes, but their need for work and their willingness to continue working through traditional smaller labour disputes had seen tensions grow, especially in the emerging Industrial centres of Liverpool and Manchester. Some described areas of the former as “practically suburbs of Dublin”, and the use of Irish workers as blackleg Labour caused Ire in the 1850s and 1860s. The 1867 Outrages had reunited the cause around Provincialism and once again had masked the underlying sectarianism but in reality, especially in the North-West, the organisations and rallying were separate. As the agricultural depression took hold during the second half of the 1860s especially, the political space to combine Social Conservatism, Loyalism and Legitimism with Orange Tribalism emerged and was exploited by Murphy, as noted by D Downer. Murphy claimed that he had converted from Catholicism to Evangelicalism after seeing his father beaten by a Catholic mob in Limerick and arrived in Liverpool in 1862, finding a willing ear from many of the local workers concerned by Irish Immigration and veiling their concerns within the banner of No Popery. Through the rest of the late 1860s, he would make an important contribution to Orangeism that his forerunners would build upon - equivocating ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’ as one and the same. He replaced the anti-Italian and anti-Roman nature of No Popery, which had lost its zeal after the Liberal Risorgimento movement which had supporters within the Radical Movement, with an anti-Irish doctrine much more appealing to the native workers, seeing starving and destitute Irish workers arriving in their city. Riots in Birmingham were the most high profile and causing massive damage and injuries after the local chief magistrate allowed Murphy, who had a base in the city, to speak which incited a riot. As the Illustrated Police News noted in 1868, his preaching and his events became the pretext for the destruction of Irish property and homes:

Mr Murphy has been delivering his so-called “lecture” at Ashton-under-Lyme with the usual result—rioting. On Friday night a large crowd gathered in the streets and proceeded to “Little-Ireland”, where they proceeded to smash windows. The people were armed with formidable weapons and their demeanour was so threatening that the mayor called out the volunteers to assist the police. On Sunday, Mr Murphy “preached” in the afternoon and evening. A notice to quit has been served upon him but he ridicules all attempts to drive him away.’

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Birmingham’s Murphy Riots, 1867
It was no surprise that Loyalism and anti-Constitutionalism welcomed him with open arms, but the mainstream appeal of Murphy’s preaching would not arrive until after his death. During the controversy of the 1871 Election he was killed on a speaking tour in the Northumbrian city of Whitehaven, and this made him a martyr to the emerging Loyalist movement. His mantra, that Constitutionalism was the zenith of a campaign from Rome to undermine the native faith and cause the reassertion of papal control of the British Isles, found new zeal in the context of the schism in the Church of England post-Constitutional Laws. Combined with the effects of the Long Depression, which started in 1873 and continued throughout the Provisional Union Council’s term, shown by falling price and wages, less purchasing power and economic strife, this created an audience for those who wished to continue the creed of Murphy and present him as a prophet of sorts, who required religious devotion to correct the mistakes of the Constitutional Laws and the restoration of the rightful King to the throne. The forcing of the Orange Order underground after the Protection of the Union Act brought these groups into the sphere of influence of the Murphyists, and it is this osmosis, combined with the bulging of the Order with resigned military officers led to a very dangerous cocktail being mixed in the underground right of the country. The officers who joined the Institution formed the Orange Military Council or OMC in the aftermath of the Protection of the Union Act and secretly administered an oath to restore the crown by any means. These included W.J Codrington, Henry Roxby-Benson and Evelyn Wood, Officers of the Crimean War who held close personal affinity to Prince George, the deposed Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. Concurrently, an Orange Political Council was formed by Viscount Cole, Earl Erne and Sir George Jenkinson at its head. It was Jenkinson, listening to the concerns of fellow Orangemen in the Order from the lower classes, who believed that this meshing of No Popery and Radical Murphyism against Irish Immigration could provide the mix that would provide the momentum to restore the prestige of the country and being a Monarch back to the throne.

Jenkinson proposed a symbolic gesture that would have wide ramifications. He wrote a letter to George inviting him to become Grand Master of the Orange Order and head of the Orange Military Council and Orange Political Council. George, still in the country, accepted the role and was as good as confirmed in May 1878. Prince George distributed a communique, written by Albert-Edward in Paris (where he was going through his own troubles that would soon be made public), that the Order was ‘defending the faith, doing the work of God and providing a shining example to Englishmen’. This galvanised and motivated the Orangeists, who believed their work was just.

In June, with the affirmation of George as Grand Master, the Orders across the country secretly convened a Grand Orange Lodge in Liverpool. It was at this time also, before the Parliament’s summer recess, that Joseph Chamberlain, having constructed the legislation with Gladstone over the previous weeks, finally introduced legislation to disestablish the Church of Ireland, while securing its future through a constitutional document and the gradual withdrawal of public funds. To Orangemen, this was the sign of the coming war against the Church of England as promised by Murphy. The OMC and OPC both called emergency meetings to discuss the response, and in a joint session in a Legitimist Church in Bootle, they agreed that the only reasonable course of action would be to plan for the arrest of the Union Council and a second Glorious Revolution to put Albert-Edward on the throne, along with the restoration of the Church of England, the arrest of all Catholic and Anglo-Catholic leaders and the exile or arrest of all members of the Provisional Parliament and its replacement, temporarily until order could be restored, with representatives of the OMC and OPC. The men had in essence stated their intent to launch a Coup. They auspiciously set the date for the insurrection as November 5th, the date of William of Orange’s landing at Torbay.

At this stage, despite the furious reaction of the Grand Lodge, nothing was shared with the fellow Orangemen, some 390 or so assembled, but as soon as two days after, feelers were sent out in the army amongst the Officers who had resigned to gauge support for the Coup. Wood, who led this endeavour found that a number of sympathetic officers were still in post in the Army, and a greater number were personally loyal to Prince George. All in all, they estimated that around 9,300 troops either in, or soon to be arriving in the Union could be guaranteed upon in support of a Coup, with further falling as the command chain in the Union disintegrated. Realising that this would not nearly be enough to pacify the country and put down the expected rebellion in Union strongholds, it was agreed that Orders before the Coup were to complete a campaign of ransacking military barracks loyal to Field Marshall Yorke, and assembling militias in sympathetic cities, with particular emphasis put on Belfast, Liverpool, Bradford, Manchester and areas of London, with the last of these providing a fifth column for the invasion of the capital. Plans were still kept secret, however, for fear of the information being leaked to the Home Office or State Internal Affairs Department.

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Viscount Cole, member of the Orange Political Council

In early July, Viscount Cole began to engage with local Order leaders in Belfast, and the Belfast City & County Police noted a large uptick in gun smuggling and ransacking cases after the traditional marching season, arousing the suspicions of the Provisional Irish Minister for Home Affairs, Charles Gavan Duffy. He submitted a private report to the Home Secretary on July 18th that the Police Commissioner for Belfast City & County suspected that a nefarious plot against State Rule in Belfast was being hatched. Bruce reported the communique to Chamberlain who in turn informed Gladstone on July 21st. Gladstone ordered Lieutenant Fortescue to authorise the investigation of these ransacking incidents and Fortescue dispatched several Investigators from the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s G Division of plain-clothes officers to get to the bottom of it. After investigation, they found a much wider plot to overthrow the Union and arrest State Legislators and Parliamentarians as well as overthrown the Union Council orchestrated by the Orange Order. Reporting to Fortescue, Duffy advised the Lieutenant that immediate action should be brought against the Order, but the Lieutenant believed this should be led by the Home Office, so in an audience with the President-Regent brought forward his teams findings. Gladstone, in an error of catastrophic proportions, rubbished the claims, pointing to a fall in assassinations since the passage of the Protection of the Union Act. Despite this, the OMC & OPC were spooked by the reports from Belfast of investigation and ramped up their planning for the Coup. The process was hastened with the return to the Union of several regiments and battalions that were loyal to George who would form the core of the military elements of the plan; the 17th Lancers on the 23rd, several battalions from the Middlesex Regiment on the 25th, the Union Rifles Corp (formerly Kings Royal Rifles Corp) on the 29th and elements of the Suffolk Regiment on August 1st. The Middlesex Regiment’s return brought Francis Cunningham Scott home after duty in the Gold Coast, wherein he was contacted by George and joined the OMC on August 8th. Scott, having seen the numbers, munitions collected and planning, convinced the OMC of a new plan to topple the Union Council allowing for the small numbers of Regulars allied with the plan, which was codenamed, Operation Boyne. These men were nothing if not subtle.

Operation Boyne was, to be frank, quite brilliant. It would use the organisation of the Orange Order to create a disturbance that would provide the basis for the OMC and OPC to take power and restore the Monarchy. The whole mobilisation would take place in 16 days and would be completed on August 20th. Firstly, Belfast units, as the most tribal and radical, would be tasked with the assassination of 16 State and Union Government officials in each of the States, combined with individual carefully selected pre-formed militia units, which existed to protect the OMC and OPC and the 17th Lancers would be utilised to ransack military equipment concurrently across the country. Then, as the Home Secretary enforced the Protection of the Union Act to arrest the Orangemen, each Lodge would be instructed by the Grand Master to form a militia, which was hoped to raise about 11,000 volunteer militiamen. The arms ransacked would be distributed to the men to defend the Order, who would initially use these arms to resist arrest. On the 18th, 6,000 of the 11,000 volunteers would provoke riots in Liverpool, Belfast, Manchester, Glasgow and Leeds, all major cities with high concentrations of State and County Police, which would tie up support that could be deployed to London. Some would then seize control of the railway stations and major canals and roads, to seize the country into a state of paralysis.

Finally on the early morning of the 20th, and the remaining 5,000 men with the 9,000 regular troops would march on London, overwhelming the 13,000 Metropolitan Police, disarming the armed officers, taking control of Parliament, placing the members in the City under arrest and imprisoning the Union Council, who was due to be meeting that morning, in the Tower of London. They would then proclaim the Monarchy had been restored, that the OMC & OPC had complete Military and Civilian Control of the country and read a pre-written ascension notice for King Edward VII before his arrival when control was assured. Gladstone, Chamberlain, Archbishop Tait and Dilke were to be executed for treason, and the King would use an Order-in-Council to revert the constitution to pre-1832 forms, proclaim Prince George as Commander-in-Chief and order the Union of the Legitimist and Continuity Church of England and outlaw the Anglo-Catholic Church and arrest the leaders of the Catholic Church in England. It combined confusion, insurrection, and guerrilla warfare. Its plan did have a few flaws; a quick turnaround was required for people who had never partaken in a Coup before, it required no more armed soldiers to be in major cities on the days in question and it required nearly 20,000 men to keep their mouth shut. In the end, none would happen.
 
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Part 4, Chapter VII
IV, VII: The Orange and Red, White & Green

“I write this letter, our 25th since my exile, simply because for many years we conversed and you always provided the courtesy, to be honest and frank to me and to show me, in your eyes, the best turn of course and the best way to proceed. You have shown deference to one’s dignity and honour in the face of challenges. I am truly sorry that we have been forced to have such a public feud from my exile in Paris, but may I attempt to resolve the feud, however superficial it may be as we both know, by providing you with a crucial piece of information: you are in danger, and you must leave the country now.”

On August 3rd 1878, a day before the enacting of Operation Boyle, a dispatch was sent to Paris to leave plans for the Coup with Prince Albert-Edward in his home in Paris where he had been living for 4 years since his refusal to take the British Throne. The courier was greeted by the sight of Paris Police searching the King’s Parisian apartment but pushed past the various investigators to find Bertie, hunched in the corner. He delivered a case containing the detailed plans for his arrival, the arrest lists, the commanders and maps of key buildings to be seized. There were train tickets to Calais and details of a ship that would take the King and members of his family, including Albert-Victor, the Crown Prince, to England and details of an armoured train that would be leaving to take him to the centre of London, where it was planned he would be proclaimed on the night of August 23rd from Buckingham Palace. Understanding the contents, he moved to the office of a Conservative Member of the French National Assembly, Baron Haussmann, whom he had struck up a friendship with throughout his stay in the Capital. Haussmann, a Bonapartist, swore to secrecy but observed the plans with Bertie, and as he came over the list of planned executions, seeing Gladstone’s name, he noted a concerned frown come over the would-be King. Bertie immediately called for the courier, and knowing that the OMC would not listen to his plea for clemency and even if they would, a dispatch to Liverpool would take too long, decided that, under secrecy, the boy, who was 18 years old, should carry a letter to London as soon as possible warning his old friend of his fate, and advising him to leave the country.

Such a warning was a fit of emotional rage more so than any strategic planning, but it plays a wonderful part in illustrating the unbelievable folly of the Orangeist Coup Attempt of August 1877. It was the product of an echo chamber, produced in dimly lit basements rather than with the forethought of consultation. The men involved had meticulously planned but relied on many an assumption rather than fact, in this case, the assumption shared by the Parliamentarians: that the President-Regent and the King had severed their communication lines and that both wanted the other out of the equation. The OMC assumed that Bertie would wish the man who usurped him dead. He did not. Parliament assumed that the man deemed ill-fitting for the crown and the man they vested the power to replace him in to be estranged. They were not.

A day later, the first communique between the OMC and the Orange Order in Belfast arrived, instructing the leadership to restart the ransacking of military equipment, delivered along with an assortment of rifles that had already been assumed. What they did not know was amongst the men who were delivered the notice and dispatched to arrange a robbery of 150 rifles from a storage facility in Larne were 6 of the G Division that had been assigned by Duffy to pursue the workings of the Order in Belfast. Alerting the Belfast City & County Police, the group travelling to the coast were halted and arrested marking an auspicious start to the planned uprising. Reports sent back to the OMC declared that the Belfast group were compromised, but several other groups managed to secure armouries in Lisburn and areas of Belfast, giving them a number, along not quite what they had hoped, of arms that could be used in the insurrection. Viscount Cole declared the mission to be a qualified success, and as similar raids were launched on the mainland, they too achieved relative success, bringing about 3000 rifles into the hands of the Order in the first phase of the campaign, mainly from areas of the country in states that did not know the group's plans. What they did not know was after the arrest of the first Belfast group, an officer from the G Division had managed to uncover a section of the plans. Believing it to be as part of an assassination campaign, the G Division reported the findings to the Lieutenant, who in turn informed the Union Council of the stolen documents and advised Lieutenants to be on alert in Greater Yorkshire, Northumbria, the Palatinates, Scotland and the Metropolis. This led to a higher number of patrols on roads between cities which the Order hoped to use to avoid detection. After further groups in Bradford and Glasgow were apprehended, the Order attempted to throw together an arms purchase from overseas, sending a telegram to the Foreign Affairs Department in Berlin, which was intercepted and at the behest of Bismarck, the German Chancellor was passed on to the Foreign Secretary, Senator Granville. This news was leaked to the press and fear-mongering of an attempted Coup began to circulate, beginning a few days out from the pencilled starting date. The debacle caused the OMC to bring forward the plans, and Boyne was retooled to include a simultaneous assassination campaign and uprising using a smaller number of men, ditching the plan to use militias raised from the Order immediately, but instead to assist with the plan to assert control once key buildings in London were under the control of the OMC and the OMC & OPC had been declared the Privy Council of the Crown.

This smaller plan was more mobile and allowed for fewer numbers of better-trained troops to carry out the offensive, but even in London, the plan would come into trouble. The Boyne plan had envisaged that around half of the Metropolitan Police would be armed, but with the higher state of tension arising from the nationwide ransacking, the Mayor of the Metropolis had asked for as many to be armed as possible, meaning some 9,000 armed officers were patrolling the streets from August 16th. Sir Charles Yorke had also ordered that the Essex Regiment be put on alert in case of strife in the Capital. Rumours of the King travelling to Calais by train furthered these rumours, even though a telegram from Liverpool from the OMC delayed his arrival and meant he was still in Paris. Not that that would matter, as he was by this time under house arrest in the French Capital. With the plan falling around them, the OMC decided to further push forward the attack to the 19th and began mobilising the 9,000 troops, plus 2,000 volunteers, via trains commandeered on the night of the 17th.

Despite the advanced warning, the Union Council were still caught unaware of the insurrection. Most in the Home Office believed the plot to be a series of coordinated assassinations rather than a plan to overthrow the Union, and went to bed on the 18th believing they had put those plans in place. The first signs on the morning of the 19th that anything was amiss was the distant sound of gunfire in the capital, as Metropolitan Police on the outskirts of the city engaged in a light exchange of gunfire in the North of the City as the Lancers approached at around 7:30 am. A thoroughly professional force, the Met vestries in the North of the City were easily defeated, but messengers alerted the Union Council of the approaching forces and immediately a joint session of the Union Council and Provisional Metropolitan Chancellery was called to convene a response. Chamberlain and Dilke, however, were missing from the meeting and it was chaired by Granville. Joe and Charles had been alerted an hour or so before the Union Council of the oncoming forces, and instead headed to meet the Committee of the GFTU and its President, George Shipton. They insisted that special editions of the Bee-Hive be printed, along with a notice to the other merchants to disobey the orders of the approaching army, unaware of their exact numbers and links. He referred to them as the Orangeists, which gives the Orangeist Coup its name. The Notice, printed at 9:30 as the Lancers linked with the Battalions from the Middlesex Regiment in Tottenham, read as follows;

PEOPLE OF THE UNION

YOUR COUNTRY AND STATE IS UNDER ATTACK

RESIST! DISOBEY ALL ORDERS PUT TO YOU! THE GOVERNMENT REMAINS IN CONTROL OF THE UNION! THE PRESIDENT-REGENT RETAINS THE AUTHORITY YOU HAVE VESTED IN HIM! THE ORANGEISTS WISH TO SUSPEND DEMOCRACY, SUPPRESS THE PEOPLES WILL AND SUPPLANT YOUR DESIRE FOR FREEDOM!

THE UNION COUNCIL

Chamberlain and Dilke had understood that getting ahead of the situation was critical, and copies were printed and circulated in the city at breakneck speed. The address was syndicated through telegraphy, and State Governments, unaware of the crisis, declared lockdowns in major cities to protect them from an expected attack that would not come. He arrived at the meeting at 10 am to see that Council had authorised the reinforcement of Government buildings and State buildings in the city. There was, however, no sign of the President-Regent. It had emerged that he had left the city the night before to travel to Manchester, much to the confusion and ire of the Union Council. In his absence, the High Chancellor decreed that a decree could be drawn up that would be non-legal but would carry enough weight to have the desired effect, so Chamberlain and the Mayor of the Metropolis, as well as the Chancellor of the Metropolis Thomas Farrer, decided to issue a series of decrees to the London Gazette and the City of London Gazette (its State equivalent) to inform the public of their responsibilities. These stated that the forces entering the city were, in their entirety, outlaws and that cooperation with them would carry the sentence of treason. The wider notice urged officers to surrender their troops and guns in exchange for amnesty and urged civil resistance. The notice was distributed just in time.

On the OMC side, as the regular troops successfully occupied key buildings in the North of the City, the Sussex Regiment arrived around 11:15 to secure the South. Orders from the OMC moved to arrest the Union Council once the City of Westminster, where the Union Council and Metropolitan Chancellery were meeting, was surrounded and this occurred at 12:30. By 1 pm, the seven major train stations in the city had been occupied as the regular troops and irregulars were tactically vastly superior to the Met Police, and in the mornings fighting some 260 officers and civilians had been killed. London Bridge, Euston, Paddington, Waterloo, Kings Cross, Charing Cross and St Pancras were all now under OMC control, along with all major roads and canals out of the city. Finally, the city’s ports, postal exchanges and telegraphy apparatus were seized and the OMC & OPC used the printing press at the Bee-Hive, where the editor George Howell was beaten and severely wounded by the irregular troops who were sent to secure the use of the printing press. The joint councils printed the following decree and had it distributed around London:

BRITONS!

THE PRIVY COUNCIL HAS SEIZED CONTROL OF THE KINGDOM AND DECLARES THE FOLLOWING AS LAW OF THE LAND:

1.) King Edward VII is proclaimed the rightful King of Great Britain and Ireland, its Realm, Dominions and its Empire and sole Defender of the Faith and has declared the Orange Military Council & Orange Political Council to comprise his most Honourable Privy Councillors.
2.) The Rouge Parliament has been dissolved and its decrees declared void.
3.) The Anglo-Roman Church is dissolved and Popery is declared illegal
4.) The Metropolis is declared in a state of siege and martial law across the Kingdom is hereby declared
5.) The Union Council are declared to be outlaws and shall be arrested for treason.
6.) The treasonous villain, William Ewart Gladstone is declared to be an outlaw and is sentenced to death as proscribed by the Military Council
7.) The so-called State Governments and their Charters are dissolved
8.) The Popish Government in Dublin is declared dissolved

BY ORDER OF
THE PRIVY COUNCIL OF THE REALM

The OMC printed over 6,000 of these declarations and ordered newspapers to print them. They had conducted a clear sweep of the Beehive’s offices when they arrived, and although they found several members of the GFTU, of which one, Robert Danter, was killed after irregulars threw him from a window of the offices, they did not find one man they were instructed to arrest, Shipton. Shipton had moved to a hideout in the East of the City, and from there he coordinated the Trades response to the Coup attempt. 2:00 pm saw the last cohort of irregulars arrive, and the OPC decided, with important buildings seized and the city in seeming control, to finally arrest the Union Council. When he arrived, the Met Police had coordinated with a group of armed workers to move the Government and the Chancellery to the hideout. Finding several Ministers of State in Whitehall, however, they arrested a number of them and several Parliamentarians, including Harcourt, who was still resting and was dragged from his bed. They took them to the Tower of London but found fresh difficulties as they arrived at the Tower - the Guards remained loyal to the Commander in Chief, Field Marshall Yorke and pledged to keep the gates closed to prevent the men, some 40 in all, from being detained at the Tower. After a company from the Suffolk Regiment arrived and pleaded with the guards, they still refused and a gun battle ensued, with the Company and Irregulars finally repelled after the cannons in the Tower were fired to clear the area. 20 soldiers, 11 of the guards, 5 irregulars and 4 of the Suffolk Regiment, had died. The men were escorted to a building in Whitehall where they were held.

As news broke to Disraeli, he was escorted into the capital and demanded to speak with the OMC & OPC to alleviate the crisis. When he arrived at their base in Whitehall, a group of irregulars interned him at the gate and beat him, finally bringing him up to the Committee Room. Disraeli had come to reason with the Orangemen but had found himself badly injured by the irregulars, much to the displeasure of the group. Cole, a pre-Union member of the Carlton Club and an acquaintance of Disraeli, demanded that the irregulars responsible be interned and discussed the matter with Disraeli. When he instructed them to withdraw their men and leave the Capital, Scott and Sir George Jenkinson reacted furiously and demanded the men guarding the room to take Disraeli to be interned with the rest of the Parliamentarians. Disraeli was reported to have said to the Council, insisting to walk, rather than be dragged despite a badly broken leg, that “this insurrection will be the death of the Crown, the death of the Orangemen and the death of all of you!”

The Internment of Disraeli at around 3:30 pm and his perceived defence of the Union would have remarkable implications on his character and loyalty to the people. It would also mark the high point of the success of the Coup Attempt. From this moment, concurrent forces began to move against the insurrection. First was the work of the Joint Session of the Union Council, Metropolitan Chancellery and those who remained of the Executive Committee of the GFTU, as summoned by Farrer, Shipton and Dilke. The three organisations attempted to coordinate a response, and used their three main apparatus to resist the ever enveloping OMC. First, the Union Council assembled called upon the President-Regent to return to London and authorise troops to enter the city to relieve the state of siege. This was largely academic as Field Marshall Yorke had called upon the Essex Regiment to mobilise and they were doing so at the time. Second, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Vice Chancellor for Internal Affairs, Sir Edmund Henderson and David Waterlow issued a central order that all Metropolitan Police districts should instruct their men to resist the insurrection and arm themselves and all those who wish to resist the insurrection. Finally, the Executive Committee of the GFTU called upon a General Strike for all workers in the Capital, and to aid the Metropolitan Police and the Army in their resistance to the Insurgency. At this stage, the Coup attempt had taken the form of isolated incidents around the capital and had not grasped the attention of the workers and merchants of the city - with the exception of the dockyards and railway stations, which were heavily guarded. But as the printing presses finished the printing of the three decrees, and their distributions around the factories and the shops in London began, the people of the Capital began to take to the streets to resist the occupation, with the largest walkout occurring on the Dockyards, where resistance was immediate from the Putschists. As this began, the division of the troops allied between the Regular and Irregular forces began to come to the fore. Many of the volunteers, hailing from Belfast and the militant sections of the Liverpool Order, began to fire on those who resisted the calls from the officers to return to the docks. The 600 or so guards, commanded by Officers from the Rifles Corp but manned mostly by volunteers were swamped by the nearly 65,000 workers on the docks, who resisted and chased them out of the Docks soon after 4 pm. Other detachments had similar problems, and as the Metropolitan Police arrived with a greater supply of arms, they began to arm strike leaders from the Dockyards to push the Putschists back. Despite being armed with a collection of revolvers which were nowhere near the quality of the military-grade weapons and artillery that was in the possession of the Putschists, the strikers had numbers and the weapons allowed them soon after 5 pm to free the Parliamentarians, including Disraeli from Whitehall and forced the OMC & OPC to relocate to the City of London, where the City of London Volunteers remained loyal to the Coup.

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Workers walk out of the factories to protest the Orangeist Coup

As the workers and Met Police regained control of the City of Westminster, the Union Council, Chancellery and Executive Committee were able to safely travel back to Whitehall, but a member of the GFTU Executive Committee, H. R King, suggested to Chamberlain that the Council should speak publicly to encourage the resistance, with Trafalgar Square chosen. Notices were sent around the city for the gathering of supporters of the Union. The release of Disraeli brought him to the mass gathering of over 100,000 workers and merchants in Trafalgar Square, and he spoke before the Union Council arrived. At first, many denounced him, baying for blood as he was assumed to be a conspirator. As he limped onto the hastily constructed podium, however, and word spread through the crowd from the workers who had freed him that he had also been interned and defended the Union, cries of “let him speak” began to ring around the square. His speech was elegant, parliamentary in style and delivered effectively.

Gentlemen, the events of today have been the epitome of the continuous effort by a subversive element, brought forward in the supposed word of God, to shed blood on the streets of the Capital of this Empire. While the existence and object of the Tory party are to uphold the traditional institutions of the country, this cannot be held against the will of the people of the country, who have rallied and shown their discontent with the traditional institutions of this country by their affirming of a Convention Parliament and the vesting of power within the Regency and the Council therein.

Statesmen of the highest character, writers of the most distinguished ability and the most organised and efficient means have been employed to the endeavour of saving this great Empire from the disintegration that others have suffered. Today they continue to defend our capital from the clutches of terror. We must be forever vigilant and forever grateful for your service.

I have spoken in the Houses of Parliament, spoken in the meetings of various Tory organisations and I speak to you today with a resolute mind: the will of Parliament and the will of the people must be respected. The people today, in the face of coercion by an obsessive cult, have shed blood here. Let this day mark the end of such endeavours and the restoration of reason. There can be no turning back.


Disraeli was greeted with thunderous applause, and as the members of the group stood up to speak, Shipton, Farrer, Chamberlain and Granville, each commanded a rousing reception. Granville stood and spoke, delivering a solemn address in the city wherein 1867 he had ordered the massacre of workers assembled in much the same way. “I stand before you, people of the Union, with regret and gratitude. A decade ago I ordered your slaughter, but I shall be forever grateful for the events of today in which you have the savour of myself, and the ministers assembled. A decade ago I stood against you, today I stand with you in the defence of the Union”. By the end of the speech, he was greeted with a rousing reception. Farrer spoke to thank the assembled workers of the City and the Police for their role in the defence of the capital against the Putschists and delivered a foreshadowing of the consequences to come - “this day cannot be forgotten, our demands must be met with a lightning speed.” Dilke was the final member to stand and speak and offered the lasting legacy of the Orange Coup for the Union. As the Units loyal to the Orange Order marched under the Union Flag and the Armed Units arriving wore the same uniform as the rebels, Dilke asked that all those who allied with the Union wear colours to identify themselves. He said that those who were rallying to the Union should identify themselves with colour signifying their commitment to the Union; Red, to represent the Workers, Green, to represent the newfound synergy between the Tories and Liberals in this Trafalgar Coalition and White, to signify the peace between them. As the speech ended, the masses marched to Ede & Ravenscroft, the oldest tailor in the city, and gathered all the Red, White and Green they could and began to tie them to their arms. They used the last of the material to create a flag which now lives in the British Museum as the first flag of the Union of Great Britain & Ireland.

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Flag raised in Trafalgar Square that would go on to become the flag of the Union of Britain

As the workers began to March the 100 or so yards to the City of London, they were met with gunfire and artillery which destroyed much of the historic city. Reinforcements under the command of Field Marshall Yorke entered the city at 7:30 pm and retook Euston Station with the help of rioting Railway Trade Unionists, who had been expelled when the Order took the station and barricaded the lines, which reopened the line to the oncoming train stopped in Peterborough carrying the President-Regent and allowed Gladstone to enter the city. His presence amongst the Union Council when he arrived at 8:25 aroused suspicion, as his hasty exit was too convenient and too well-timed. He was not allowed to attend the Three Council’s evening session but signed all the Orders-in-Council issued throughout the day. On the defensive, the OMC forces attempted to barricade themselves in the City of London, but with a force of nearly 100,000 men, 6,000 Met Police and 4,000 reinforcements from the army, carrying the Red, White and Green, their time in the Old City were numbered. They finally abandoned the City at 10:15 and moved to a stronghold in the East End, where the HQ for the operation was based. This however meant the irregulars were marched through Whitechapel, an Irish district, where they were abused and had faeces, rotten vegetables and stones thrown from windows at them. In retaliation, the irregulars lack of discipline saw rioting and the massacre of 25 souls in the district as they moved to the Headquarters, and a company from the Volunteers hailing from Belfast burned down a large portion of the neighbourhood, consuming a further 45 people in the flames. After being driven out, they set up and barricaded themselves in the buildings around St Pancras. Further strongholds pot-marked the city, and as the crowds dispersed home for the evening, it was clear that further fighting would be required to drive them out.

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Workers drive out the Orangemen in the East End of London

The Army retook a further two of the railway stations, Charing Cross and Paddington overnight and as dawn broke, the workers remained on the streets, going house to house finding Orangemen and arresting them. 3,500 mostly volunteers were apprehended overnight and the General Strike in the city continued. As the railways opened, the rage across the country at Legitimist Churches continued, and several were ransacked and defaced in major cities. Gladstone called a meeting of all Regiments loyal to the Union in the immediate area together for 11 am, artillery units began shelling the areas that remained controlled by the OMC; Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest in the East, areas of Harrow and Barnet in the North, certain pockets in Kensington and Lewisham. The holdouts in Lewisham were driven out by the Navy, led by Alexander Milne who reported for duty to lead a barrage by gunboat from Greenwich. Workers in these districts barricaded the streets leading out, held sniper positions as Orangemen tried to leave. By 2 pm on the 20th, Orangemen in Lewisham had surrendered, Harrow and Barnet had been cleared by a company of the Oxfordshire Regiment who had come to reinforce the Essex troops, and workers and merchants volunteers had launched a successful mission to drive the Eastern Sector Orangemen, who contained the OMC & OPC, into a sieged section of Newham, finally cornering them with Regulars from the Army into a gun battle for control of a school board offices on Wakefield Street. The remaining 800 troops not captured or killed held the building despite light artillery attacks and the nearly 1300 troops and volunteers surrounding them. They would hold out for 3 days before the OMC & OPC had borrowed a tip from Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War and dipped their daggers in cyanide before cutting their arms, only Cole and Prince George remained. Eighteen of the members of the joint council were found dead in the building and after the building was captured, 550 irregulars and regular forces were marched through the centre of the city. They had rotten vegetables, guts and stones thrown at them as they were paraded through the Capital. The Coup had failed. Other rumblings in major cities had been quelled but the lack of success of the capital uprising sent many into hiding or to the ports, where a catalogue of nobles, aristocrats and Orange sympathisers went into exile. Some 15,000 would flee in the coming weeks as subjects furious with the attempted coup sought revenge.

The striking workers, however, did not return to work once the last of the Orangemen were apprehended. The Executive Committee of the GFTU met on August 26th to discuss the return of workers to work, and the various unions had a series of demands to allow for the ending of the General Strike. Despite three years having passed since the passing of the Constitutional Laws, there was no Union Trade Union Law, there was no guaranteed freedom to strike, no consolidation of Factory Acts, no Work Day Act which restricted working hours, no freedom of association and no replacement for the Bill of Rights. The GFTU met for the first time since the split with the TUC, and on their recommendation, a programme of lustration was demanded to purge the regime of those sympathetic to the coup and those who had conspired or had knowledge prior to the actions. This process would end up with a Trial in the Senate of the highest political figure in the land, but that would be to come. Farrer was presented with a list of demands from Shipton and a representative from the TUC, Daniel Merrick, that asked for the tabling of a series of Bills within 14 days to remedy these gaps in the programme of the Government and for Liberals to be removed from their positions in the Union Council in the Board of Trade, which had passed from the hands of George Ogder to Archibald Primrose, the Liberal, and finally asked that within 100 days, the Provisional Parliament would be dissolved and elections called. Farrer presented the demands to Chamberlain, and he consulted William Rolley, a Democratic Federation and GFTU official who had sponsored and supported Chamberlain’s work in Mercia. He said these demands had broad support, and that they should accept them. Chamberlain visited Gladstone and called him to convene a special, 100-day session of Parliament from the following Monday ending with an election and the presentation of eight bills to be considered with haste, and for Primrose to be replaced by Shipton, who was appointed to the Senate as Agent-General of the Chancellery of the Metropolis following the coup. These eight bills and their passing, in the aftermath of the Orangeist Coup, would be known as the Hundred Days. When the Bills were presented, the GFTU and TUC called off the General Strike, but not before a rampage across the city to tear down the Union Jack of the Orangeist Rebels and replace it with the Red, White and Green of the forces that held the country together.

The Orangeist Coup was an undoubted failure and only succeeded in building support for the Union and growing the confidence of the working-class in Britain. Its containment to London overstated the weakness of the Government in the Metropolis, it overstated the centralisation of the State and it overstated the support for the restoration of the Monarchy, at least via violent means. It crucially damaged the Monarchist cause and although the Paris Affair, which would break in the coming days, would see the end of serious attempts to install Albert-Edward as King, it would also create a break between the Conservative movement, hitherto nearly entirely associated with the institution of monarchy and the monarchy it wished to restore. This break would affect one man more than anyone - Benjamin Disraeli. His intervention, his capture and his tacit support for the Union in the Orangeist Coup rehabilitated him after the National Governments, and with Gladstone absent, and accusations of misconduct abounding at the suspicious nature of his departure from London, Disraeli regained his reputation as a respected Statesmen who now had the crucial advantage of his support for the Constitutional Laws. The Hundred Days would allow him to construct a different vision of the country that was palatable to Republicans as well as Monarchists, bridging the divide and creating a successful coalition going into the election, 100 days from the Coup. Other winners included Chamberlain and Dilke, whose support amongst the populous would have a cannibalising effect on Gladstone and the Liberals popularity and would allow them to continue their ascension into the new political elite of the Young Union. Farrer would build up support across the lower and middle class alike with his heroic defence of the striking workers and Police respectively and allowed him to present himself as a force for order. Finally, Granville’s contrition during the Trafalgar Procession would establish him as a popular figure for the revolution that had occurred. The biggest winner was the Union as a political system, which had overcome its greatest test and now united the people behind it going into its first elections. Very few, but not all, in the political sphere and the candidates for election, promised to abstain from the Union Parliament, people across the country had seen the strength of the Union and State Government as a force for order. The Union, it would seem, would not be provisional, but here to stay.
 
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Part 4, Chapter VIII
IV, VIII: The Beginning of the Hundred Days

The Hundred Days have come to take a mythical status in legislative history. The late-night sessions, the stories of Parliamentarians sleeping in corridors between debates, the Committee meetings in various offices around the city to the backing track of reconstruction after the damage of the Orangeist Coup. The defining feature of the Hundred Days remains the trial before the Joint Lustration Committee of the President-Regent, presided by the High Chancellor he appointed to safeguard the law from treasonous elements, in front of Senators he had also appointed a few months earlier. On August 26th, Gladstone opened a special session of Parliament and announced the consideration before Parliament of eight bills; the Trade Union Bill, Factory Bill, Irish Church Bill, Welsh Church Bill, Bill of Rights, Lustration Bill, Political Associations Bill and the Working Day Bill. Later that week, Gladstone announced the appointment of 30 new Provisional Senators for the deliberations who would bring the total up to 95. These new senators included a number from Trades Councils and secured a solid pro-Union majority in the Upper House that would ease the passage of the Bills. Thirteen of the Senators were appointed as Agent-Generals of the State Governments, a further 7 were appointed straight from the Committees of the GFTU (although none were appointed from the TUC) and 10 were appointed after a meeting of members of Liberal Parliamentary Committee, the Democratic Federation Executive Committee and the Conservative Parliamentary Committee over the weekend after the coup. As trains reopened, Parliamentarians from across the political divide, as well as representatives from State Governments began to descend on the Capital to assess the damage to the city and coordinate a response. The new Senators included Shipton, scholars like Edward Bibbins Aveling, William Morris and John Ruskin, jurists and barristers like Ernest Bax and Thomas Hare and those who had not sought election to Parliament from the Conservative movement, such as R.A Cross. It was designed to bring a wide range of opinions into the emergency session. The Provisional Parliament could at this time finally be called a truly National Parliament, as Parliament at this time saw high attendance and a greater number of Senators and Members within these 100–days sessions. It’s evident that Parliament at this time was at its strongest, and there was a high level of support for the first time from large sections of society for the political concept of Union, as the Orangeist Coup had shocked the country and forced it to rally around the Institutions.

Conservative politicians were forced to make a series of political statements and essays in their ideas for moving the country forward without the institution of Monarchy, which had paralysed the party into a subdued comatose of haphazard eternal opposition, disputing the institutions rather than the party. The energy of the Conservative movement now rallied behind the institutions that they were participating in. Disraeli commissioned a series of private essays to be written in and published in the National Review. These helped form the emerging politics of Conservatism: one that attempted to make a paternalistic conservatism based on the support for continued Union between Church and State, protecting the institution of empire and most importantly making social reforms to improve the condition of the people in contrast to the institutional individualism of the Liberals. A society of extreme meritocracy as argued by the Gladstonian Principles of hard work and free trade risked the creation of a society of squalor and poverty. Legislation to create minimum standards on Public Health, supporting progressive Trade Union policies (especially in the aftermath of their role in the resistance to the Orangeist Coup) and reforms to the Army and Police to make people safer were high on the priorities of Disraeli and fellow contributor Richard Cross, who would rose to prominence in this era. This was in opposition to the more laissez-faire elements within the Radicals in the old Benthamite position - while Radicals like Chamberlain and Dilke had big plans for social reform in the Union, there was reticence from the older elements of the Liberals, including the Prime Minister towards large scale intervention in the economy, preferring common-sense, light-touch regulation designed to promote a more efficient economy. What Dilke, Chamberlain and now the Conservatives were recognising, that perhaps the working-class could be brought onside with social reform and moderation concerning the political question could be the way to bring a large-scale electorate.

At this stage, Chamberlain was already toying with a land reform based on the disestablishment of the Church as a method to bring agrarian workers, who had traditionally been represented by the Tories due to their undue influence from landlords. Even at this time, usually, most rural constituencies could still be regarded as a relic of the 1830s, with Tories (representing landlords) and Whigs (usually representing the Business interests and small scale industrial workers) usually being the option for the most rural voters. Chamberlain believed that by offering land reform and popular agricultural reforms, voters would form a small scale landowning class loyal to the Union for the longer term. Redistributing land from the Church, which still represented significant power and influence to rural workers would be to secure a long term route to power and coherent with the wishes of the public. He was still controlled by Gladstone, whom Chamberlain believed had overextended his reach throughout the Provisional Parliament. Unity between Dilke and Chamberlain, had been wavering before, had begun to re-establish itself in the period, with the former constructing and proposing an Education Reform law to guarantee access to schooling on a Union level that Chamberlain supported. Having allowed the apparatus of politics to be melded with the Liberals to support the Provisional Council, the groups ideologically began to split as the elections loomed, although some centrist members supportive of the current arrangement began to drift as well, including Henry Fawcett who favoured continuing the Governmental Coalition with Gladstone as a guide of sorts. Chamberlain, Dilke and Shipton wrote pieces arguing for a less interventional approach from the President-Regent. Fawcett’s Democratic faction numbered around 150 or so of the 393 Democratic MP’s, and had support for Chamberlain but wanted experienced Liberals to have a greater say in affairs, and for a more Semi-Presidential system, where the President-Regent makes interventions but not law and were more aligned with Gladstonianism generally. Chamberlain began courting the left of the Party as he saw them gaining ground through their ardent support of the Union, and they favoured a young Government of more Democrats and more from the Trade Union movement.

This brings us to the Trade Union Act. The Trade Union Act was the work of three Senators, two of whom had been part of the Commission that had reported after the Northumbrian Outrages. A Minority Report sponsored by Senator Thomas Anson and Senator William Earle called for a new piece of legislation to support the legalisation of Unions and had significant support from both the TUC and GFTU. The GTFU's President, Robert Shipton supported a draft of legislation first proposed in 1871 but quashed by the Senate. The legislation was presented to the Senate and supported by Thomas Hughes & Frederic Harrison in the Commons, and allowed for several changes to the way that common law applied to trade associations; they would no longer be liable for conspiracy unless an act by them would be deemed criminal if committed by a single person, that restriction of trade doctrines should not apply, that all existing legislation applying to Unions should be repealed and the associations receive full legal protections of property and funds. They also sought to protect Unions from court interference and provide for voluntary registration which formalised their members already accrued. The legislation found a majority in the Senate, although amendments were made to make picketing illegal, which was struck down in the Commons by the tight control of the Democratic members, who were under pressure from the GFTU to make sure that picketing was left out of the Bill. This caused a period of Parliamentary Tennis, with the Bill, passed between the two houses several times on its way to eventually tightly controlling picketing, but allowing it to only occur in areas designated by State Police. This provided the legal basis for Trade Unions, which had already accelerated their development greatly since the Outrages, to begin to be considered legal in the eyes of the law. Further acts would be passed in the 1st Union Parliament, but the basis and doctrine were founded in the passing of the Trade Union Act, which was the first to pass in the emergency session. During the passage, the opposition headed by Disraeli began to observe that the Acts provisions would not be sufficient, however and began to consider developing the legislation in the next Parliament. This would finally arrive in the form of the Employers and Workmen Bill and the Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Bill which would fully legalise the activity of Unions.

A flurry of legislation rushed to the floor of both Houses to be passed; a Factory Act which consolidated all previous Factory Acts over the previous few years, brought forward to the Commons by Sir James Fergusson and supported by all except a small number of Conservatives in both chambers. Similarly, Senator Shipton brought forward a Working Day & Conditions Act, which limited the hours of children, included provisions for workplaces in the open air (excluding mines and agriculture), protecting persons within a twelve-hour window and entitling them to two hours for meals and limiting one work session. It initially provided for an eight-hour working day, but after its introduction on the 31st of August, it had this amended substantially in the Committee stage. This amended version, which limited work sessions to four and a half hours, was reluctantly agreed to by Trade Unionists in Parliament and Senate, and it achieved Assent by the Union Council as a whole (with Gladstone incapacitated) on November 1st, the same day as the Factory Act. Two Bills were brought forward to disestablish the Church in Ireland and Wales, with the former having been brought forward before the Orangeist Coup. These two bills were opposed by the Conservatives, with Disraeli, in particular, wishing to protect the Union between Church and State, but the large majority of Democrats and Liberals, as well as the new cohort of Senators, meant both Bills were passed and Gladstone granted Royal Assent quickly within 4 weeks of the Bills being brought before the Commons. Gladstone was sympathetic to the Church of Ireland and the Church in Wales, so made generous provisions for it to survive after disestablishment. He worked with the Prime Minister in bringing the Bill before the House, to include provision for a Commissioners of Church Temporalities to manage the lands of the Irish and Welsh Church and the Representative Church Body for Ireland and Wales to appoint Bishoprics and Archbishoprics as vacancies occurred. Opposition in the Senate was led by Senator James Hamilton but supported by many of the Liberals and Democrats in both Chambers, so was passed with uneasy speed given its opposition before the Coup. Demonstrations were held and petitions submitted, signed by over 250,000 people in Ireland in opposition to the disestablishment, but the need to finally appease Ireland of its obligations to the Church through tithes was deemed pivotal to the stability of the Union. A further act, to disestablish the Church of England brought forward as a private bill by Chamberlain and Bradlaugh, attempted to seize the momentum on disestablishment to extend it across the land but it failed in the Senate through the opposition of Liberals and Conservatives working in tandem to block the measure. Gladstone himself indicated he would be likely to veto the act if it was brought for Assent. The Church of England in Wales and Church of Ireland would finally be disestablished on January 1st, 1879 as the act provided the basis for.

Among the elements missed from the Constitutional Laws was any attempt at rationalising fundamental rights into a single piece of legislation. Many common law rulings, statutes and two pieces of legislation, the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights, formed the fundamental basics of civil liberties in the Kingdom before the Constitutional Laws, and although the Bill of Rights had been repealed, the Magna Carta formed the basis of Civil Liberties law along with these court rulings after the Union and was a wholly unsatisfactory arrangement. Attempts at revisions of statutes had been brought forward by Hugh Cairns during the last National Government in 1870, but this effort had been quashed and muddied due to the Constitutional Campaign. Most Constitutionalists believed the Constitutional Laws would provide for a Bill of Rights (hence the repeal as part of the Grand Committee process), so failed to engage with Cairns attempt, but attempts had been put to the backburner due to the unrest after the 1870 & 71 elections. A Joint Committee had been formed in 1875 after the appointment of the Provisional Union Council, to look at the subject, and a report in 1877 had recommended a Revision & Consolidation of Statutes Act, which would mesh all remaining fundamental rights of both common and statute law into statute law. This would take into account several precedent-setting cases and elements and fragments of legislation into one unified act. After this effort lost momentum and was overtaken by other issues in Parliament, the issue was moribund. At the Emergency Session, a further Joint Committee was proposed to finally bring the legislation to the floor of Parliament. This was boosted by the rapprochement of Conservatives towards the process, finally allowing Cairns (who had been an Abstentionist but had returned as a Senator after the Church Schism) to come into the Committee. Convened by the High Chancellor, Sir Henry James, the Joint Committee on Fundamental Rights had taken into account the reports of Cairns, the Committee formed in 1875 and the deliberations and reports of the Grand Committee during the drafting of the Constitutional Laws. It contained Senator Cairns, Charles Dilke, Edward Leatham (an associate of John Bright) and 13 others from the House and Senate.

They produced a series of pieces of legislation that are collectively referred to as the Bill of Rights but consist of amendments to existing Constitutional Laws and new legislation designed to create new statutes to protect civil liberties and voting rights. An amendment to the Executive Authority Act introduced six new sections to limit the President-Regent’s power in line with limitations in both the 1698 Bill of Rights and Magna Carta.

Executive Authority (Amendment) Act 1878

11. The Regency by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of common law, or statute law, or customs of the Union. The Regency has no prerogative other than that allotted to him by the Statute of Parliament.
12. Any subject of the Union has the right to petition the Regent and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal
13. The Regent cannot levy taxes without the grant of Parliament
14. Power of suspending laws and dispensing with laws by Executive Authority without consent of Parliament is illegal.
15. The Regent should not appoint any officer of the Union except such as know the law of the Union and are willing to keep it well.
16. The Regent shall not invite mercenaries or foreign troops onto the soil of the Union unless consented to by Parliament.

Sections 11, 13 & 14 further restricted the right of the President-Regent to make unilateral declarations without Parliament as started in the 1610 Case of Proclamations and the Bill of Rights respectively in addition to Section 12, which reestablished the right of petition. Section 15 placed a legal responsibility on President-Regent to appoint qualified and responsible officers into positions of Authority. Section 16 prevented the President-Regent from unilaterally inviting foreign soldiers onto Union soil, which was feared during the Orangeist Coup. There were also amendments to the Union Act, with the amendments to the Union Act designed to reassert Parliamentary Privilege and Immunity, while simultaneously appointing the Parliament as the Court of Law for Parliamentarians. It also prevented interference by a Public Officer in voting and establish the right of all Adult Men over the age of 21 to vote. This along with the Ballot Act would find the basis of free, secret and universal ballots in the Union.

Union (Amendment) Act 1878

Part 2 - House of Commons

11. Elections of members of Parliament is to be free, equal and universal for all men over the age of 21.
12. The Right to Vote cannot be interfered with by a public official

Part 3 - Both Houses of Parliament

7. The freedom of speech and debates and proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.

These amendments were combined with the aforementioned new legislation which brought all the remaining elements of a statute on civil liberties into one bill and introduced laws around the protection and process of elections into another. The Civil Liberties Act protected fundamental Civil Liberties and Rights, with protection from; arbitrary arrest and seizure, against selling justice, its denial or delay, excessive bail, excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment, the promise of fines or forfeitures before justice and against arrest without the lawful judgement by their peers. It also protected liberty, freedom of movement and the right to re-enter and leave the Union at will (except for Outlaws and in Wartime), freedom to assemble and associate, freedom to state opinions within the law without persecution and freedom to practice religion without persecution.

Civil Liberties & Process Act 1878 Provisions
1. Right against arbitrary search and seizure
2. Right to liberty, freedom of movement and to leave and re-enter the Union at will, with exceptions for outlaws and wartime
3. Right against the selling of justice, it's denial or delay
4. Right against excessive bail, not excessive fines, nor cruel and unusual punishments
5. Right against promises of fines or forfeitures before conviction
6. Right to assemble and associate peacefully without prosecution
7. Right against being arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
8. Right to practice religion without harassment or disqualification from the law of the land
9. Right to publish and speak opinions within the law of the land without harassment and disqualification.

The final part of the Act concerned the process and integrity of elections through the Ballot Act. While the seizure of candidature was a serious concern for Democrats who had been denied it since the proclamation of Universal Suffrage, processes needed to be established outside the confines of the Union & States Act, which determined that seats must be allocated in proportion to the population for the House of Commons and now, after the amendments, guaranteed the equal right to vote for all men over 21. Candidature not be seized if a candidate had an independent proposer and a seconder, and mandated that Registrars cannot hold another Union or State Office, indicating that the Registrar Office must be non-political and independent. Most importantly, the Ballot Act introduced the five freedoms of voting; free, fair, secret, without interference and universally allocated to all men over 21 (although that was reaffirmed in the Union Act). It did not however tackle the problem of parallel voting, as that would require a Representation of the People Act amendment and would have attracted the ire of the Conservative Party, who fiercely defended the dual voting process and the so-called “fancy franchise”, which was key to their urban revival. Cairns however expressed concern at the fancy franchise’s impact on representation and in the Report that led to the Ballot Act mulled new machinery to bring a greater variety of representation in cities, where Democratic voters outnumbered Tories, which led to no representation for the new Conservative Voters in the Cities, or so-called Villa Tories. It was at this time that Senator Thomas Hare proposed the use of his ranked voting system, which would lead to greater representation for ideological minorities, and especially in Ireland, where fears of a one-party state under the Irish Nationalists were widespread, would allow for Protestant Unionists to be fairly represented, should they choose to take their seats or not. Cairns had expressed concern in 1867 that minorities were not fairly represented in Parliament, and another electoral reform bill had supported the attempt of Lord Russell to introduce limited voting. The ranked option proposed by Senator Hare would allow for such an option for minorities to be represented in Parliament. “Such an option [as the Hare Scheme] could have sufficient value to represent all ideologies in the new Union Parliament” he concluded in an essay in National Review on further reforms after the Ballot Act.

These Acts and Amendments now form the basis of Civil Liberties Law in the Union so much so, that when the Constitutional Laws were protected in the Constitution Act, 1982, they became part, with the upcoming Acts of the upcoming Conservative Government to fully legalise Trade Union, of the Union Constitution and its special legislative process, which finally turned Britain from a Union based on Parliamentary Supremacy to a Union based on Constitutional Supremacy. That ruling would be the end of a long-running debate between the two philosophical camps in British Politics: those who believed the country needed a constitution to protect liberties and those who believed that Parliament would always protect Liberty. Each was passed with a surprising lack of opposition and were a product of the breathing space the Union had in the days and weeks after the Orangeist Coup to bed in the Union as the political composition of the State. These deliberations, which went concurrently with the Reports on Lustration, were the easy part of the Hundred Days and the constructive, rather than destructive phase of the legislative session. Each Bill was passed with a fanfare, but the debates and testimony being accrued in other exploratory committees would have a far greater bearing on the political situation of the Government and the fate of the President-Regent in particular. This period also marked the first approach of the Conservatives into the legislative process since the Union, and a number of members gained public reputations, riding on the coattails of the rehabilitation of Disraeli after his Trafalgar Speech, for being good honest lawmakers after a long period of distrust from large sections of the public. Disraeli’s desire for competent Trade Union legislation in particular, and the Conservative’s support for legislation in regards to workers rights would have important ramifications for Unionism as an ideology, especially considering that most of the opposition to Bills like the Factory Act came from the Liberal faction supporting Gladstone. For the first time, Conservative forces seemed to be coalescing with Democratic Forces, which would form the basis of Unionism as we know it today. The progression of the political debate passed Institutional Reform allowed the Tories to re-enter the debates on the condition of the people question, which Disraeli believed that he could drag the Tories towards to the electoral benefit, and a growing number of Democrats believed would be the basis of future support for the Union as a political institution. The next phase, which handled many more controversial matters, would divide these two groups, however, and force alliances in Parliament thought unthinkable just 5 years previous. This phase would end with the forced resignation of the President-Regent, the collapse of the Democratic Federation as a national body and the election of a purely Tory Prime Minister for the first time since Wellington. That man would be Benjamin Disraeli, who finally achieved the modernisation of the forces of Toryism he had craved his whole life. While it would be a Pyrrhic victory and the Conservatives would never hold power again, it would show the path for Joseph Chamberlain to forge Unionism in 1885, 7 years after his resignation as Prime Minister. This first period of the Hundred Days, summing 40 of those days, would provide the political context, the next 60, ending in the Union’s first elections, would provide the situational context.
 
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Hi all,

I’m doing a bit of statistical work alongside the work on the Lustration Trials, which will form the basis of the next update. After Lustration, we’ll look at Senator Granville and his foreign policy endeavours (which will arise in the Hundred Days in the form of the debates on the Treaty of San Stefano) and general goings on around Europe to provide a bit more context for the coming Administration. Hope it’s worth the wait. I have a little bit less time than I’ve had recently, so things are moving a bit slowly!
 
Will we see Neo Vedanta or Chicago Speech by Vivekananda or those butterflied away?
I’m not quite sure at this stage, I can see the conditions for it emerging and can’t see anything that would point me to it being butterflied away, but I’ll have to do some more research as that’ll take part towards the end of this part of the story
 
What is your view towards impact of eastern art or indian art in general in this timeline? I mean before cummarswamy there were no proper eastern art appraisal conducted by western critics.
 
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