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Ripples and Puddles: Change Afoot in British Politics, 1848-1855

Sir James Graham, British Prime Minister

While the violent ripples of the Springtime of Nations failed to ignite a revolution in Great Britain, it's effects still washed upon the shore. While Chartism had threatened to overthrow the new order, before fizzling out in a cold, damp afternoon, London became home to various malcontent, radical political exiles who agitated for a new dawn and the end of the old order.

Outside of the fevered air of the radical bookshops and coffeehhouses frequented by the likes of Marx and Kossuth, the post-Congress world of the New Europe presented the British establishment with a challenge. The emergence of a newly unified Germany, under the auspices of a liberal constitutional model, was greeted in public with elation by the Prince Consort, while in private the government viewed the new state as a useful counterweight against possible French or Russian expanisionism. This goodwill was briefly hindered by the unpopular (in Germany), British brokered, Treaty of London (1852), but the two countries developed a reasonably cordial relationship, following the visit of the Emperor and Empress of Germany in 1854.

Domestically, the Great Exhibition and the rebuilt Palace of Westminster fully demonstrated Britain's imperial power, as did the 'gunboat diplomacy' of Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, who came to typify the pragmatic free traders who dominated politics during the period. Indeed, as the Whigs enjoyed a prolonged period of political dominance, the Conservatives appeared to be collapsing into anarchy, as the Peelite wing split from the Tories to form the Free Trade Party. [1] The new coalition government [2] of Sir James Graham, granted self-government to several colonies [3] though this was overshadowed by the Russo-Turkish War which threatened Britain's sacred routes to India. While the war was eventually ended before British troops were deployed, Graham authorised a deployment of a naval squadron to the Dardanelles (alongside the French), before helping broker the Treaty of Paris which opened the Black Sea to neutral shipping. While these suggested strong foreign policy success, Graham's coalition government was always shaky and eventually collapsed over attempts to extend the franchise, a problem that would dog successive administrations. [4]

BRIEF NOTES

[1] The imaginatively named Free Trade Party, were essentially the Peelites of the Tories and some disaffected Whigs, who resented John Russell, and as a result was always an uncomfortable allliance between social reformers and social conservatives in the name of free trade.

[2] Sir James Graham, formed a coalition administration with the Whigs, following the collapse of the very shortlived Conservative administration of Edward Smith-Stanley. Much like the Free Trade Party, the coalition was fraught with tension.

[3] New Zealand, the Australian territories and Natal were successively granted independence between 1853 and 1855.

[4] The debate, between those who wished to progressively enfranchise the working classes to an eventual end goal of universal (male) suffrage, and those who viewed the 1832 Act as sufficient would continue to haunt British politics until the 1880s.

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