The Story of Britain Page 15

  The Caribbean islands that the British took from the Spanish were perfect for growing sugar, which people in Britain wanted to put in their tea and sweeten their food. But there weren’t enough men in the Caribbean to work on the sugar farms, because the islands’ original people, the Caribs, were killed when the Spanish came, or died of disease. So the British went to Africa and took Africans to the Caribbean as slaves.

  When slave ships appeared off the African coast, everyone who lived there ran to hide in the forest. Every village had a story of a father, a wife or a son disappearing and never being seen again, and rumours went round about what happened when the slave traders found you.

  “They chain your hands and make you walk for days through the jungle. Then they put you on a ship and take you far away across the sea.”

  “What happens across the sea?” people asked.

  No one knew, for none of the slaves ever came back.

  When West African kings fought one another, they sold their prisoners to the British as slaves. Realizing how much gold the British would pay for a slave, they raided neighbouring towns and captured the strongest men and women. But if British slave traders arrived on the coast and there weren’t any slaves to buy, the slavers loaded their guns and set off into the forest to hunt them. They seized women who had gone to the river to fetch water, and dragged away men who were herding cattle. They threw boys and girls into sacks. Then they loaded their new slaves onto their ships, and when the ships were full, set sail for the Caribbean.

  The journey across the ocean was called the Middle Passage. Each ship had a deck where the slaves were forced to lie down in rows with chains fastened around their necks and ankles. They were packed so tight together that they couldn’t move. When the ship swooped over the waves, the slaves were seasick. They were given hardly any food or water, there was no light or air, and the heat was stifling. Many died. The survivors closed their eyes and tried not to think of their children and families, and the homes they had been taken from. Often they wished they could die as well.

  When they reached Jamaica, they were taken to the slave market. The sugar farmers, who came to the market to buy them, held handkerchiefs over their noses to keep out the smell. They paid most for the strongest men and prettiest girls. Sugar farmers were very rich and their houses were like palaces, so some of the slaves were washed and put to work as servants. But most of them worked in the fields. No one looked after them. They toiled for as long as their owner told them, and were whipped until their backs were bloody.

  When the sugar was harvested, they helped load it onto ships.

  “Where are the ships going?” they asked.

  “To Britain,” they were told.

  And they remembered Britain was the island where the slave ships came from, and wondered what sort of devils the British were, who liked eating sugar, and bought and sold men as if they were cattle.

  We all want to be proud of our country, and the people of our islands have a lot to be proud of. We made ourselves free and helped free others as well. Our discoveries and inventions have made the world much better. But the slave trade was a shameful evil that we should never forget. Millions of families were destroyed by slavery, and millions of African men and women killed.

  It would be more than a hundred years before the British realized that the freedom they loved so much should belong to everyone, not just them.

  The Union of England and Scotland

  WHEN the Glorious Revolution was over, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland all had the same king and queen – William and Mary – but they were still separate kingdoms. And even though a Scottish king had first brought Scotland and England together, the Scots often complained they were treated unfairly.

  “The king does what’s best for England,” they grumbled. “He doesn’t care about us.”

  It was true. King William let his ministers in Scotland do what they wanted. The result was the terrible massacre of Glencoe.

  The Scottish Parliament passed a law to say that every Scottish clan chief had to swear allegiance to the new king, but many of the Highland chieftains preferred James II.

  “At least he’s a Stuart,” they said, “and a Scotsman at heart, even if he’s a Catholic and a fool.”

  The chief of the Glencoe Macdonalds put off swearing the oath of allegiance until the very last minute; then a blizzard held him up, so he swore it late.

  “This is my chance to deal with them,” muttered John Dalrymple, the king’s Scottish minister, who had always hated the Macdonalds, and he got the king to sign an order to let him punish them as he chose.

  A few weeks later, the Macdonalds saw a column of Campbell soldiers winding down the path into Glencoe. The Campbell and Macdonald clans had always been enemies, but under the Scottish laws of hospitality every stranger was welcomed and given a bed for the night, so the Macdonalds let the soldiers into their cottages. Some days passed. Then, one night, when it was freezing cold and snow was falling, the Macdonalds banked up their fires and said goodnight, while the soldiers lay down on the floor with their muskets beside them. But the soldiers did not go to sleep. In the middle of the night they got up and attacked their hosts.

  Woken by the screams of women and children, the Macdonalds struggled to escape. Soldiers ran after the children as flames leaped from burning cottages and stained the snow blood red. The Macdonalds fled up into the bare hills, stumbling through snowdrifts, until the cold numbed their legs and they sank down to die on the bare hillside of Glencoe.

  Afterwards William said he signed his order to John Dalrymple without knowing what would happen. He didn’t understand Scotland and its different clans. But that just showed the Scots how little the government in London cared about them.

  Not long after William died, an even more serious argument blew up between Scotland and England about who should be king next. William and Mary had no children, so when both of them died, Mary’s younger sister, Anne, became queen. Anne’s seventeen children all died young (which was quite common in those days before proper medicine), so there was no one left to rule after her.

  James II was still alive. His supporters, the Jacobites, wanted him to be king; and when he died, they wanted his son to become James III. But James was a Catholic, and most people didn’t want to make him king as if the revolution had never happened. They called him the Pretender and began searching for an alternative. Lawyers dug out a family tree of the Stuarts and searched through it until they found a Protestant who could become king. He was a distant German cousin of Anne’s called George, and Parliament passed a law to say that when Anne died he should become King George I of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

  No one in Scotland liked being bossed about by the English. “We’re a separate kingdom!” raged Scottish MPs. “It’s not up to the English to say who’ll be king of Scotland!”

  All the same, a lot of Scots preferred George to the Pretender, and many thought it was time England and Scotland stopped quarrelling.

  “It doesn’t make sense for us to have different kings,” they said. “We trade together; we fight together; we’ve been ruled together for a hundred years. We shouldn’t just share a king – we should turn England and Scotland into one country. We should form a Union.”

  “Have you gone mad?” other Scots shouted. “The English are our enemies! Have you forgotten Robert Bruce and William Wallace?”

  “It’s time we looked beyond our own borders,” replied the Unionists. “A Union will let us trade freely with England and grow rich. We’ll keep our Scottish law and Scottish religion – and have MPs in London too!”

  So Scottish and English politicians prepared a treaty to abolish the Scottish government and turn Scotland and England into one country. For all their arguments, though, they still couldn’t persuade everyone that joining England was a good idea.

  “Traitors!” people chanted as the politicians went to Parliament to debate the Union.

  Rumours began to circulate
that MPs were being bribed to vote for the Union. It was said the duke of Argyll, the Unionist leader, had been promised lands in England and given a chest of gold to reward anyone who supported him. And at last the Scottish Parliament voted in favour of it.

  “This Parliament is now over,” said the lord chancellor, and even though he supported the Union, he felt a moment of sadness. “And there,” he added, “is the end of an auld song.”

  The Scottish Parliament wouldn’t meet again for three hundred years.

  So Scotland, England and Wales became a new country called Great Britain, and a new flag called the Union Jack was created by mixing together the Scottish saltire and the cross of St George (there was no room in it for a symbol of Wales, which many people still think wrong). No one could be sure whether Scottish MPs had voted for the Union because of the benefits it would bring or because they had been bribed, but most Scots were furious at what had happened. No one had listened to them! And they were sure that from now on the English would run Britain for their own advantage, never thinking about the good of Scotland.

  Marlborough’s War

  AT just that time, though, the British showed how much they could achieve if they only worked together.

  Louis XIV, France’s Sun King, didn’t like Britain’s Glorious Revolution because James II was a friend of his, while William of Orange was his deadliest enemy; so for most of William’s reign, Britain and France were at war. But although the war went on for nine years, Louis couldn’t beat the English and Scots, and another war started after Anne became queen. It began with an argument over who should be the next king of Spain, so it was called the War of the Spanish Succession.

  “This is our chance to smash the British once and for all!” roared Louis as he ordered his generals to get ready.

  But Britain was allied with Austria (which was a huge empire in those days) and had a brilliant general to lead its army – John Churchill.

  Churchill had realized that the most successful armies weren’t always the largest, or even the bravest, but the ones who were commanded most cleverly. He was skilled at getting his soldiers into just the right position for a battle, and surprising his enemies by attacking when they least expected it.

  He first beat the French at the Battle of Blenheim, in southern Germany. Thinking he was far away, the French had attacked Austria, but Churchill marched his soldiers two hundred miles, took them by surprise and defeated them.

  After that, he beat the French again and again, at the battles of Oudenarde, Ramillies and Malplaquet. To thank him for all his victories, the government made him duke of Marlborough, and built him a mansion outside Oxford called Blenheim Palace.

  Not long before, Europeans had joked that Britain was “the land of revolutions”. But in the War of the Spanish Succession the British showed they could defeat the strongest country in the world.

  A King from Germany

  DESPITE the victory against France, many Scots were still angry about the way English politicians had treated them, and hated being part of the Union. When Queen Anne died and King George I arrived from Germany, they grew even angrier.

  George had never been to Britain before. All he had done was run a small town called Hanover. He was bad-tempered, middle-aged, and spoke no English. His ship was delayed by a storm, so when he landed no one was there to welcome him. It wasn’t a good start.

  Some Scots began a rebellion to make the Pretender king instead. “He’s a Stuart,” they declared. “At least he’s one of us!”

  Their leader, the earl of Mar, gathered an army in Scotland and called all Jacobites to join him. Unfortunately the rebellion went wrong from the very start. The Pretender, who arrived from France, turned out to be just as foreign as George of Hanover. He had lived all his life abroad and hardly spoke English. Apart from that, he was as stubborn, bossy and slow-witted as his father, James II. And when some Highland chieftains led their clans to join the rebellion, a lot of Lowland Scots were put off.

  “Do we want our country to be like that?” they whispered as they saw the fierce-looking highlanders in their tartans. And they decided to support George instead.

  For his part, George of Hanover turned out to be a much better leader than anyone expected. He got an army ready and beat the Jacobites at the Battle of Sheriffmuir. The Pretender ran away to France, and the rebellion of 1715, which came to be known as the ’15, came to an end.

  So King George I kept his throne, and his successors – George II, George III and George IV – were kings for the next hundred years. That is why people of the eighteenth century are often known as Georgians. And with the war against France won and the Pretender out of the way, the Georgians settled down to get rich.

  The South Sea Bubble

  ONCE, the best way to be rich was to own land. Lords were rich because of their land; and kings, who owned the most land, were the richest of all. Merchants became wealthy too. They owned no land, but by buying and selling things they earned gold, which they locked away in strong chests.

  However, not many people were landowners or merchants. Most stayed poor, working on the land and eating what they could grow. They often went hungry, and that was how things had always been. There had always been rich and poor. No one thought the whole country could get richer.

  Yet after the Glorious Revolution, it did.

  Britain became rich by copying ideas from Holland. The Dutch had made themselves richer without owning any land at all – a lot of their country was water – and they weren’t that interested in gold either.

  “Money’s no good locked up in chests,” they said. “You have to use it if you want to get rich!”

  In the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, there was a bank that lent money to merchants, who paid interest to make the bank richer, and used the bank’s money to make themselves richer. Thanks to their bank, far more trade happened in Holland than anywhere else, and the whole country became wealthy.

  Then the Dutch found other ways to get rich. Groups of merchants started companies to trade together. If they needed more money to build ships, they divided the company into shares and sold them. In that way, ordinary people could buy a share in a trading company and make money. The cost of shares in the company went up or down depending on how well the company’s trade was going, so people got rich by buying and selling the shares as well.

  And that was when the Dutch realized that everything could be bought and sold. It wasn’t just food and clothes, beds and chairs, tables and candles and pans. It wasn’t just houses, fields, sheep, eggs, paintings, books and shoes. You could buy and sell money. You could buy and sell shares. You could buy and sell the chance of a house burning down or a ship being sunk at sea. Everything had a price, and the price wasn’t fixed. You could even make a fortune betting on whether the price of something would go up or down.

  The British soon copied the Dutch. Not long after the Glorious Revolution, a Bank of England was founded in London by William Paterson, a Scot, and John Houblon, a Huguenot (the Bank of England is still in charge of Britain’s money today), and the British started companies and began trading in shares.

  As they became richer, people spent the money they made on new clothes and houses, shopping and fashion. They turned London into one of Europe’s most exciting cities, where you could buy luxuries from all over the world. At night you could visit theatres and concerts, or go to pleasure gardens where bands played and waiters hurried through the crowds with trays of food and bottles of wine. Irish, Scots and Welsh, black people, Jews, French Protestants and English all jostled one another in the streets. Religion didn’t seem so important any more. All people cared about was how to become rich.

  The only problem with the new way of making money was that it was very risky. People could make fortunes buying and selling shares, but they could lose them as well.

  One day, a rumour went round the City of London that a business called the South Sea Company was making a lot of money.

  “What does the S
outh Sea Company do?” some asked.

  No one was quite sure, but people were so eager to get rich that no one cared. They all hurried to invest in it, and the price of South Sea Company shares shot up.

  “If we invest a hundred pounds,” men told their wives, “by the end of the month we’ll have a thousand! We never need to work again!”

  So families invested all they had. Carpenters sold their tools, merchants sold their ships, and rich ladies drove to the City in carriages to invest their jewels. None of them saw the danger they were in. The South Sea Company didn’t actually do anything, and wasn’t worth anything. It only looked big because so many people had put their money into it. It expanded like a bubble – and one day the bubble burst.

  A rumour went round that the directors of the South Sea Company were cheats. People started to sell their shares, so the share price began to go down instead of up. Suddenly, instead of getting richer, investors found they were getting poorer. They hurried to the City to sell their shares, but met crowds so thick they couldn’t get through. South Sea shares fell faster and faster, until they were worth less than people had paid for them. Then they were worth nothing at all.

  “Ruined!” whispered the carpenters, merchants and rich ladies. They had sold everything to invest in the company, and now they had nothing left. All they could do was stand in the street and whisper, “Ruined!”

  Daniel Defoe was a writer who lived near where the shares were bought and sold, and saw the investors walking home to tell their families what had happened. “I’ll remember a man with a South Sea face for as long as I live,” he wrote.

  Today people still invest in shares, and still make fortunes. London has become one of the great financial centres of the world, with share traders working in huge tower blocks in Canary Wharf and the City. But shares still crash sometimes, and when they do, there are pictures in the papers of traders sitting in front of their computers with their heads in their hands – and you can see what Daniel Defoe meant by “a man with a South Sea face”.