POLITICAL HISTORY 



bought in by his publisher, and the further advocacy of the charter was 

 openly abandoned.'" 



In the midst of all this seething Chartist and Radical agitation a tem- 

 porary lull occurred, afforded by the visit of the queen and Prince Albert to 

 Liverpool and Manchester in 185 1. Of the queen's own impressions we 

 read in her diary, where she observed that at the latter place she was sur- 

 rounded by 



a very intelligent but painfully unhealthy-looking population, men as well as women, who 

 kept the best of order during the procession of that day, better we read than had ever been 

 kept on similar occasions in London, Glasgow, Dublin, Edinburgh or any other city we have 

 visited. 



The queen goes on to remark that 



the order and behaviour of the people, who were not placed behind any barriers, was the 

 most complete we have seen in our many progresses through capitals and cities ... for 

 there was never a running crowd. Nobody moved and therefore everybody saw well and 

 there was no squeezing. 



If Queen Victoria was agreeably pleased with the Lancashire people, it is 

 equally true that the people were delighted with their queen. She won all 

 hearts. The poorest among them perhaps felt that, however hostile or harsh 

 the Parliament or the laws might be, they had a friend in their sovereign, 

 one who would see them righted and who would never betray or desert them. 

 It is quite possible the queen's appearance amongst them did much to lighten 

 the gloom that pressed upon the working classes of Lancashire at this period. 

 They abandoned their Radical attitude for the time, at all events, and the 

 queen, in her delightfully sly, humorous way, refers to the honour done her by 

 the mayor and other city officials, who, though they had hitherto been too 

 Radical to wear any robes of office, were, on the occasion of her visit, most 

 beautifully dressed ! The Lancashire people never rested till the queen came 

 again, which she did in 1857, when the crowds at Manchester were greater 

 than ever, and the enthusiasm beyond belief. ' Nothing but kind and 

 friendly faces,' says the queen in her diary recording her impressions of the 

 visit. 



In 1859 the Volunteer movement, which had died away with the re- 

 moval of danger from Napoleon I, sprang into life again at Lord Palmerston's 

 suggestion of danger from France."^' Rifle Corps were again formed all over 

 Lancashire, and formed the nucleus of the volunteer force as we know it to-day. 

 In 1 86 1 terrible disasters befell both the queen and Lancashire. In the 

 last month of that year the Prince Consort died, and the American War 

 brought upon Lancashire the cotton famine."' The political sympathies of 

 the Lancashire working men were, however, all with the North,^''* which 

 they believed to be the cause of freedom, and such was their fine independent 

 spirit that they would not have accepted deliverance at the price of a victory 

 for the slave-owners. The voice of men of this calibre was needed in the 

 counsels of Parliament, and the local distress and the growth of population in 

 these great Lancashire (and other northern) towns made the question of 

 granting an extension of the Parliamentary franchise very urgent. From the 

 close of the 'fifties' and throughout the 'sixties' agitation for representation 



"' Gammage, op. cit. 381. '" Justin McCarthy, Hisi. of Our Ouin Times, iii, 229-30. 



^ For details of this see below, p. 319. '" Justin McCarthy, Hist, of Our Own Times, iii, chap. xlir. 



253 



