The Defense of the Old Regime, 1815–48 479Queen Victoria gave scant help to the campaigns to
change such attitudes and laws. She once wrote: “The
Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak
or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of
‘Women’s Rights’... with all its attendant horrors.... [I]t is a
subject which makes the Queen so furiousthat she can-
not contain herself.” Ironically, the force of her example
as a strong woman simultaneously served to advance the
cause of emancipation, which she opposed.
The first changes in the legal restrictions on
women resulted from the work of an outraged individ-
ual instead of a women’s movement. Caroline Norton,
the wife of an M.P., had an intimate friendship with a
Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne. This so enraged
her husband (a confessed adulterer) that he sued the
prime minister for alienation of his wife’s affections.
Caroline Norton then discovered she would not be al-
lowed any role or representation in the trial because the
law considered her interests to be represented by her
husband. The suit failed, and the Nortons separated
(she could not even divorce her husband), with the law
awarding custody of their children to the father. Caro-
line Norton thereupon launched a pamphlet campaign
that led to the Infant Custody Act of 1839, giving
mothers limited rights over their infant children to age
seven. Her role in the evolution of women’s rights did
not stop with that victory. She came from a talented
family (her grandfather was the dramatist Richard
Sheridan), and she supported herself comfortably by
writing. In the 1850s her husband, now badly debt-
ridden, legally seized all of her royalties as his property,
and Caroline Norton became a central figure in the
campaign to obtain a Married Woman’s Property Act.
Other issues received more attention than women’s
rights, both from contemporaries and subsequent histo-
rians. The chief interest of middle-class liberals was the
repeal of the Corn Laws, the high tariffs on imported
grain that kept the price of bread high, the landowning-
class prosperous, and workers hungry. Repeal, however,
would produce cheaper bread, healthier workers (who
still relied on starches for 50 percent of their total calo-
ries), and business profits (because workers need not be
paid so much if bread were not dear). To win repeal,
British liberals (led by Manchester business interests)
founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which became the
international model of a political lobbying group. At the
same time, a parallel campaign of working-class radicals
known as the Chartist movement (named for the
National Charter of 1838) outlined a democratic pro-
gram: universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, the
abolition of property qualifications to serve in Parlia-
ment, the payment of salaries to M.P.s (so the poor
could serve), the creation of equal-sized constituencies,
and annual elections.
The fate of these two campaigns shows the cau-
tious approach of European liberals. The leaders of the
repeal campaign, John Bright (the M.P. son of a cotton-
mill owner) and Richard Cobden (a wealthy Manches-
ter textile factory owner), succeeded by courting
conservatives. They convinced moderate Tories, led by
Sir Robert Peel (now dubbed Re-Peel), to adopt free
trade as economic orthodoxy. The same coalition, how-
ever, would not accept Chartism. The Chartists in-
cluded radicals such as Feargus O’Connor, a newspaper
editor whose willingness to consider violence fright-
ened both the conservative government and the liberals
who claimed to be his allies. Although Chartism sum-
marized most elements of modern democracy, it did
not come close to adoption.International Liberalism and Slavery
Nothing better illustrates the strength of conservative
regimes and the weakness of liberal reformers in Met-
ternichian Europe than the persistence of serfdom in
eastern Europe and slavery in European colonies. In
1700 virtually every state in Europe had practiced one
of these forms of enslavement in some part of its terri-
tory. Britain had no serfs at home but had built slave
economies in America. France had both serfdom at
home and slavery in its colonies. Most of Russia, Prus-
sia, and Austria lived in serfdom. During the Enlighten-
ment, three important states abolished serfdom: Savoy,
Baden, and Denmark. The abolition of serfdom during
the French Revolution led to the spread of this idea to
Switzerland, Poland, Prussia, and Bavaria. The French
abolition of colonial slavery did not, however, persuade
other slave states to follow, though Denmark and
Britain both ended their slave trades, and the United
States stopped the importation of new African slaves.
Abolitionists thus faced a great task in 1815. They
won a few victories between 1815 and 1848, but mil-
lions of people in Western civilization remained in slav-
ery or serfdom throughout the age of Metternich.
Alexander I abolished serfdom in his Baltic provinces,
and the revolutions of 1830 ended serfdom in several
German states. At the beginning of 1848, however, feu-
dal obligations still restricted peasants in the Austrian
and the Hungarian portions of the Habsburg Empire, in
a dozen German states (including Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
the homeland of Queen Victoria’s consort), in the