Britain Abroad

_{Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, who  British public opinion supported in the face of Austrian repression. © Getty Images}

The most exciting imperial news of 1851 was of the Australian gold rush following the discovery of gold by sheep station manager Edward Hammond Hargraves near Bathurst in New South Wales.

Some people had known of the presence of gold, but kept it a secret for fear of exciting the convict population; now the race was on to get rich.

The transportation of convicts was soon to end and administration had to reflect developing populations at a time when world prices for Australian mutton and wool were increasing. Victoria was proclaimed a separate colony from New South Wales on 1 July and new constitutions also came into effect for South Australia and Van Dieman’s Land (later Tasmania) to fit them for the challenges of rapid change.

An influx of Chinese immigrants into Australia brought demands for legislation to keep non-white immigrants out of the continent which would soon see fruition in the ‘Exclusion Acts’ starting in 1855.

Ireland was still desperately impoverished and scarcely recovering from the famine that began in 1846. The resulting curse was widespread blindness caused by years of malnutrition; 250,000 people emigrated from the already depleted population.

With regard to Europe, British public opinion was wholeheartedly on the side of the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, whose rebellion against Austrian domination had been suppressed with the aid of another European despotic power: the Russians. No one was in any doubt whose side the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston was on. ‘The Austrians are really the greatest brutes that ever called themselves by the undeserved name of civilised men’ he wrote in a letter.

Kossuth and his rebels sought asylum in Turkey but then, in the summer of 1851 thanks to Palmerston’s assistance, they left and sailed to Britain. Kossuth was rapturously received and feted at a series of celebrations on his route to London. He had intended to visit Palmerston to thank him but the prime minister and the cabinet emphatically refused to permit the recognition of such a rebel.

In continuing turbulence on the continent, the French Second Republic ended after a coup in December engineered by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in which troops fired on resisters in the ‘massacre on the boulevards’. This was another step towards Louis Napoleon’s declaring himself emperor which was attractive to the Napoleonic pretensions of some French citizens, but disturbing to the British who had had enough trouble with his uncle. Palmerston’s casual approval of the coup led to his dismissal from the government. The Austrian leader Prince Schwarzenberg gave a ball to celebrate his departure

Over in Asia, hostility from Burma towards British traders was the early sign of another war brewing with the Asian kingdom. A neighbouring country was more affable: in Siam King Mongkut Rama IV ascended to the throne. He was the first Thai king to speak English and he began a correspondence with foreign rulers, including Queen Victoria. He instituted a programme of reforms of administration and education which included engaging an English governess for his own household. The governess Anna Loenowens, wrote about her experiences which were (a hundred year later, in 1951) to be the subject of a hit musical, The King and I.

Jad Adams