Richard Cobden and the Crimean War

In the early 1840s the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws had seen the rapid rise to national prominence of the Manchester calico printer, Richard Cobden (1804-65). Previously known for his pamphlets on foreign policy and his leading part in the incorporation of Manchester in 1838, Cobden, ably assisted by his friend the Quaker cotton spinner John Bright (1811-89), led the Anti-Corn Law League’s assault on the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws, or as Cobden preferred the ‘bread taxes’, had become for many Radicals and Liberals the symbol of aristocratic power and popular oppression in early Victorian Britain. Their Repeal, although carried out by the Conservative leader Sir Robert Peel in 1846, foreshadowed for many a new age of middle-class dominance in British politics – the novelist Thackeray predicted ‘Dicky’ Cobden’s becoming prime minister. Subsequently Cobden achieved the reputation of ‘the International Man’, influential in Europe and the United States, while as a leading ‘Independent Radical’ in British politics his ideas on the state, economic policy and foreign affairs were vitally important to the Liberal Party.

The coincidence of the bicentenary year of the birth of Cobden and the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Crimean War prompts an instructive reminder that however important he and his legacy proved for the British Liberal party, his strident opposition to the War had seen the celebrated hero of the Anti-Corn Law League reduced to a position of impotence and despair. For Cobden and Bright, the War’s most persistent and vociferous critics, experienced a striking reversal in their political fortunes, alienated from their erstwhile supporters and rejected by the electorate in 1857. As Kinglake, the great, if Turcophile, contemporary historian of The Invasion of the Crimea (10 vols. 1863-75) put it, Cobden and Bright ‘had shut themselves out from the counsels of the nation. They were powerless’. This was particularly surprising in Cobden’s case for following the success of the campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, he had enjoyed a high political profile. He had triumphantly toured continental Europe, acclaimed from Malaga to Moscow as the ‘apostle of free trade’. Returning to Britain in October 1847 he had played a central part in Parliament in the campaign for financial reform, including the reduction of military expenditure. Outside Parliament, he had vigorously promoted peace and national education. In 1851 Cobden had acted as one of the Commissioners for the Great Exhibition which itself had served as an advertisement for the causes of free trade and peace. Notably, too, in 1852 he achieved permanence in the political vocabulary as the term ‘Cobdenism’ was coined.