ABSTRACT
Despite the deplorable muddle of British transport arrangements between Balaclava Bay and the trenches before Sebastopol only seven miles away, despite the follies committed by the Army Medical Department, the military situation was improving when the great storm of November 14th brought havoc and disaster. The first political result of the disaster was not what might have been expected. Ministers put on a bold face, called Parliament early for war-business and adjourned before Christmas with their hold apparently unshaken. The most extraordinary demonstration of the dangerous restlessness of the “public” during the agitated summer of 1855 was, perhaps, the three successive Sundays of rioting in Hyde Park by mobs who had been provoked in the first place by Lord Robert Grosvenor’s Bill to put down Sunday trading in the Metropolis. The retaliatory and indiscriminate mobbing to which fashionable society had been subjected while driving through the Park had speedily expanded in political importance.
