Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Page 3
Weavers made up one of the biggest occupation groups who were killed and injured at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in August 1819. This was a demonstration for parliamentary reform and better working conditions. More than 60,000 peaceful men, women and children were attacked by armed cavalry resulting in fifteen deaths and over 600 injuries. In a sarcastic reference to Wellington’s triumph in 1815, it was dubbed the ‘Peterloo’ massacre.
When the Morning Post satirised the groups that were at Peterloo, their first target was the handloom weaver:
Diggory Dunderhead, a very honest and hard-working stocking weaver, went to the Meeting of the 16th August, to look for his master at Peterloo, with the view of receiving eighteen pence for a whole week’s work, on which he had to maintain a wife and thirteen small children (all under three years of age) for seven days. It will be shown that he was one of the many thousands who were mutilated on that day. Mr Dunderhead meeting his master, who was one of the Yeomanry Cavalry, applied (most respectfully taking o’ his hat) for his wages. ‘Wages!’ replied the brute (his master). ‘I’ll pay thee in a crack;’ and with that he lifted up his sword (which had been sharpened for the purpose), and seemed about to strike, when Diggory pathetically exclaimed – ‘Squire Jollychops, thee wo’ no hurt me, I know;’ and, while he was speaking, the same blow took o’ his left-hand, and both his ears. The hat fell to the ground, and has not since been recovered, nor has the eighteen pence been paid.6
From his surname, Diggory is deliberately presented as stupid; he has an impossible number of children, with the implication that Poor Law support has produced them. His wages are stated by him as much lower than any poor weaver – he is a liar; his master is presented as a cardboard-cut-out villain, and the terrible deaths and injuries of the day are mocked. Although this was an extreme characterisation, there was not a lot of sympathy in the Regency for the poor handloom weaver. What they did not know, but might have suspected, was that far worse was to come.
Chapter 3
Making Life Worse
The Corn Law, the Budget, the Game Laws and the Lottery
The British soldiers at Waterloo, with their Prussian allies, defeated Napoleon in June 1815. The sacrifices had been made by the soldiers and workers, but the government handed the victory to the landlords and the richest taxpayers. The aristocracy had invested heavily in their land since the 1790s, putting fields under the plough that had not been used since medieval times and fencing in land that had previously been open to the rural labouring poor. In 1815, the price of a quarter (512lbs) of wheat had fallen to sixty-five shillings; this spelt economic disaster for the aristocracy and was a great problem for their tenants, as rents would become unaffordable. Food prices needed to go back to the same levels as during the Napoleonic War for the ruling class to prosper.
It was in the spirit of protecting the already privileged that Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, introduced the Corn Bill in March 1815. Landowners argued that the wartime investment in agriculture meant Britain was now self sufficient in food, but the price needed to be maintained to allow landowners to recoup their earlier investment. European and American farmers would always be able to produce food more cheaply because they were free from the burdens of tithes and taxes that were levied in Britain. The importation of cheap food would bankrupt landowners and their tenants and put Britain at the mercy of foreign food supplies, which would be withdrawn at times of conflict.
Meetings were held all over the country rehearsing these arguments, including one in Warminster, Wiltshire in January 1815 organised by local landowner, John Benett. The Benett family had had a good war. On the proceeds of high wheat prices, Benett had rebuilt his home, Pythouse, adding a Palladian frontage with pillars, portico and steps. Other buildings included a huge walled vegetable garden, a dovecote, a stable block, an orangery and an icehouse. Like many of the British aristocracy, they had spent considerable amounts on agriculture during the war and had made immense profits from a closed market. Unlike many others, who were merely grasping, he had a reputation for being an innovative farmer who also added some value to his estates.
This meeting in Wiltshire was different to the hundreds held around the county in one crucial way. John Benett was not the only substantial landowner at the meeting. Another, who made Benett’s landholding look puny, was Henry Hunt. He was a gentlemen farmer with 3,000 acres in Wiltshire and Somerset. Despite an economic interest in the proposed Corn Law, Hunt was scathing about landlords like Benett and the arguments they employed to justify their profits. Hunt declared the meeting improper; he knew for a fact that the local tradesmen and artisans had been told there was nothing to interest them in this meeting and that they should not attend. He invited Benett to hold an open meeting and then tell the people that he was planning a petition to parliament to raise the price of bread. He then issued a further dare: tell the poor people that he was doing it in their economic interest!
Hunt then explained how the Napoleonic War had created inequality. In the central Wiltshire village of Enford in the previous thirty years, for example, agricultural wages had risen from 6s to 8s; in that period the quartern loaf had doubled in price to 10d. The rents from local estates, for example from the Benett’s own Pythouse estate, had quadrupled from £400 pounds to £1,600 a year. Hunt concluded that it was clear to him who gained from high prices. The Leicester Chronicle of 14 January 1815 reported:
This proves that bread has rised [sic] more than three times more than labour, and land more than twice as much as bread, and six times more than labour. At the present price of land, corn, bread and labour, the landlord is benefitted three times more than the farmer, and six times and much as the labourer.
Some newspapers reported the meeting but completely omitted Hunt’s speech. It was not what their readers wanted to hear.1
Thousands of petitions from all parts of the country were sent to parliament by the aristocracy and richer farmers asking for protection from the type of competition that ordinary working people encountered every day. Meetings were large and formal, headed by the local aristocracy and gentry and packed with tenants who were so dependent on the landowners for their living that they were politically neutered. The Bury and Norfolk Post reported that the 4,000 strong meeting in Stowmarket, Suffolk was interrupted briefly just as the decision to petition parliament was about to be made:
When the assent of the meeting was called for, there was a clamorous cry of No Corn Bill! No Corn Bill!, but on the Sheriff’s requiring that those who dissented from the measure should put up their hands, not a single arm was observed to be uplifted.
The powerful were making the rules.
There was no doubt that parliament, who represented the same people as appeared at the county meetings, would legislate to ban foreign importations until home produce reached 80s a quarter. This price was so high that it was a de facto ban on foreign imports.
As the bill was about to become a law, petitions against the Corn Bill were produced in both rural and urban areas. The Birmingham petition was signed by 50,000 people. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge crafted an anti-Bill petition for the poor people of Calne in Wiltshire. It was quite important to get the wording right; if the obsequiousness was not complete and the wording accurately phrased, the petition would not even be read and if it were read, it would be ignored.
Resentment bubbled up. The London mob appeared in the Palace Yard at Westminster, trying to make their voice felt in the traditional way. On Monday 6 March, big crowds of ‘disaffected persons’ appeared around the Palace of Westminster, hooting and hissing members of the Lords and Commons and inquiring robustly about how they intended to vote. Later, the crowds stopped coaches reaching their destination, and members had to walk through the crowds, supported by the local militia. The militia pushed the mob into the surrounding streets and, in a clear indication that the mob had been following the debates closely, they destroyed houses of those who initiated and supported the Bill.
It was
the biggest London riot since the anti-Catholic disturbances of 1780. Rioting continued into Tuesday when the Corn Law was passed, with parliament protected from the Londoners’ wrath by soldiers with fixed bayonets. By Thursday, the panicking government offered outlandish rewards for information about the ringleaders. It was by this mixture of law, violence, and bribery that the state operated against the anger of the lower orders.
The rich were not the only victims of the four days of rioting. Two innocent bystanders were shot in the head outside the house of Frederick John Robinson MP in Old Burlington Street. From early evening on a Tuesday, his house was surrounded by a mob of about sixty throwing stones and brickbats. Robinson was paying the price of introducing the Corn Bill to parliament. However, his price was less than that of 19-year-old midshipman Edward Vyse, who was walking past the house and was hit with a shot from the pistol that was designed to scare the mob of boys outside. He died immediately at the scene.
There was another fatality that night, a young woman called Jane Watson (in some newspapers she is Mary, and the coverage was considerably less than that of Edward Vyse) who was in her mid-twenties and already a naval widow. In the formulaic words of the time, she ‘lingered’ in hospital for a few days before dying. When Frederick Robinson went to the Commons to explain the events in his house, he cried, and the sympathetic property and landowners gave him the nickname ‘The Blubberer’.
In order to make life even more intolerable for the lower orders, the Property Tax was abolished in 1816, and the money lost was replaced by taxing consumption, which hit the poorest hard. It was the people who supported the Corn Law who also wanted the poor to pay more in indirect taxes when the Property Tax was abolished.
Unlike the Corn Laws, the members of parliament themselves must take the blame for this. The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and the foreign minister Lord Castlereagh knew how desperate the financial situation was and wanted to keep some form of the tax. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, came to the House of Commons with a confident proposition. He would halve the rate of tax to five per cent and he would protect small farmers. He regretted not being able to expire it – ‘expire’ rather than ‘abolish’ it – making it clear that it was a time limited expedient. He promised cuts in expenditure from £30 million to £20 million per year and the end of the Property Tax in two years.
Vansittart argued in vain that more indirect taxation on expenditure would hit the poor hard. For many MPs, the fact that there would be government commissioners enquiring about their income and lifestyle was the last straw and they called the tax ‘Unnecessary, Unconstitutional and Inquisitorial’.
Such was the outcry about taxing property that even religious organisations with a deserved reputation for humanitarianism were opposed to it. Lord Lansdowne told the Lords that he had a petition from ‘some of the persons called Quakers’ who opposed the continuance of the Property Tax. Their reasons for this view will never be known for sure; the Lords rejected the petition without reading it, because it had been addressed simply to ‘The Upper House’ and not the ‘Lords Temporal and Spiritual’. The Quakers had refused to use the word ‘Lord’ as they believed that this should be reserved for the Supreme Being; the forty-four Lords refused to countenance such disrespect and voted thirty-five to nine not to even read it. One reason for the Quakers’ opposition to such a tax might have been their objection to the use of government money to finance wars. The Quakers had a long history, especially in the USA, of refusing to take part in transactions that were used to finance war.2
Sir William Curtis MP wanted the tax abolished, albeit for different motives. Sir William was a maverick. His fellow MPs used to openly mock him; it was a parliamentary age that was much less polite than now. He had outraged his colleagues by opposing the Corn Law, saying that landlords were already well protected. Perhaps his modest background – the family wealth came from the manufacture of sea biscuits for sailors – made him less worried about the aristocracy. The Regency cartoonists and satirists called him ‘Billy Biscuit’, and his colleagues, a little more respectfully, ‘Sir W. Biscuit’.
Billy was not a great speaker, and not particularly well educated. He had gained his knighthood in 1802 for his record of constantly voting as the government wished, but revolted on the subject of the continuance of the Property Tax. The tax had been a war tax…where was the war now? He was, strictly speaking, correct, as the tax had been introduced in 1799 as a temporary measure to pay for the war with France. Despite selling food to the wartime navy, Billy demanded the demobilisation of 90,000 sailors to prevent the rich being taxed so heavily that they could not continue to help the poor with charity.
On 18 March, the government lost the vote. The debate was ended by William Wilberforce, the man who led the campaign for the abolition of the Slave Trade. Wilberforce suggested that the government simply cut its budget faster and more savagely.
Unlike the Corn Laws, it did not need a ring of soldiers around parliament to abolish the tax and there were no riots. However, it certainly added to the misery of the lower orders. The government now had a yearly deficit and an accumulated debt of £834 million and it was clear that the elders and betters of the establishment were going to allow the poor to pay the price of austerity. The only remaining way of raising the money was by increasing taxes on spending. This indirect taxation pushed up the price of tea, tobacco, sugar and beer. Much of the money raised from the poor would be used to pay interest on the loans given mostly by the wealthy, who had just opted out of making their contribution by allowing the Property Tax to expire.
Britain was already heavily taxed. Tithes were payable to the Church of England clergy. All the adequate roads had fees payable at tollgates. Now, lots of basic items were to be taxed and the burden fell on the poor, who used up more of their income on necessities. A crowd of 35,000, mostly workmen, attended a political meeting in Glasgow in November 1816 where the taxes were listed:
We are grievously harassed and borne down with the salt tax and the leather Tax, the soap tax and candle Tax, the sugar tax, the tea Tax, the spirit tax, the Licenses, the window light and house duty tax, the stamp tax, the Manservant tax, the Cart tax, the Horse tax, the dog tax….
The people of Glasgow did not mention the Coal Tax; it bore a much bigger burden on the poor of London. The Regency government found it very hard to collect indirect taxes, and many of what we call taxes were actually duties – coal was a difficult commodity to tax and some coal attracted no tax. A petition in the Windsor and Eton Express in April 1819 showed the vagaries of the system. Coal that entered the Port of London paid a duty, largely because the government was in a position to control its movement. Other ports had a lower rate of taxation, and those people who lived near the source of coal paid no duty at all. So it was the poor of London, with the least access to any kind of fuel, who paid the most. This shows the difference between taxation 200 years ago and today – there was no attempt to create fairness; taxes and duties were only designed to raise revenue. The fact that Regency winters were some of the coldest on record made the situation even worse.
In a decade when food and basic goods were heavily taxed, the government made it even more difficult to take food from the land owned by the aristocracy. The Game Laws were a piece of class-based legislation forbidding the rural poor from taking pheasant, partridge, hares, and rabbits from the lands of the aristocracy. As ever, poverty had a moral aspect, but not the immorality of the poor suffering. The Morning Post (July 1816) reported on the thoughts of some members of parliament. The aristocracy had become richer since the original game laws. Game was still given away by the long-standing aristocracy as part of their responsibilities to the poor; it was noted that the newer owners of land were less interested in either giving away game, or even owning it.
This put the poor in moral danger; they could take from the land of the aristocracy with impunity and make a living from the property of others. The strong belief seemed to be t
hat the poor only worked if they had to; possible starvation was motivation. Those who plundered the aristocratic estates would not want to work again; they would end up being transported and depriving the country of their labour, or worse still, hanged. If they were in prison, their relatives would have to be supported by charity or the poor rates. A poached hare was transformed into national ruin in a few illogical steps.
The poor could not eat the game, but the game could eat the poor. Pheasants and partridges would eat their grain; rabbits would consume their grass, and hares would attack parsnips, and nothing could be done about it. The New Monthly magazine reported that some landowners would not even allow small boys to chase off rooks, in case there was a precious game bird among them. A farmer whose land was worth more than 40s (£2) in rent per year could vote for a member of parliament, while he had to have £100 a year to even consider killing a partridge.
The law was passed in July 1816 with the same robust punishments that were used to protect other property. Few people were actually transported for the maximum of seven years, but the code was bloody enough even without an enforced visit to Botany Bay.
William Peachy of Saffron Walden was given six months hard labour and imprisonment; he had been spotted on the land of Lord Bristol between the hours of 8.00 pm and 7.00 am. Although nobody saw any poaching, the fact that he was on the land with a gun was enough to convict him. The person watching him also felt the need to show great discretion. He was the only witness and could not be sure that the two men would not kill him to avoid the new punishment. That was always a danger when the punishment for murder and poaching was similar in severity. The ‘bloody code’ was designed to protect property but it almost encouraged extreme violence.
His partner in property crime – John Rayner – was also found guilty. He had previously spent a week in prison for owning a lurcher – an unlicenced hunting dog. Moses Johnson of Flint was given the same punishment. Ownership of a dog in a location where you were not known was suspicion enough for some gamekeepers, and such a suspicion was enough for magistrates.