by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
Chapter 9
All About The Money
In our age when money seems to rule everything, it may come as a surprise to know that the Regency was far worse. Money, rather than merit, mattered. Everything came at a price, and without that price, nothing would happen. Military ranks were bought and sold; parliamentary seats and influence could be purchased for money; names of bankrupts were printed prominently in newspapers as a warning not to trade with them; cash was routinely given to informers as rewards; ecclesiastical livings in the established church were bought and sold. Vicars neglected the people of poor parishes if they held a more lucrative living elsewhere. The government took money from the poor in taxes and gave it to the rich in the form of sinecures – jobs that carried a salary but no work.
None of this was corruption and fraud, although that existed too. Bakers adulterated their bread, politicians paid voters to support them and mobs to intimidate their enemies; bribes were paid to witnesses to lie in court, and police officials used trumped-up charges to create felonies that would lead to rewards.
One form of property was the right to nominate the next occupant of a parish. In 1818 this right – ‘the advowson’ – was offered for the Rectory of Fiddington in Somerset. The advertisement laid more stress on the agricultural than pastoral. It was a healthy spot, convenient for the turnpike, and:
the Glebe contains about forty acres, near the parsonage house, and the parish consists of 770 acres of very fertile land and large proportion of this is annually tilled.
The present incumbent is 81 years of age.
With the present rector not far from death, and with a house and medium size farm to go with it, this was an exciting potential purchase.
The parish eventually changed hands in 1821, when the Reverend H.W. Rawlins succeeded the 84-year-old former incumbent. Since 1810, Rawlins, a theology graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, had also been Rector of Staplegrove, and after 1821 he continued in both jobs as each provided an income. He did not reside at Fiddington, leaving St Martin’s Church to be served either by a curate or nobody. This probably did not worry the parishioners of Fiddington, as there had been an absent rector for most of the eighteenth century. To modern eyes this seems to be the sign of a lazy and selfish character. However, Rawlins seemed to have been at least a passable cleric. In 1810 he donated two guineas to the widow and eight children of Lambert Kiddle. Rawlins was secretary of the Taunton Adult School Society and raised money for the Ladies’ Bible Association. What he did was normal for the time. A clerical posting was a piece of property and the incumbents had to find any way possible to earn a living. Jane Austen’s father, the Reverend George Austen, had a boys’ schools in his parish at Steventon in Hampshire. He also farmed, or more accurately, allowed others to farm for him.1
Money could also buy a commission in the armed forces, but there were limits. It never applied to the navy, and only really applied to infantry and cavalry regiments, who were regarded as socially superior to the Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers, where qualifications and seniority were the requirements. There was absolutely no stigma attached to purchase of rank, and it was regarded as another form of property – you bought your rank from somebody who was relinquishing it, either through his promotion or ‘selling out’. Even the Duke of Wellington once considered selling his rank in the army to pay off gambling debts.
This notice appeared in the newspapers. It was one of many:
Military Promotions
War Office, May 22nd 1818
2nd Regiment of Life Guards – Lieutenant William Elliot to be Captain of a troop, by purchase, vice Irby – Commission dated April 14 1818
The newly promoted Captain Elliot has chosen well – the Life Guards, with their link to the monarch and light duties around London, were a most desirable regiment. He would have paid the difference between the price of a captaincy and that of the lower rank. Money would not have been enough; he would have been vetted for social acceptability. Although a fixed set of fees existed, more money may have been necessary to secure the deal if there were other strong applicants. He replaced the Honourable Henry Edward Irby, son of Frederick Irby, Lord Boston, so William was already moving in elite social circles.
You did not always need to pay to be promoted. Captain Elliot knew this already. This from the London Gazette of December 1812, which listed all changes in armed forces personnel:
War Office Dec 15; 2d regiment of life guards; cornet and sub lieutenant William Elliot to be lieutenant without purchase
How had William achieved this without money? There are three possible ways. This was 1812, and people bought fewer commissions during wartime, when the 2nd Regiment of Guards would be fighting in Spain with Wellington rather than spending summer evenings at fashionable social occasions in their attractive uniforms. Another possibility was that William was replacing somebody who had been killed in battle, or he may have simply been promoted on merit and bravery. The system worked tolerably well with this mixture of paths to promotion, but it was money that was needed to scramble up the ladder, especially in peacetime. He would have paid for his first rank as a cornet, as well as needing to know the right people; both were important.
Money could not just be used to get you on in the military. It could be used to get you out. This is one of seven advertisements in the Morning Post on one day in August 1810:
MILITIA – A gentlemen who has been drawn in the militia and is in want of a substitute, to serve for five years or during the war, and to who a very liberal bounty will be given, by an application to Mr Jones, Charles Street…any young man who may have received a decent education and is presently out of employ, will find this a most desirable opportunity.
Mr Jones had been drawn at random to join a local militia. This was a home based force that was a serious commitment, and vital in times of war. However, if you did not want to do your duty you could pay to evade it. He would probably pay between £30 and £50 for his substitute. This made sense; he would have had to pay fines of a similar amount if he refused to serve in person, and would still be liable to be entered in future ballots. He was also being canny by directing his advertisement at the unemployed. His substitute would receive help for himself and his family if they fell on hard times, and medical help if they were injured. It was a reasonable bargain on both sides.
Whole businesses were set up to evade the militia; you could insure yourself against being picked out of the ballot; agencies recruited substitutes in advance – men between 18 and 45 over 5ft 4in – and acted as intermediaries for gentlemen with more money than patriotism. Mr Charonneau of the High Holborn Military Insurance Office offered not only bounties but rewards for ‘bringers’, people who procured substitutes. Although the whole system may seem dishonest to people today, that was not the view of the time. The substitutes were often more welcome by militia than reluctant recruits; it provided work and a transfer of money from the rich to the ambitious poor.2
Money was also vital to political promotion. Today, prime ministers get to the top mostly in their late fifties. This is partly because it takes a long time to secure a seat in parliament; during the Regency the belief was different. If a person was born to rule, then it was thought best if they got on with it, and start by purchasing a seat in parliament or rely on a political patron to lend them one. William Pitt’s ability to be Britain’s youngest prime minister at the age of 24 was helped considerably by being elected as MP for the rotten borough of Appleby, in the pocket of the Lowther family. The prime minister for most of the darkness years was Robert Jenkinson, later Lord Liverpool, who became MP for Rye in 1790, one year too early to take up his seat legally, so he was made to wait. Rye had six voters and was controlled by the Lamb family, who offered a seat to the young Jenkinson as his father was a member of Pitt’s government and Lamb expected this generosity to be recognised. Lord Liverpool became prime minister at 42 and died at 58, when the career of a modern politician would just be reaching its peak.
vast sums of the public money are bestowed upon individuals, as the salaries of sinecure places…selecting a few instances out of a great variety of the same nature, they beg leave to remind the House, that the right honourable George Rose holds the sinecure office of clerk of the parliament, with a salary of £3,278 per annum; that the right hon. George Lord Arden holds the sinecure offices of register of the high court of admiralty and of register of the high court of appeal for prizes, for which he receives, clear of deductions, 12,554l. per annum; and that the earl Camden, and the marquis of Buckingham, hold the sinecure offices of tellers of the exchequer, for which offices they receive, the latter 23,093l. the former 23,117l. per annum.
The petition went on to complain about the numbers of smaller grants to thousands of people, including foreigners (mostly in war subsidies). George Arden probably received more money than anybody for doing little; probably three times as much as the weavers’ estimate. In 1816, the hostile newspaper The Examiner stated that Arden received £38,566 per year.
The number of sinecures was one of the problems that was postponed for the duration of the war. There was growing political opposition to them. Pressure mounted from both sides of political opinion, from the radicals and from the new business class. To both of them it seemed reprehensible that these payments should be made to the elite in times of austerity and national debt.
When asked by a Parliamentary Commission in 1810 whether any inconvenience would arise if his sinecures were abolished, George Arden refused to even consider the question as appropriate, or talk about his sinecure – Register of the High Court of Admiralty – apart from the amount of money earned. It was a hereditary sinecure, as he gained it from his dead brother. Arden regarded the post as a piece of property and felt a discussion of the value of the sinecure would jeopardise it. Second and third on the list were the Marquis of Buckingham and the Marquis of Camden who both acquired £23,000. They were in receipt of this cash in 1807, when radical MP Thomas Cochrane pointed out that this was slightly more that the total paid out annually to wounded officers and widows of the whole Royal Navy.
Although the majority of the Church of England clerics were doomed to continue to be without a parish, and instead doing the work of those who had the money and connections, it was very lucrative at the top. In 1820 the Archbishop of Canterbury received £19,000. He headed an organisation that made no official payments to the widows and orphans of the clergy but relied on others to provide charity.
In 1820, journalist John Wade calculated that 2,344 persons received £2.5 million annually.3 These included members of the government, armed forces and the established Church. Some were salaries for actual posts. Lord Liverpool received £13,500 for being prime minister (The First Lord of the Treasury) and that was probably value for money. Lord Eldon, Speaker of the House of Lords, earned £18,000 from work and another £24,000 from sinecures.
Sinecures led to power, which allowed nepotism. Lord Eldon’s brother took £6,000 for doing nothing, and after retirement took a £4,000 a year pension to get over the exertion. Stratford Canning, the cousin of Foreign Secretary George Canning was given a sinecure in the Foreign Office in 1807 and by 1815 was working on the peace with France from a base in Switzerland on nearly £500 per year. John Wade also pointed out that large numbers of non-existent jobs were given to the younger members of the aristocracy:
Many Noble Lords and their sons, Rt. Hon. and Hon. Gentlemen, fill the offices of Clerks, Tide-Waiters, Harbour-Masters, Searchers, Guagers [Collectors of excise], Packers, Craners, Wharfingers, Prothonotaries [law clerks], and other degrading situations.
They were not degrading because they attracted no work. In the spirit of equality, women were included too:
There is one fine lady, a baroness, who is Sweeper of the Mall in the Park, for £340 a year; Lady Arabella Heneage is Chief Usher in the Court of Exchequer; and the Honourable Louisa Browning and Lady B. Martyn are Custos Brevium in the Court of Common Pleas.
Arabella Heneage was the wife of John Walker Heneage and the sinecure reverted to her when her husband died in 1806. He had, in turn, inherited it from his father. Heneage was an MP for Cricklade for four years in the 1790s and never spoke in the Commons.4
It was almost a social security system for the aristocracy and establishment. John Wade and many other radicals such as Cobbett, Burdett and Hone opposed the system; they called the sinecurists ‘state paupers’. Wade became less radical in later life, and his ranting against sinecures ended when Prime Minister Palmerston organised a weekly pension for him in his old age.
At the other end of the spectrum, the low cost of the legal system was an illusion. Its creaking apparatus was oiled by dubious payments. In order to catch criminals, rewards known as ‘blood money’ were offered to the informant on conviction. Despite the name, it wasn’t a compensation for a victim’s family, nor did it necessarily involve blood, but it did pervert the course of justice. Witnesses could be bought; honest witnesses could be suspected of being bought. Some reforms started in 1818, but it remained a process that was open to abuse.
Local groups were set up all over the country to plug the gaps of the justice system by offering their own informal reward system. Property owners would form a subscription society. There were hundreds all over the country; as usual one must stand for them all, they were more or less the same. The ‘Audlem and Wrenbury Association for the Discovery, Apprehension and Prosecution of Felons’ did exactly what it said. Forty or so local property owners offered rewards for help in apprehending criminals. The crimes had to be local and had to be to the detriment of one of the subscribers. Ten guineas was offered for horse stealing, housebreaking, and highway robbery; five guineas for large farmyard animals; two for small animals and fowl; and a guinea for the apprehension of people stealing crops or destroying farm property. Like the whole judicial system, it was unashamedly designed for the protection of property.
George Vaughan was a Bow Street officer who knew that justice was all about the reward money. He was paid a basic weekly retainer of £1. It was not much for a high profile police officer, but he had other sources of money. Small amounts were available for court appearances and night work, but most of his money came in the form of blood money.
There was no official reward for the detection of minor crimes, only for solving felonies. This meant that petty criminals and juveniles were ignored, even encouraged, until they ‘weighed £40’ – that is, committed a felony that was worth a reward.
At 12.30 am one day in 1814, Vaughan went to the Falcon public house in Gray’s Inn Lane and noticed local thieves John Farthing and John Thomas ‘drinking out of the same pot’. The officer now thought they weighed the right amount, so Vaughan followed them when they left the pub in haste. A few streets later, Vaughan apprehended Thomas with a flitch of bacon under his coat. The bacon was worth seven shillings. This made the crime ‘grand larceny’ – and a reward payable to Vaughan. However there was nobody who came forward to say that they owned the bacon or had seen the robbery. If there had been witnesses, they would have been given a share of the reward, to be decided by the arresting police officer. The scope for corruption was obvious.
Vaughan had enjoyed a distinguished career, and had been publicly thanked by the magistrates at various times. He was a successful witness against bigamists, forgers, highway robbers and burglars.
He visited the house of James Poole late in the evening in December 1815, when it had become too d
ark for James to cut any more cloth for his tailoring business. Vaughan warned him that his house was about to be robbed and he was here to prevent it. Could Poole imagine the danger to his wife and children? Perhaps they would be murdered in their beds! Poole was frightened. Vaughan asked Poole to mark his cloth so it could be identified later; Poole was unsure how to do this and Vaughan did it for him, surprisingly skilfully. They left the house, leaving the door on a latch on Vaughan’s instructions.
Poole was told to continue his business; he went to visit a customer but returned earlier than planned and on the way back saw thieves carrying his rolls of calico. He cried ‘stop thief’. ‘After I seized him, the officers came up immediately; I don’t know where they came from.’
When he met Vaughan, Poole was displeased. Contrary to Vaughan’s promises, he had lost three rolls of cloth. Vaughan was also angry: ‘he said he knew where to find them, and he knew where to find the other thieves; but I had spiked the job by calling out “stop thief”; for he knew where they had gone.’
He never saw his cloth again. Poole also ruined the later prosecution by admitting that he could recognise their faces without artificial light. The crime was reduced from burglary to the daylight crime of stealing from a dwelling house and the reward disappeared. Vaughan told Poole that he had spoiled it: ‘by saying it was so light…you have deprived me of the three rewards of forty pounds, which you would have had part of for taking the one man’.
Vaughan had also been deprived of the reward for John Farthing, the man from the unproven bacon theft, who was also picked up from the street on the night of the robbery and added to the charge list as revenge for escaping last time.