by David Crane
And as he waited, something was about to happen to him and to the whole of Britain. The day before Sir Augustus Frazer had asked what the real name of this place was and now a new word was about to be given to the language, a new dynamic forged in the shifting triangular relationship of government, army and people, a heightened sense of British history, prestige and destiny born. And at the heart of it were the Wheelers, the outcasts and casualties of society who made up the core of Wellington’s ‘infamous army’. ‘Think what they are thinking of us in England,’ Wellington told them, and it was not only England. As Wheeler took up his new position north of Hougoumont, the Bath mail-coach from London would be just arriving, bringing the last letter he had written to his family from Grammont five days before, to add to all the letters of his they had carefully kept since he had joined the army six years before. And across the whole of the British Isles, wives, parents, children, brothers and sisters of every class waited on the same news. They waited in Dublin and Drogheda – to take just one regiment at random, the 73rd of Foot, a Highland regiment only six years earlier – they waited in Ballyboy and Ballyseedy, in Trallee, Tyrone, Tipperary, Lismore and Leitrim; in Glasgow, Paisley, Perth, Peebles, Annan, Ayr, Dumfries, Inverness, Edinburgh and the Isle of Mull; in Betchworth, Bewdley, Birmingham, Blackfriars and Banstead, in Walsall, Worcester, Warwick, Wells, Wolverhampton, Wadhurst and Westminster, in Ashbourne, St Albans, Smarden, Bromyard, Meopham, Uppingham, Hereford, Northampton, Tower Hamlets, Lincoln, Frome, Isleworth, Colchester, Boston, Tamworth, York, Bingley, Oxford, Shepton Mallet and a hundred more cities, towns, villages and farms across Britain and Ireland. For the last time in Wellington’s career, the scum of the earth was about to rise to the surface.
9 a.m.
Carrot and Stick
The Duke of Wellington might have harboured his suspicions about the levelling tendency of Methodism among the scum of the earth who made up his army, but if the Reverend Edmund Grindrod’s Altrincham Methodist Sunday School was anything to go by, he had little to fear. If you had walked past the school building earlier you would have heard the sound of hymns, but at nine o’clock in the morning, with the Superintendant Mr John Barrow’s final exhortation to the children still seven interminable hours away, hardly a murmur escaped the schoolroom to ruffle the Sabbath peace.
In the world beyond the classroom walls, Altrincham was still the bustling, ‘cheerful’ market town that had delighted the infant Thomas De Quincey – the square full on market day of fruit and flowers and ‘bonny young women’ ‘tripping cocquettishly’ about – but here there was an order and rhythm to the day that no child was ever allowed to disturb. At eight thirty in the morning each teacher would take the school register for the different classes, and as a child answered to his or her name, make a neat slanting mark from left to right, completing the ‘x’ at the afternoon roll call with a corresponding mark in the opposite direction: Charles Leicester, William Leicester, John Leicester – the Leicesters were all strict in their attendance, and on their way to the reward of a first hymnal – Christopher Briggs, Mary Hewitt, George Worsley, Ellen Roger, little Macaijah Harrington … something just over two hundred and fifty in all, boys and girls in roughly equal numbers from the age of seven upwards, crowded into the one cramped schoolroom.
There had been a Sunday school in the town since 1783, when another Leicester – the Wesleyan Oswald Leicester, a prosperous grocer and mayor of Altrincham for that year – rented for his son Oswald a small upper room above a cottage in Thorley Moor Lane to teach the town’s children. Within a year or two that room had become too small for their growing numbers, and soon after the school had moved to a site at the corner of Norman Place and Regent Road where, under the shadow of the four-storey-high Kinder’s Mill, Oswald senior built his son a new schoolroom.
The Leicesters were a successful and upwardly mobile Altrincham family – the different branches hovered somewhere, socially and religiously, between the Church of England and dissent – but many of the children were there because the mills were there, and the mills were there for those same reasons of geography that had underpinned the whole course of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The ancient market town of Altrincham was unusual in the fact that it was remote from the usual sources of power in the Pennines, but there was enough water in the streams that came off Hale Moss and Bowdon Hill to drive three or four mills, and situated only miles from Manchester – and linked since 1766 by the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey to the Liverpool docks and the open sea – Altrincham was perfectly placed to take advantage of the raw cotton that came from the West Indies into the port of Liverpool.
For thousands of children across the north-west of England, mills such as these would be their lives – from half-past five or six in the morning until eight at night, with all that meant for their health and life expectancy, for their physical strength and stature, for the erosion of family ties – and yet if Reverend Grindrod’s pupils wanted any warning of an even darker future it was there across the road in the empty shell of Kinder’s Mill. The factory had been there since 1784 but it had been closed now for eight years, and a community like Altrincham’s, its livelihood closely tied to the fluctuating demands of the textile market, was going to be no more immune to the economic effects of peace than was Eury MacLeod’s Caolas Scalpaigh.
On 18 June, the Isabella from Surinam, the Aimwell from Barbados, the Robert Quayle from San Domingo, the Unicorn from Demerara, the Integrity from Charleston, were all unloading their cotton at Liverpool, but this was the Sabbath, and if the Battle of Waterloo might not have been won on the playing fields of Altrincham it was here that the battle for the souls of Britain’s poor would be fought. Two-hundred-odd miles to the south on the banks of the Thames, the young Thomas Fremantle was talking cricket and skipping ‘Lyricks’ to celebrate the taking of Naples, but here beside the Bridgewater Canal on the Lord’s Day there would be no skipping anything, no lounging in the Parade with officers from the Castle, no company or fun, no ogling Miss Goodall, no writing letters to uncles – the Reverend Grindrod would no more have allowed writing on the Sabbath than he would have allowed cricket – but only the intimidated murmur of the under-teachers, the silence of 250 children and the answering silence of the mills.
There were five classes within the one school room, taught by young teachers and monitors picked from among the older children, and ranging from a ‘trial class’ for the newest pupils, up through Spelling Book, Reading, Testament and Bible. The teachers were instructed to pay particular attention to spelling and reading, but the avowed ‘object’ of the school was ‘eternal salvation’ not education and the first duty of the teacher to set an example of Godliness, order, submissiveness, and punctuality. ‘The teachers are expected to submit to the direction of the Superintendant,’ the Rules for the Management of the Altrincham Methodist Sunday School, spelled out, ‘to speak as quietly as they can … to observe well whether their Pupils are clean, and free from any infectious Disease or Eruption; to prevent them talking with each other … and oblige them to sit in an upright posture … to shew an example of serious behaviour, and profound reverence for the Lord’s Day, Word, and Ordinance.’
If the Reverend Grindrod imagined he could teach a child to read and shackle his mind for ever he was badly mistaken – a school like his was as likely to produce a Chartist as another Sunday school teacher – but its whole ethos was one in which religion was both carrot and stick for that dismal form of social conservatism and moral coercion to which early nineteenth-century Methodism lent itself. It might have been different before the threat of French Jacobinism, infidelity and Revolutionary violence had frightened Methodism into the enemy camp, but if the men who made up the school committee, small traders and craftsmen in the main – William Worsley, constable; Mr Jonathan Potter, worsted manufacturer; Mr Joshua Ashcroft, grocer – had ever seen the world differently they knew better now. ‘What is the People?’ a passionate Hazlitt demanded of the men of power. �
�Millions of men like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with the blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and passions and anxious cares, and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free.’ And here, and in hundreds of schools like it, the first steps were being taken to stifle these instincts in them before they had ever had time to develop.
This was partly a matter of theology – Hannah More’s unbending conviction that children were of ‘a corrupt nature and evil disposition’ ran deep in evangelical circles – but it was also partly a real fear of social disorder and one fed off the other until the two impulses were virtually indistinguishable. There is no doubt that men like Edmund Grindrod would have seen severity first and foremost as a religious duty, but William Wilberforce’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, with its suspicions of the working classes and their ‘disgusting’ and ‘unsubdued passions’ had no more effective lieutenant than the Sunday school teacher.
‘The Scholars must come to school clean washed and combed,’ read Grindrod’s instructions for the management at Altrincham, instructions that might equally well serve as a blueprint for the orderly, mechanised, submissive ideal of every mill-owner’s dreams; ‘they must not go out, if they can possibly avoid it, during School hours … Not one word must be spoken in School hours to any but the Teachers … Girls [are] not to wear their patterns or bonnets in school … books [are] not to be removed on any pretext … no cursing, swearing, gaming, quarrelling, wilful lying, calling by names, using indecent language …’
Altrincham’s was, on paper at least, by no means a harsh regime compared with many Anglican schools – there is something peculiarly touching in the injunction to teachers ‘to exercise much patience towards those who may be dull and stupid’ – but it was a police state and if there were children absent this Sunday the two appointed ‘Visitors’, Mr William Worsley and Mr William Potts, would make it their business to visit the homes in the week ahead. With the school numbers growing steadily with each quarter the committee urgently needed more Visitors, but the two men did what they could, checking up on their teachers’ morals, reporting on Sabbath absenteeism, and visiting the sick of seven and up ‘for the purpose of pious advice and prayer; and to administer temporal relief in cases of necessity’.
It would be a hard call whether Wilberforce and his Society for the Suppression of Vice had most to learn in the way of moral espionage from the Methodists or the Methodists from Wilberforce, but in both cases their motives were again the same blurred mix of religious conviction and social control. At the core of all evangelical faith – Anglican, or Methodist – was the absolute conviction that the miseries and rewards of this world were of no consequence beside the bliss and torments of the next, and if it was always easier to tell that to the poor than the rich, heaven and hell remained wonderfully effective tools at the sick-bed of a seven-year-old with nothing more to look forward to than a short life in the mills.
At what point duty shaded into pleasure in the work of men like William Potts and William Worsley, and the pious monitoring of souls into the love and exercise of power, was something that had exercised Sydney Smith, but Anglican and Methodist alike could at least point to the best authority. The Established Church had long taught the poor that their ‘more lowly path,’ as Wilberforce put it, ‘has been allotted to them by the hand of God’, and Methodism had not just inherited the Tory John Wesley’s social conservatism but all of the unattractive theology that served it so well. ‘Break their wills betimes,’ Wesley had warned his followers – and the Reverend Edmund Grindrod, the loyal supporter of Jabez Bunting, was not the man to ignore an injunction of this kind; ‘Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all. Whatever pains it costs, break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. Break his will now, and his soul shall live, and he will probably bless you to all eternity.’
And so, too, in the meantime would the mill-owners of Altrincham and masters across the country – ‘I have left most of my works in Lancashire under the management of Methodists,’ the first Sir Robert Peel had written nearly thirty years before, ‘and they serve me excellently well’ – and a generation of war with a Jacobin and infidel France had only cemented the compact. While it was hardly surprising that an Anglican establishment tied to the status quo and the landed interest saw the poor as ‘the enemy’, in schools like Altrincham, where from the moment the children had bowed and curtseyed their way into school in the morning, to the moment they had bowed and curtseyed their way out at the end of their final moral scolding, the poor were doing their and the factory owners’ work for them.
There had been nervous suspicions in some Tory circles at the rise of the Sunday schools in which Wilberforce and Hannah More were such leading figures, but this was no trahison des clercs, but its opposite. There were certainly ways in which the school reflected the supportive and improving ethos of the Methodist communities, and yet when all that is recognised there is still something heartbreaking in the fact that here at Altrincham, Sunday in Sunday out, from nine in the morning in winter, eight thirty in summer, a pool of twenty-three teachers, none of them paid, none of them any different from the children they taught, many of them scarcely any older, were willingly sacrificing their one day of freedom a week to collude in the industrial and political stifling of their own class.
They were powerful sanctions they had at their disposal, too, heaven and hell, and vivid and imminent for a small, sinful child in Altrincham. The next world was never far away – the Leicester children had already lost a sister – and no scholar sitting through Mr John Barrow’s dark warnings would ever be allowed to forget it. In the midst of life they were in death and if any girl leaving the school that week to begin her life in service – Betty Bray, Hannah Gibbon, Mary Pearson – was in any doubt where ‘cocquettishness’ would lead her then there were examples enough to hand. Before they had answered to their names for the last time that afternoon, and the teacher had added her mark to complete her ‘x’, another young Methodist servant girl, who had sat over the same lessons as they had and climbed in the same way from Spelling Class to Bible, would be ending another day in her Newgate cell.
Nine of her brothers and sisters had already died, and yet only this morning, faced with the gallows and her Maker, she was still stubbornly refusing to take Communion. Where had lewdness and deceit led her? What foul lies still, in the darkness of her cell, was Satan spinning? ‘Believe me,’ warned her Methodist visitor, addressing himself to all the Betty Brays and Mary Pearsons and Hannah Gibbons across the country faced with the Tempter, ‘Newgate is a dreadful place, confined in narrow cells, where the light of day is only admitted to light the wretched criminal to the knowledge that it is day; the heavy doors, and massy bolts and bars, strike terror into the beholders … O, My beloved friends! Pray heartily unto God that you may never enter into that abode of wretchedness and despair.’
10 a.m.
The Sinews of War
There was possibly no man happier to be on the battlefield that morning than Welsh Ensign Rees Howell Gronow of the Guards. For almost everyone in the allied army the morning of the 18th was one of unremitting cold and misery, but for the gloriously dandified and irrepressible miniature, ‘No grow’ Gronow, it was a day chosen by ‘some providential accident’ beyond the ‘wisdom of man’, a Sunday morning of such glorious sunshine and clarity of vision that it might have been designed for the ultimate act of Sabbath-breaking that Christian Europe was planning.
The rain had at last stopped, but if Gronow’s irrepressible good humour was largely a matter of temperament, it was at least in part because this Sunday morning he was supposed to be with his regiment in London. When the Guards embarked for the Low Coun
tries in May the 1st Battalion had remained behind, and a frustrated Gronow, a twenty-year-old veteran of the Peninsula and one of the finest pistol shots in England, was left to kick his heels on ceremonial duties while the fate of Europe was being decided on the other side of the Channel. ‘Early in June I had the honour of dining with Colonel Darling, the deputy adjutant,’ Gronow recalled, ‘and I was there introduced to Sir Thomas Picton, as a countryman and neighbour of his brother, Mr Turberville of Evenney Abbey, in Glamorganshire. He was very gracious, and, on his two aides-de-camp – Major Tyler and my friend Chambers, of the Guards – lamenting that I was obliged to remain at home, Sir Thomas said: “Is the lad really anxious to go out?” Chambers answered that it was the height of my ambition. Sir Thomas inquired if all the appointments on his staff were filled up; and then added, with a grim smile, “If Tyler is killed, which is not at all unlikely, I do not know why I should not take my young countryman: he may go over with me if he can get leave.”’
If the idea of a ‘gracious’ Sir Thomas Picton would have been new to most people – a ‘rough, foul-mouthed devil’ was Wellington’s pithy verdict on the man who had commanded the famous 3rd Division in Spain – there was a well-hidden streak of kindness in him and he was as good as his word. There seemed to be no chance of Gronow getting leave from his regiment to join the army in Brussels, but he reckoned that if he managed things smoothly he could be across and back again in time to mount guard at St James’s before he was missed.