The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  This baffling confusion was the aspect of their polity of which they were most proud. For it stressed the importance of the individual for whom, in their view, all government existed. For there was another and indefinable force—one not counted but weighed—to which every legal power had at times to defer. It was the sum total of the political consciousness of the individuals who made up the nation. The most powerful Minister of the age, William Pitt, had been able to take office at the outset of his career with the King' support but without a parliamentary majority partly because public opinion, disgusted with those in office, was known to be behind him.

  Even the views of uneducated individuals could at times influence political action in this extraordinary country. For, since there were no proper police and the only protection of Government in a capita of a million inhabitants were three regiments of Foot Guards and twelve hundred Horse, the London mob could subject Parliament and Government to a most unpleasant ordeal. In the seventeenth century it had more than once changed the course of history and though the ruling aristocracy had learnt to humour and manage it they could never wholly ignore it. Thirty years before, it had tried to burn down the capital in order to prevent a mitigation of the intolerant law against Catholics. During the rejoicings for Salamanca it had terrorised London for three nights, firing in the streets, setting coaches alight—in some cases with their occupants inside—and stoning the residences of the anti-war party. The iron railing outside London houses were not there for ornament. A howling mob round the door, a shower of brickbats at the windows, a lighted torch against the lintel were the statesman's reminder that, however irrational and ill-organised, the people had a will of its own.

  Even in ordinary times the mobile, as it was called, played a part in politics. At every contested election the candidates had for week to run the gauntlet of a rough, drunken mob which paraded the streets, surrounded the hustings and pelted speakers and voters. In the London suburb of Garrat near Wandsworth, a mock-election was held during every general election, in which all the most notorious characters of the metropolitan underworld appeared as candidates—a kind of political "Beggar's Opera." For the sake of practical local convenience the right to vote was treated as a form of tenure, transmitted, like an estate or title, by inheritance or purchase. But he right to throw a dead cat at a candidate and to support one's Party with the full force of one's lungs and fists was regarded as fundamental, and inalienable.

  "Our man for ever, O— Yourn in the river, O !"

  sang the Radical shoemakers of Towcester and the rival Tory poachers of Silverstone as they rolled up their sleeves before the Hustings. "The whole mob of Middlesex blackguards pass through Piccadilly twice a day," wrote Walter Scott during a Westminster by-election, "and almost drive me mad with their noise and vociferation." Before it ended one of the candidates was wounded and another forced to hide for his life in a churchyard.

  Only one thing could be said for certain of English politics. No power could be openly exercised without provoking a reaction. The greater the power, the greater the reaction. Even the mob was subject to this law of diminishing returns, since, whenever it went too far, it automatically created an alliance of law-abiding persons against it. England might canonise admirals—for their sway was too distant to threaten anyone's private liberty—but she never worshipped long it the shrine of any living statesman. Popularity with one faction was certain to arouse the enmity of another; vilification of William Pitt, the national saviour during the war, became the credo of Whigs md radicals for a generation after his death. It was symptomatic of his jealousy of power that the office of Prime Minister had no recognition in law, and that the Cabinet—the inner council of supreme office-holders, who were at once the Government and the managers of the parliamentary majority—was unknown to the Constitution, its members modestly called themselves "his Majesty's confidential servants." They did not even possess an office or a secretary.

  As for bureaucracy, what there was possessed no political power, the Civil Service was purely clerical and was nominated by the statesmen for whom it devilled. These viewed it chiefly as a means of rewarding supporters and providing for younger sons. Walter Scott praised Croker, the Secretary of the Admiralty, for never scrupling to stretch his powers to serve a friend.1 Such patronage though valuable for securing Party discipline, was no foundation fc a strong executive. Ninety-nine Englishmen out of a hundred viewed with sturdy contempt a bureaucracy recruited by jobbery. The country gentleman who named a litter of puppies, Placeman Pensioner, Pilferer and Plunderer, expressed this.2 Any attempt to increase the size and powers of the Civil Service was certain to be assailed. Even the Foreign Office had a staff of only twenty-eight including the two Under-Secretaries and a Turkish interpreter. The Home Office consisted of twenty clerks. As every document had to be copied by hand, such administrators had no time for regulating other people's lives.3

  It was a source of amazement to foreigners that a country so governed, without a regular police and with so small an Army should be so orderly. At Brighton, a town in 1811 of 14,000 people there were neither justices nor municipality, yet crime was almost unknown and the doors left unbarred at night. The capital, the world's largest city, was patrolled by a handful of police officers and a few hundred elderly night-watchmen. Little Mr. Townsend, the Bow Street "runner," with his flaxen wig and handful of top-hatted tip-staffs, constituted almost the sole force for executing the Government's will. Everything else was left to the Justices and parish constables.

  Yet the English were not a timid or submissive people. The brutality of an English crowd could be a formidable phenomenon. Even at royal levees there was so much shoving that the removal of fainting ladies from a "squeeze" was a part of Court routine; when Carlton House was thrown open to well-to-do sightseers after fete, shoes and fragments of clothing were gathered up afterward in hogsheads.4 In poorer districts fighting was almost incessant

  1 "If any office should be at your disposal," wrote Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, "the duties of which would not call so largely upon my exertions as to prevent me from giving a considerable proportion of my time to study, it might be in your Lordship's power to place me in situation where, with better hopes of success, I might advance towards the main object of my life; I mean the completion of my literary undertakings." De Selincourt, II, 486; Lockhart, 306. See also idem, IV, 349; Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 8tn March, 1822; Cobbett, I, 41; Granvill. I, 22; Peel, II, 140; Lady Shelley, II, 90; Simond, II, 190-2.

  » T. E. Austen-Leigh, The Vine Hunt.

  2Woodward, 61, 189. See Emma Mount-Edgecumbe's account of how her uncle, Lord Castlereagh, sent for her to copy out a long dispatch to Wellington after Waterloo. Brownlow 121.

  3"Many a delicate female was extracted from the melee nearly in naturabilis and obliged to hide herself in a corner till a petticoat could be procured." Simond, II, 227. See Ann. Reg Mitford, Life, II, 187. The same thing had happened when Nelson lay in state at Greenwich few years before. See English Spy, 219.

  Simond, staying in Orchard Street, was kept awake all night by Irish labourers having a free-for-all in a slum alley at the back. Above the noise of their rattles he could hear one old watchman calling out to another, "If I go in, I shall have a shower of brickbats/' and the other replying, "Well, never mind, let them murder each other if they please!"

  To foreigners British liberty seemed always on the verge of degenerating into licence. In Edinburgh, hooligans roamed the streets at night with bludgeons, knocking down revellers with shouts of "Mire him!"; English public schoolboys rose against their masters and had to be driven back to their class-rooms by the military. An attempt to raise the prices of the London theatres provoked the galleries to shout down every play for months and break up the houses.1

  For the common people, though allowed a licence known to no other country, were, like the poor and uneducated everywhere, quite uninhibited. When their passions were roused, they acted passionately. Two Jews caught stealing in a Bris
tol stables had their hands tied behind their backs, their beards stuck together with pitch and their noses filled with snuff till they knocked each other senseless. A party of picnickers who fouled some fishermen's lines off Hammersmith, were pitched, with a stream of blasphemy, into the Thames. Nor, for all the deference of the race to rank, did the populace respect persons. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he attended divine service at the Millbank Penitentiary, was bombarded with stale bread by the aggrieved lady inmates. Appalling crimes of violence passed unpunished for lack of police. Lonely turnpike-keepers were robbed and beaten to death; gangs of smugglers and poachers fought pitched battles with keepers and revenue officers. Pickpockets surrounded the doors of the coaching inns for "Johnny Raws from the country," and during fairs and public processions packs of thieves swept through the crowds emptying pockets, snatching purses and even stripping men and women of their clothes.2 Dusk round London was called footpad-hour. Yet the

  1 Simond, I, 89-91. See also Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 20th Feb., 1822; Ashton, I, 25; Bamford, I, 28, 127, 129, 131, 185, 245-9; H, 67; Bewick, 21-2; Scott, III, 61-2; Gronow, n, 225-6, 310; Keats, III, 282; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, I, 190; Mitford, Life, II, 187; Simond, II, 227-60; Stanhope, 274; Woodward, 466.

  8 Ann. Reg., 1819. Chron., 55; Diary of Walter Treveleyan, G. T. Warner, Harrow in Verse and Prose, 99. See inter alia Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 30th Oct., 1820; Bamford, II, 64; Colchester, III, 237; Cranbourn Chase, 35-7; Fowler, 122-3; Gronow, II, 309-10; Lieven, Private Letters, 78; Sydney, I, 122, 210; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, I, 190.

  nimbleness and courage of its pickpockets was almost a matter of pride to Londoners. "A man who saunters about the capital with pockets on the outside of his coat," a guide-book warned its readers "deserves no pity."

  A little rough and tumble seemed a small price to the English for avoiding the ills of arbitary power. "They have an admirable police at Paris," wrote Lord Dudley, "but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half a dozen people's throats were cut every few years in the Ratcliffe Highway than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies and the rest of Fouche's contrivances." The British attitude towards the agents of executive power was instinctively hostile; Stendhal on a visit to London was amazed to see soldiers jeered at in the streets. The Life Guards, who carried printed orders to avoid giving offence to civilians and repeatedly showed the most exemplary restraint under showers of stones, were known in the capital as the "Piccadilly butchers." Even the Prime Minister who reaped the glories of Vittoria and Waterloo viewed General Graham's proposal for a club for military officers as a threat to the Constitution.1

  Foreigners could not understand the British attitude to popular violence; it seemed to them like the weakness that had precipitated the Terror. But the people who quietly obeyed their voluntary ring-keepers at a rough boxing match chafed at the least restraint by arms. It was never really safe for a magistrate to use troops to maintain order. In the British Constitution there was no droit administratif a shot fired in defence of public order by a servant of the Crown could involve both him and his superior in the penalties of murder.

  It was in this that the English recipe for reconciling order with liberty resided. Social discipline was secured, in theory, by the rule of Law. A man might do as he pleased, but, if it infringed the liberties of others, he had to answer for it in the Courts. After the traditional chairing of the lord of misrule in north country villages, the constables spent the next day patiently inquiring who had kicked through a neighbour's door, smashed his window, or stolen his can. "The strange medley of licentiousness and legal restraint," wrote a foreigner, "of freedom and confinement—of punishment for what is done and liberty to do the same thing again—is very curious." At first it struck him as irrational, but in the end he decided that it

  1 Lynedoch, 748-51; Gronow, II, 220; Simond, I, 79, 91; II, 221, 280-1.

  approximated more nearly to natural law than the simpler and more arbitrary processes of other lands. The artificial composition of gardens in England, he noted, like that of her government, abridged only the liberty of doing harm.

  For the judgment of their Courts the English showed an un-deviating respect. The independence of the Judiciary was as much an article of their faith as the legislative monopoly of Parliament. No one, however powerful, could evade the Law; even the Heir Presumptive had his coach seized at a levee by sheriffs' officers in distraint of debt.1 The Bang's Ministers were as subject to this power as anyone else. A man arrested by the Executive could immediately obtain from the Courts a writ of habeas corpus compelling his jailors either to show lawful authority for his detention or release him.

  Yet this, by itself, would only have increased the difficulty of governing such a country, but for the capacity of the ruling class for inspiring and evoking voluntary obedience. As there was no adequate standing Army, police force or bureaucracy to secure property and privilege, the gentry had to preserve these themselves. Their recipe for dealing with a rabble was to stand up and face it; it was the only attitude a rabble respected. Having no professional deputies as in more regimented lands to stand between them and those they ruled, they learnt to command respect by force of character, courage and good sense. Instinctive, unreflecting and fearless leadership was a by-product of the country's libertarian laws. It was this, probably more than anything else, that enabled her to win the war.

  Training for such leadership, like most things in England, was unplanned and unconscious. It began in boyhood, when future legislators and magistrates took part with the sturdy ragamuffins of the countryside in running, swimming, bird-nesting, riding the wild ponies of the commons, making midnight expeditions, climbing trees, rocks and steeples.2 They learnt to endure knocks and hardships, to face risks, conceal fear, be quick, bold and adaptable. They acquired, before they inherited wealth and luxury, habits of hardihood such as early rising and cold bathing; John Mytton, with his £20,000 a year, dressed in winter in a thin jacket and linen trousers without drawers, and once stalked wild-fowl all night on the ice stark naked. "Can't I bear pain well," he cried as he lay, skinned and

  1 Holland, Journal. I, 125.

  2 Bamford, I, 85; Bewick, 16-17; Cooper, 20; Howitt, Boy's Country Book, 9-10; Lockhart, V, 80-1; Lucas, I, 33.

  scorched, after a debauch in which he had set his shirt alight to frighten away the hiccoughs.1

  From their earliest years Britain's rulers indulged with passionate intensity in the field sports of the countryside. It gave them, as Walter Scott wrote of his countrymen, a strong and muscular character, saving them from all sorts of causeless fears and flutterings of the heart. Men who rode straight to hounds, shot duck in wintry marshes with breach-loaders, fished for salmon in moorland streams, learnt as boys to snare and kill wild-fowl, snakes, hares, rabbits, badgers and all forms of game and vermin, and continued to do so, whenever they had a chance, so long as they could walk or stride a horse, were not likely to fail for lack of courage. Their versatility in sport was amazing. The great Master of the Quorn, George Osbaldeston—"little Ossey" or, as he was called later, the "Squire of England"—a shrivelled-up, bantam-cock of a man with short legs, a limp, a gorilla chest and a face like a fox cub, excelled at every sport he touched, boxing, pigeon-shooting, steeplechasing, billiards, was one of the six best amateur cricketers in the country, rowed for the Arrow club—the forerunner of Leander—beat the famous professional, Barrie, at tennis, and kept harriers, gamecocks and fighting mastiffs.2

  The hunting field played a big part in such education. Under the famous East Midlands Masters a new form of foxhunting was superseding the slower and less specialised sport of the past. Its pioneers, establishing a new convention and discipline, were almost as much leaders in their kind as Nelson and Wellington. Their hounds ran from scent to view; "neck or nothing," "a blazing hour," "the pace was too good to inquire," were their watchwords. Their followers —for no man who wished to be respected spared either person or fortune in this pursuit—went like a scarlet strea
k across the green, enclosed shires. "Throw your heart over and your horse will follow!"3 the great Assheton Smith used to say. It was a rule gentlemen instinctively applied in time of danger, and to which the English people invariably responded.

  1 Mytton, 16-17, 127-9.

  2 Osbaldeston, passim; Creevey Papers, U. 199-200; Dixon, 158-63, 166.

  3 Dixon, 32. See idem, 17,47.154-63.166-7; Aiken, passim; Assheton Smith, passim; Cranbourn Chase, 42-3; Creevey Papers, If, I199-200; Lockhart, V, 81; Newton, 51; Nevill, 38-40; Osbaldeston, passim.