What this great man achieved on an international stage, others did on a humbler. They did not succeed without arousing resentment and envy. Cobbett in his blind rage at the debt system—IT, as he called it—which he believed was changing the values of the England he loved, wrote of "dark, dirty-faced, half-whiskered vermin" to whose expenditure he attributed the alarming expansion of London, Brighton, Cheltenham and other "odious wens." "You may always know them," he wrote, "by their lank jaws, the stiffness round their necks . . . their stays, their false shoulders, hips and haunches, their half-whiskers, and by their skins, colour of veal kidney-suet, warmed a little, and then powdered with dirty dust."1 He did not confine his venom to Jews; Scotsmen in his view were as bad or worse. Instead, he complained, of a resident, native gentry attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from childhood, practising hospitality without ceremony, a tribe of fund-lords, contractors, loan-jobbers, brokers and bankers were buying up the entire countryside near the capital—"a gentry only now-and-then residing, having no relish for country delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, and relying for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage but the dread of their power."2 It was from this class that the great economist, Ricardo, came—a most kindly, amiable man, inheriting a younger son's portion from his Dutch-Jewish father, starting hfe in a stock-jobber's office at fourteen and making a fortune before he was forty, when he purchased the estate of Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. Later, buying an Irish rotten borough, he entered
1 Cobbett, Rural Rides, I, 68-9. See idem, I, 30, 38-9, 65. Ibid., IT33-4.
Parliament where, despite his painful lack of oratory, he became immensely respected, his economic views being treated by all Parties almost as holy writ.
"According to the best information I can obtain' wrote a correspondent in the October after Waterloo, "the landlords will fall short of their Michaelmas receipts upon an average one half." All over the country banks were calling in their money; some, like that in which Jane Austen's brother was a partner, had already closed their doors and stopped payment. The Gazette was crowded with bankruptcy notices and tradesmen's books with bad debts, and the table of the House of Commons piled with petitions from farmers and manufacturers. Cotton spinners in Lancashire and on the Clyde, hardware workers in Birmingham and iron-moulders at Merthyr Tydfil, Spitalfields silk-weavers, Leicestershire stockingers and Nottinghamshire hosiers, all were hungry, angry and clamorous.
As 1815 gave place to 1816 the situation grew worse. With bankers unwilling to advance or discount, no one, not even the rich, seemed to have any money to spare; by the spring ten thousand livery servants were said to be out of place. Among those who went down in the general ruin was Beau Brummell, the great dandy, who decamped for Calais with a few pounds. Another was Sheridan—"the last of the giants." Art prices fell to a level unknown in the history of the sale rooms; at Phillips's a Claude which had fetched a thousand guineas in 1813 went for £70. Even Sir William Beechey was forced to beg for a settlement of his account with the royal household, "the unexpected alteration of the times making a shocking impression on the arts." The only thing which seemed to sell in the universal ruin were Scott's novels.1
The summer of 1816 proved the worst in memory, though in a brief spell of fine weather at the end of May young Keats, after a day in the Hampstead meadows, wrote his sonnet, "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill." Six weeks later, in a torrential July, Jane Austen among the sodden Hampshire fields finished her last and greatest book. "Oh! it rains again! it beats against the window," she told a friend, "we were obliged to turn back before we got there, but not soon
1 Alison, I, 81; Ann. Reg., 1816, 54; Colchester, IL 558, 560, 562, 584-5; Creevey Life and Times, 102; GeorgeIV, Letters, II, 167-8; Hill, Austen, II, 244-5; Lockhart, III, 296, 333; IV, 2, II; Lady Shelley, I, 186; Smart, 462, 512-13.
enough to avoid a pelter all the way home. We met Mr. Woolls.... I talked of its being bad weather for the hay, and he returned me the comfort of its being much worse for the wheat." Such a summer, her fellow writer, Mary Mitford, thought, was enough to make one wish for winter all the year round.1
It was the same all over western Europe. The English visitors who flocked to the Continent that summer—the first without war in fourteen years—found sullen, pitiless clouds, and the crops destroyed by snow and hailstones. Such stupid mists, fogs and perpetual density suggested to Byron that Castlereagh must have taken over the Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Heaven. Meanwhile, in every port British goods were piling up or selling below cost. During one week that year not a single entry for export or import was made at the London Custom-House—an event without parallel in its history.2 The whole of the manufacturing districts seemed to be out of work. The unemployed colliers of Bilston Moor, with fifty men yoked to a wagon, set off with their coal for the capital to petition the Prince Regent; other teams of miners followed their example, and magistrates were kept busy intercepting them. A poor Lincolnshire widow, trudging from door to door trying to sell pasteboard boxes with her hungry boy trailing behind her, was followed by a blasphemous chimney-sweep who told her, with what seemed unanswerable logic, that if she did not sell the child for the two guineas which he flourished in his grimy hand she would soon be in the workhouse. In vain did Wilberforce and his friends revive the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, founded in the slump of 1812, and assemble the Archbishop of Canterbury and three royal dukes at a public meeting at the London Tavern. In such a deluge of ruin, private alms availed nothing; they could not distribute incomes.
In their tribulation the people turned to Throne and Parliament. They found small comfort in either. The old, blind king was irrevocably mad—immured with his medical attendants in a wing of Windsor Castle, "with long, unkempt, milk-white beard," talking
1 "It is snowing and hailing eternally and will kill all the lambs to a certainty unless it changes in a few hours. At any rate, it will cure us of the embarrassments arising from plenty and low markets."—Walter Scott, i8th April, 1816. Lockhart, IV, 4-5. See idem, 9-10; Austen, II, 457-9; Colchester, II, 586; Colvin, Keats, 36; Hill, Austen, 249-57; Mitford, I, 333-45 Newton, 17, 27; Paget Brothers, 290; Smart, 490.
2 Morning Chronicle, 3rd July, 1816. See Creevey, Life and Times, 103-4; Farington, VIII, 83, 95, 100.
incessantly, of the dead. The royal family was represented by his martinet queen and his seven stout, bald sons. The big man of all, Prinny, wrote Creevey, was ill in the bladder and afraid to show himself in the streets;1 his brothers deep in debt and involved in ludicrous controversies and scandals; his wife—a pantomime source of ribaldry and indecorum—gallivanting round the Mediterranean with an amorous Italian courier and a court of rogues and buffoons. The Regent's girth was said by malicious gossip to have grown so vast that his doctors had advised him to give up stays and let his belly drop; the cartoonists portrayed him with dewlaps hanging like bags over his tight dandy's collar. To millions of decent folk his life seemed a perpetual scandal and his squanderous profusion, as a member of Parliament put it, more suggestive of the splendour of an oriental despot than "the sober dignity of a British prince seated in the bosom of his subjects." At the moment he was engaged on his most costly project—the rebuilding of the west end of his capital; a fashionable new park to bear his name and a sweeping avenue designed by his favourite Nash to give western London a north-south axis. That spring, while the sheep perished in the snows and an ailing Jane Austen, propped on two chairs, wrote and rewrote the closing chapters of Persuasion, he married his daughter, the heiress of England, to an obscure German prince; the bride could not help laughing at the words "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," for the bridegroom was so poor. A week earlier Lord Byron, publicly reviling his wife, attacked in a sensational novel by his mistress and believed
to be guilty of incest with his sister, left England in a blaze of notoriety.
If the Crown could not rally a distressed nation, Parliament provided an ineffective sounding-board for its grievances. Representing neither the small manufacturing middle class nor the hungry workers, its members had little understanding of the suffering caused by the crisis. Nor had the King's Ministers. "Mouldy & Co.," as the young Whigs called them after the worthy, melancholy man who had stepped into the murdered Perceval's shoes, were still young in
1 "Not even the intoxication of that greatest of all victories, Waterloo, could extract from the Mob a single indication of applause for him on the day he closed Parliament. They seem'd to think they did a great deal by maintaining a dead silence and no hissing, but they made loud and repeated applauses when the Duke of York's carriage appeared."—Festing, 176-7. See Bury, I, 262; II, 6-8, 20-4, 41, 50-3. 88-9, 92-3; Creevey Papers, I, 206-9; Creevey, Life and Times, 82; George IV, Letters, II, 97-8, 110-11,120-1, 349; Gronow, II, 255-6; Dudley, 292; Stanhope, 174.
years—their leader was not yet forty-five—but the cares of war and revolution, continued throughout their adult lives, had robbed them of all spring. Lord Liverpool, like most of his lieutenants, was of gentle rather than aristocratic origin—the son of Charles Jenkinson, Lord Bute's political factotum. As Lord Hawkesbury he had been Foreign Secretary in the well-meaning Addington Administration that had tried to appease Napoleon, and he had never recovered his spirits after that early blight. His high, stiff look, bold nose, strained mouth, the sorrowful, blinking, rather defiant eyes, the long, awkward, slouching neck bespoke the character, not infrequent in the second generation of arrivistes, of a stubborn bewilderment. Like most appeasers who have been humiliated by the object of their appeasement, he had become, in his quiet, un-emphatic way, an unshakable believer in the folly of compromise. He was thus the ideal leader of a party based on resistance to change, and the worst for guiding a country through a revolution.
He was by nature a kindly and not illiberal man. But the horrors of Revolution—he had personally witnessed the storming of the Bastille—and of long battling with Napoleon had frozen his sympathies. He had the virtue, desirable in the leader of an Administration, of being a disinterested, honourable colleague, and of knowing how to keep his mouth shut; Madame de Stael remarked that he had a talent for silence. In his uninspiring way he held the reins of party firmly and fairly. Though often testy and sometimes, when his royal master was unendurable, querulous, he seldom lost his head and never snubbed slower or stupider men into resentment, or aroused jealousy.
His colleagues were of a piece. They made no pretence to genius, though one of them, Castlereagh—as trusted in the Commons as at the Congress table—had great, if inarticulate, ability. The antithesis of the daemonic, Napoleonic or Byronic ideal which was the ignis fatuus of the age, they appealed to quiet men of property and commerce; a Ministry, as one supporter gratefully put it, without any of those "confounded men of genius.,, They represented "the fear of democracy and the general property of the country"; they were inexorably opposed to what they called "the democratic spirit of the times" and thought anyone infected with it either wicked or deluded. They stood for Church and King, a "Bible, Crown and Constitution supremacy": for Bishops, rectors and Justices of the Peace, for Fellows of Oxford Colleges and honest, old-fashioned shopkeepers and steady merchants, for rents, tithes and investments, for the status quo in thought and deed. Their idea of the future was an unending extension of the present, though the old Lord Chancellor, Eldon—a rugged, self-made man of stoic character—dreamt of something more positive: a return to the tougher, more robust England of his youth before the French and American Revolutions.
Their enemies thought that they remained in office from love of power, their friends supposed it to be a habit of which they could not break themselves. They themselves attributed it to a sense of duty—"shadows who work all day in the cabinet and wrangle all night in the House, baited like bears at the stake." In this they were nearer the truth than the world supposed; for men of moderate ambitions, possessed of ample fortunes, there was nothing very attractive in guiding a high-spirited people through an interminable series of insoluble crises while enduring the vagaries of a spoilt unscrupulous Prince and the sallies of an irresponsible Opposition. It was their firm, unalterable conviction that they stood between the country and revolution; in this, by remaining in office—pilots, in Byron's jeering phrase, who had weathered every storm—they conceived themselves to be carrying on her struggle against Napoleon and the armed Jacobin. From that war there was for them no discharge. They received the support of all who thought, like Walter Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth, that those who demanded change were "rogue radicals" and "incendiaries."1 They were also supported by Wilberforce and his Evangelical "saints," who believed that the nation should endure affliction with resignation, that the glory of the poor was to be patient in adversity and of the rich not to question the dispensations of Providence but to live piously and soberly in gratitude for saving mercies.
The Opposition represented the great Whig Dukes and landowners—the Grenvilles, Cavendishes, Russells and Fitzmaurices; the disciples of Fox, led by Lord Grey and Fox's nephew, Lord Holland; a sprinkling of young patricians of rather raffish, radical views; the respectable middle-class intellectuals of the Edinburgh Review; and the Nonconformists. They enjoyed the rather disapproving
" 1 See Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, ist May, 1820; 23rd Sept., 1820; Auckland, IV, 385; Brock passim; Byron. Age of Bronze; De Selincourt, Middle Years, II, 569, 806-15; Farington, VII, 87; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, I, 246; Keats, IV, 320; Lockhart, III, 112; IV, 125; V, 357; Quarterly Review, 1843, IV, 125—Article by Rev. T.James; Simond, II, 161; Stanhope, 287; Two Duchesses, 362; Woodward, 50; Yonge, passim.
support of the utilitarian radicals, the followers of the rich jurist, Jeremy Bentham, whose programme was the greatest good of the greatest number ascertainable by processes of strictly logical deduction never likely to be pursued by any political Party. Weak in numbers through their unpopular opposition to the war, the Whigs made up for it by their eloquence and capacity for faction. They were great hands at denouncing everything Government did, but fundamentally, except for the extreme radical left wing, believed in much the same things as their opponents. They supported the hereditary peerage, the rule of law, the sanctity of inherited property, laissez faire, the right of traders and capitalists to pursue their own unrestrained advantage, and the subordination of the lower orders to their social superiors.1
Like most politicians who have been too long in opposition and lack a leader, the Whigs found it hard to get on with one another.2 Since Fox's death, ten years before, their only real allegiance had been to his ghost. Their most brilliant orator, Sheridan, had long drunk himself into a decline, while the rising hope of the Party, the lawyer Brougham, was too erratic, pushing and plebeian to be trusted by his colleagues. Whitbread, the brewer, a shrewd honourable man, had committed suicide a few weeks after Waterloo. The titular leader of the Party in the Commons, George Ponsonby, was in failing health, and his lieutenant, Tierney, the son of an Irish wine merchant, was known to its irreverent younger members as Mother Cole.3 The most distinguished Whig in the Lower House was Romilly, the advocate of penal reform and a foe of every form of cruelty and oppression.
For the Whigs the crisis was an opportunity. Only one of the Ministers—"a good, quiet, easily-beaten set of block-heads"—was capable of a tolerable speech, and he, Canning—the fallen Tory archangel and the one man of genius among Pitt's followers—was so distrusted by most of his colleagues as to seem a negligible factor.
1 Hazlitt remarked that the two parties were like rival stage-coaches; they splashed each other with mud but went to the same place.
2 "They are a very powerful Party, indeed, if they would but abstain from fighting with each other . . . which makes it so unpleasant to have anything to do with them."—Dudley, 184. See idem, 198. See Broughton, I,
138, 179; Cecil, Young Melbourne, 210; Creevey Papers, I, 124, 164, 172, 192, 207, 324, 327: Life and Times, 55; Granville, II, 485-6, 493-4; Halevy, II, 53-4; Holland, Journal, I, 28; Moore, Byron, 182,184, 345; Simond, II, 25, 35, 163; Stanley, 79-81; Woodward, 53-6. 76.
3 After his habit of referring to himself as a plain, honest man, like the lady in Foote's farce who presided over a female establishment in Covent Garden and loved to indulge in flattering references to her own character. Creevey Papers, I, 327.
"Our ground' wrote Brougham to Creevey, "is clearly retrenchment in all its ways, with ramifications into the royal family, property tax, jobs of all sorts and distresses of the landed interest; in short it is the richest mine in the world!" The clamour for tax reduction became almost deafening. The Government, inundated with petitions from the commercial interest—assiduously collected by Brougham—and threatened by its own supporters, promised to reduce expenditure from a hundred to eighty millions and jettisoned the income and malt taxes. Castlereagh, fearful for the peace of Europe, spoke sadly of an ignorant impatience of taxation; the Services were again drastically cut. The Regent, too, was forced to abandon his hope of crowning his metropolitan improvements with a new palace,1 and the northward march of Regent Street was halted at Piccadilly Circus. Even the Elgin Marbles were nearly sent packing back to Greece. "Economy is the order of the day," wrote Walter Scott, "and I assure you they are shaving properly close."2
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