The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  Yet, for all these measures, the distresses of the country increased. With the corn sprouting in October, wheat touched 103s. in December. In Ireland, where the potato crop failed, the poor were reduced to stalks and nettles. Bamford saw an unemployed calico weaver's wife drop dead from hunger, with her babe at her breast, as she begged before the Middleton overseers for relief. A Scotsman travelling across England at the year's end found half the houses along the road with placards announcing the sale of farming stock. Everywhere farmers were ruined, bankers failing, the bread like dough. The odious cotton and worsted mills, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote from Halifax, had become mere incumbrances on the ground. "Few get more than half work—great numbers none at all. .. . For a time whole streets—men, women and children—may be kept alive by public charity, but the consequences will be awful if nothing can be manufactured in these places where such numbers of people have been gathered together. It can never be expected, or even wished, I think, that the state of our manufactures should ever again be what it has been, but, if there be not a revival of trade in a smaller way,

  1 "Our fat friend will have to live within compass and fire off no more crackers in the Park."—Walter Scott to J. B. S. Morritt, Lockhart, IV, 10-11.

  2 Lockhart, IV, 7,10-11. See Alison, 86-7, 94-7; Brougham, II, 303-5. 312; Colchester, II, 579; Creevey Papers, I, 247-8; Life and Times, 99-100; Farington, VIII, 77-8; George IV, Letters, II, 154-5, 158-9; Halevy, II, 6-8; Hansard, XXXIV-XXXV; Peel, I, 211, 216-17; Smart, 466-70, 497, 539people and things cannot go on as they are." The national debt, it was rumoured, was to be wiped out, and Parliament reformed.’

  Humbler men, no more able to understand what ailed their country than their rulers, took their own remedy. Throughout 1816 a savage anger, unknown in England since the Civil War, spread through the labouring classes. It began in the early summer among the population of the enclosed villages. In Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire ricks and barns were burnt, some by night and others openly by day, while crowds surrounded mills and bakeries shouting for price reductions. The worst outbreak was at Littleport, where the cellars were broken into and the town subjected to a sack. Anxious Justices were sent galloping Londonwards for help, and cavalry was dispatched to the shires. At Cambridge, where the arrival of the fenmen was hourly expected, three hundred special constables were enrolled and the Vice-Chancellor prepared to arm the undergraduates.

  Despite resort by a Special Commission to the gallows—Government's sovereign remedy for all ills—the rioting spread first to the south-west and then to the manufacturing districts. The pitmen of the Tyneside and Staffordshire, the Irish slum-dwellers of Glasgow, who, nestling in crowds about the Calton, Bridgeton and Gorbals, were always ripe for mischief, the housewives of Sunderland, the Preston weavers and Welsh iron-moulders all attacked shops and factories. In October the employees of the Tredegar ironworks, faced by further wage reductions and rising prices, marched on Merthyr Tydfil to stop the blast furnaces. Later, 12,000 strong, they crossed the mountains to call out the colliers of Crundin, Newbridge and Abercarne. Only the arrival of the military prevented worse.2

  The most alarming outbreak of all came at the year's end. Throughout the autumn the radicals of the capital had been gathering strength. At a charitable meeting for the relief of the manufacturing poor organised by Wilberforce and presided over by the Duke of

  1 Ann. Reg. 1816, Chron. 111-12,167; Ashton, II, 97-8; Bamford, II, 56-8; Colchester, II, 584; De Selincourt, II, 765-8; Hamilton ofDalzell MS., p. 108; Hansard, XXXDC, 1430; Smart, 490, 492, 512, 540; Tooke, II, 12.

  2 Ann. Reg. 1816. Chron., 60, 64-5, 67-71, 73-6, 79, 93, ioo-l, 115-18, 127, 165-8, 173-4; Ashton, II, 89-94; Bamford, II, n; Colchester, II, 595; Coupland, Wilberforce, 419-20; Halevy, II, 8-14; Newton, 34; Smart, 489, 492.

  York, they shouted the royal chairman down and forced him to leave amid storms of booing. All over the country the revived Hampden Clubs, thrown open to the workers by penny-a-week subscriptions, met in alehouses and dissenting chapels to debate manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. Their proceedings were kept at fever heat by Cobbett, who, evading the stamp duty on cheap newspapers by issuing his Political Register as a twopenny pamphlet, sold nearly 50,000 copies of a single number. Thereafter he repeated his defiance weekly. Mass meetings occurred in all the principal industrial towns; at Manchester, Glasgow and Paisley over a hundred thousand were reported to have attended. In the middle of November a still larger gathering took place in Spa Fields, London, when the orator, Henry Hunt, supported by the tricolour and a cap of Liberty on a pike, told an excited crowd that their all was being taxed to pension the bastards of the Tory aristocracy. He ended by promising to carry their petition—"the last resort before physical force"—to the Prince Regent. A few days later Shelley, writing to Byron in Italy, predicted either radical reform when Parliament met in January or the triumph of anarchy and illiterate demagogues.

  On December 2nd a further mass meeting was called in Spa Fields. It was preceded by a distribution of handbills proclaiming that death would be a relief to millions. Yet just as Hunt had stolen the earlier meeting from the parliamentary demagogue, Sir Francis Burdett, so Hunt's limelight was now stolen by a wagon load of fanatics supported by a gang of seamen with revolutionary tricolours. Two rabble-rousers named Watson, after inflammatory orations, asked who would follow them. Thereupon, before Hunt had even arrived, the sailors and a portion of the crowd set off for a gunsmith's shop and, after killing a merchant, marched on the City. They were opposed at the Royal Exchange by the Lord Mayor with a small detachment of police officers, whereupon they made off with a great hullabullo for the Minories, where they broke into two more gunsmiths' and acquired two small cannon. Later, after a futile summons to the Tower and a skirmish with the Life Guards in Aldgate High Street, they dispersed in small groups, whooping, breaking windows and robbing passers-by.1

  1 Alington, 72-3; Ann. Reg. 1816; Chron., 190-1; Ashton, II, 122-30; Byron, Corr., II, 20-2; Halevy, II, 18; Colchester, II, 581; Smart, 493; State Trials.

  Across the sea, those who wished England well watched anxiously. In Dublin, Robert Peel was asked whether it was true that the Duke of York was at the head of the Guards leading the people against his brother. The Regent had his pictures at Carlton House valued and insured. All the world was awaiting the opening of Parliament in January, when it was known that the reformers were to present petitions with half a million signatures. The National Convention of People's Delegates in London passed a resolution in favour of universal suffrage; the Lancashire delegates demanded annual Parliaments, manhood suffrage at eighteen, equal electoral districts and the exclusion of placemen and pensioners.1

  On the morning of January 28th, at the Golden Cross Hotel in Charing Cross, Hunt, in all the glory of blue lapelled coat, top-boots and white hat and kerseys, handed the petitions to Lord Cochrane, who was to carry them to the Lords. The tribune of the people was in roaring spirits, rolling and unrolling the scrolls and exchanging greetings with the crowd. Later Lord Cochrane was borne shoulder-high to Westminster Hall, where it took him two hours to unload his petitions. Meanwhile the Regent, surrounded by Life Guards, drove to Parliament amid storms of abuse and ribaldry. As the royal cortege returned down the Mall, the glass of his coach was broken in two places, either by stones or by a bullet from an airgun.2

  The attack startled the country. From the Government's point of view the effect was salutary. It made the Regent, in Scott's words, "a good manageable boy," and sobered the House of Commons. For, as reports poured in from the provinces of designs for midnight risings, secret orders for pikes, and overtures to the armed forces, Whig and Tory alike stiffened against the reformers. If it was to come to a fight for hearth and home, Englishmen knew where they stood.

  There was reason for alarm. The English poor were not weaklings; they were suffering almost beyond endurance. They were passionate, easily swayed by rumour, and uneducated. Behind the stubborn, rather bewildered, law-abiding
artisan, marching with banners to

  1 Bamford, II, 13-14,24-6; Byron, Corr., II, 31; Farington, VIII, 106; Halevy, II, 20-1; Moore, Byron, 330-1, 337; Peel, I, 235; Smart, 545-7; Trevelyan, Grey.

  2 Ashton, II, 135-6; Bamford, II, 19, 21-2; Colchester, II, 599-601; Gronow, II, 308-9; Halevy, II, 21-2; Lockhart, IV, 43; Peel, I, 237.

  demand bread or debating the Constitution in his penny Hampden Club, lurked a more menacing figure. The slums of London and the industrial towns swarmed with criminal types who, led by demagogues, were as capable of a massacre as their Paris prototypes. During that winter even the prisoners in Newgate rioted and attacked their jailors. The roughness of that outcast populace was a constant menace to a rich society. Such folk could not be ruled by milksops. Their blood was up; when Cashman, the man who committed the Spa Fields murder, was hanged, he shouted from the cart, "Hurrah! my boys, I'll die like a man; give me three cheers when I trip!" and then to the hangman as the mob yelled encouragement,

  "Come, Jack, you , let go the jib-boom!"1

  The rulers of England faced their peril with courage. Though unimaginative and narrow, they had strong nerves. They had not fought Napoleon and the Revolution to shrink from Orator Hunt and a pack of weavers. Even "goody" Sidmouth—"Britain's guardian gander" of invasion days—declared that no man was fit to be Minister to whom it was not a matter of indifference whether he died in bed or on the scaffold. Resolved to maintain public order, he and his colleagues made no concessions to popularity. Confronting committees of both Houses with widespread evidence of an intended insurrection, they suspended habeas corpus, stopped the unemployed "blanketeers" who tried to march on London, and sent Bow Street runners to Lancashire to arrest the ringleaders. They enrolled special constables, strengthened the law against attempts to seduce soldiers from their duty, and took measures to put down Cobbett, whose "twopenny trash" threatened to turn every working man who could read into an agitator. Fearful of arrest for debt, the great journalist fled to America.

  These measures—even the Cambridge Union Society had to suspend its meetings—were in quieter times condemned as alarmist. Owing to the inadequacy of administrative machinery, they were vitiated by the use of agents provocateurs and corrupt informers. But they succeeded in their object. Within a few months the epidemic of arson, strikes and riots had ceased. Shelley wrote to Byron that Ministers had gained a victory undisturbed by a single murmur, "save those of famine which they have troops of hireling soldiers to

  1 Ashton. II, 98-9,130. See Bury, 1,148; De Selincourt, II, 783-4. 813-15; Farington, VIII, 199; Gronow, I, 220-1; Dudley, 308; Lockhart, IV, 125, 128; Neumann, 36;Robinson, I, 389; Lady Shelley, I, 8; Woodward, 191.

  repress." By the autumn most of the Government's measures were tacitly dropped as needless, though the suspension of habeas corpus continued till the beginning of the following year. Even in Ireland there was quiet.

  Yet though England's rulers, in their fear of Jacobinism, closed down on the political aspirations of the workers, they showed little vindictiveness. Despite their lack of imagination and understanding they still behaved, even when scared, as members of a Christian society. Though Ministers, magistrates and manufacturers were all convinced of the hopelessness of interfering with economic law, the Staffordshire gentleman who put himself and his family on short rations to feed the unemployed was characteristic of thousands.1 It was still unnatural for Englishmen of different classes to hate one another. When the St. Albans Justices stopped the Bilston colliers' march to Carlton House, pointing out that their action might result in a breach of the peace, the hungry, angry men listened with attention, admitted they had been ill-advised, and expressed their readiness to return home, and were helped to do so by a subscription. Bamford and his fellow radicals, though wrongly charged, were treated with courtesy and consideration by the Privy Council who examined them. The number brought to trial for treasonable conspiracy and libel was comparatively small, and most were acquitted, including Watson, the leader of the Spa Field Riots, and the bloodthirsty Arthur Thistlewood, who had carried the tricolour in the attack on the Tower. Orator Hunt was not prosecuted at all.

  And, after an intense but temporary spell of suffering, trade revived, as the economist Ricardo had always predicted. The prices of manufactures having fallen to rock-bottom, foreign customers began to buy again, and, employment improving as a result, internal purchasing-power became more plentiful. By the autumn the monthly average of bankruptcies was only a quarter what it had been at the beginning of the year. Agriculture revived, too, while the lovely summer of 1817 and moderate imports of foreign grain under the sliding scale kept the cost of bread within tolerable Hmits for the urban worker. Consols, which had been down to 63, recovered to 80. England was becoming herself again.1

  1 Ann. Reg. 1817; Chron., 2, 239; Halevy, II, 28-9, 54-5; Harriet Granville, I, 129; Holland, Journal, I, 105; Lockhart, IV, 25-6, 98; Newton, 10, 78, 81, 85; Smart, 564-6; Young, 470-1.

  2 Ann. Reg. 1817; Chron., 5, 16, 19-21; Alington, 73; Ashton, II, 141-2; Bamford, I, 10; II, 24-5, 31, et seq. Colchester, II, 604-7; Cole, Cobbett, 217; Fortescue, British Statesmen of the Great War, 168; Halevy, II, 18-26; Lieven Letters, 1812-14, 30-1, 42; Mitford, Life, II, 1-3; Newton, 57; Peel, I, 237-8; Smart, 548-9; Woodward, 61-2.

  She was still immensely strong and rich. A gentleman wrote that if he were to shut his eyes and open his ears he would believe the country ruined, but if he were to open his eyes and shut his ears, he would think it the most prosperous in the world. Even in the terrible summer of 1816, when her trade was at a standstill and her harvest ruined, Lord Exmouth with the Mediterranean Fleet stood in under the guns of the pirate stronghold of Algiers and, in pursuance of an international policy agreed at Vienna, destroyed, in an eight-hour bombardment, forts defended by 40,000 men, ending the cruel trade in Christian slaves which had terrorised the Mediterranean for centuries. On the second anniversary of Waterloo the Regent went down the river in his crimson and scarlet barge to open the new Strand bridge—London's fourth—while the throng of buntinged boats stretched from shore to shore and flags on enormous poles flew over the heads of watching multitudes. Another bridge of cast-iron was building a few hundred yards downstream, to be paid for like the other by tolls levied by the capitalists who erected it. During 1818 every building site on either side of Regent Street was taken, and the great avenue, halted at Piccadilly a year before, resumed its majestic sweep towards the Marylebone fields where Nash was laying out Doric-pillared crescents. In all the environs of London neat, blue-slated terraces were rising on either side of the trunk roads, and pseudo-Grecian edifices of white stucco were replacing the red and grey bricks of the sober Hanoverian past. So were stately club houses with wonderful cellars and kitchens, vast docks with attendant slums, and grim prisons built on principles which made escape impossible. Soon, it was rumoured, Oxford Street was to be extended as far as Bayswater brook, making it the longest street in Europe. Gas was twinkling—still a little uncertainly—in shop windows, and steamers, blowing black smoke from high, thin funnels, were appearing in rivers and estuaries; Keats on a walking tour through the Highlands was astonished to see one on Loch Lomond. Others, with the help of sails, braved the waters of the Channel, or, despite an occasional tendency to explode,[3] carried parasoled ladies and top-hatted gentlemen on summer outings to Richmond and Hampton Court. And all the while the wheels of the north country factories turned ever faster and the smoking chimneys multiplied, and the ships of Britain carried goods to the farthest corners of the earth. Castlereagh, speaking in the Commons, described 1818 as "the most splendid year ever known in the history of British commerce." That autumn a vessel sailing from the Hoogley anchored in the river at Ochotsk and discharged her cargo, to the amazement of the inhabitants, into a Siberian warehouse.1

  Yet underlying all this prosperity—the glittering streets and great houses where the "fifteen hundred fillers of hot rooms called the fashionable world" supped nightly on ortolans and champa
gne, the ever-lengthening chain of mail coaches speeding across the land, the stupendous bridges planned to span the Menai Strait, Tyne estuary and Avon gorge—the foundations remained troubled. In vain did the favoured architects of Society press forward with the new churches which Parliament had voted and towards which the pious were so liberally subscribing, so that, as Arthur Young put it, the poor might learn "the doctrines of that truly excellent religion which exhorts to content and to submission to the higher powers." Discharged sailors and soldiers still begged, half-naked, in the gutters. Stendhal, visiting the capital, was shocked by the fear of starvation that haunted her outcasts; "such," he wrote, "was the fruits of England's victory." In the bitter winter of 1819-20 a poor woman who lived alone in Stewart's-rents, Drury Lane, in a room without bed or furniture, was asked by another still poorer creature—"a heap of bones covered with rags and filth"—to let her boil a potato at her tiny fire where, being granted permission to he down on the bare floor, she died from want of clothes and nourishment.2 Many others, of whom there was no memorial, perished like her.

  The boom of 1818 which followed the post-war slump was shortlived. In the summer of 1819 the same phenomena recurred— glutted foreign markets, slashed wages, shrinking purchasing-power and men and women unable to buy the goods whose sale would have given them the wherewithal to live. With their reappearance vanished the belief that the disaster and misery out of which Britain

  1 Ann. Reg. 1818. Chron., S77-83- See Smart, 671.

  2 Ann. Reg. 1820. Chron., 7. See idem, 3, 5. 11. See also Ashton, II, 162-3; Colchester II, 561; III, 8; Coupland, Wilberforce; Woodward, 487.