The Age of Elegance
Page 52
And though the mob in a three days' illumination celebrated what they chose to regard as the Queen's acquittal but was in reality their
1 Harriet Granville, I, 158-9. See idem, 155-6, 160-1, 164-6, 172, 179; Broughton, II, 134-5; Colchester, III, 164; Halevy, II, 99, 102.
2 Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 18th Oct., 1820, 24th, 28th Feb., 1821; Creevey, I, 319; Croker, 1,174-5,179; George IV, Letters, II, 378, 386; Harriet Granville, 1,196; Halevy, II, 98; Hobhouse, 36-41.
own triumph, and though even in the quiet Berkshire woodlands Mary Mitford and her family were forced by riotous villagers to light candles in the windows, the poor woman's cause was finished. She had ceased to be a pretext or even a joke, and had become a nuisance. "Most gracious Queen," wrote a pamphleteer:
"we thee implore
To go away and sin no more;
But if that effort be too great,
To go away at any rate!"
The Queen fever was over. When Parliament met in January, 1821, a large majority voted against the inclusion of her name in the Prayer Book. Her prestige slumped still more heavily when, having proclaimed that she would never touch a penny while the insult continued, she accepted an annuity of ^50,000 per annum.
As the Queen sank, the King rose. That February, feeling perhaps that he had drained the last dregs of humiUation, he went, for the first time for years, to the theatre. He was very pale when he entered, but the whole house, including the pit, stood up and cheered him, singing the National Anthem again and again. There were only a few shouts of ‘Queen!" and "George, where's your wife!", and these were quickly drowned. He was so delighted that he repeated his success next night by going to Covent Garden where the same tiling happened and where he laughed so uproariously at the jokes of Grimaldi, the clown, that he burst his stays.1
In its unaccountable way, the country had gone about. It had had a debauch and was now sober. Even Byron wrote from Italy repudiating the reformers and telling his friend, Hobhouse, not to be so violent.2 The more dangerous radicals were safe under lock and key; the harmless ones like Bamford were released and allowed to return to their employment. Trade was doing well, food prices were low, the North was back at its looms and spindles. Everything was returning to normal; everything was apparently as it had been. A prime sporting dinner was held at the Castle Tavern, Holborn, where, after harmony, the stakes were laid for a match between
"I saw him trundle downstairs and I never saw anything look so happy."—Harriet Granville, I, 206-7. See idem, 2o8; Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal; 7th, 8th Feb., 1821; Farington, VIII, 274; Greville (Suppl.), I, 124; Neumann, 50-1.
2 "It is not. against the pure principles of reform that I protest," he wrote, "but against low, designing, dirty levellers who would pioneer their way to a democratic tyranny."—Byron, Corr., II, 147. See idem, 115-16, 134, 137-8, 142-3, 147-8.
Tom Cribb, the Champion of England, and a challenger; a new-ballet dancer appeared at the opera—her price, the old lechers told one another, was £5000—Constable exhibited four more pictures at the spring exhibition at Somerset House, including "Hampstead Heath" and "The Hay Wain." Far away in a Roman lodging young Severn, the painter, bent over the bed of the dying Keats and heard the phlegm boiling in his throat.
That summer—the summer of Napoleon's death and Shelley's Adonais—they crowned the King. It cost a quarter of a million and was attended by every romantic excess of pageantry of which he and his age were capable. The Duke of Wellington, the Champion and the Earl Marshal backed wonderful horses down the feasting defile of Westminster Hall, girls in white dresses strewed flowers amid forests of plumes and gleaming trumpets, "the nobles and sages of the land decked out in velvet and satin, gold and jewellery, passed in procession through -countless thousands, the sun shining without a cloud, and all uniting to do homage to the Constitution."1 It was a lovely day and the populace was in the best of humours, cheering everyone, even Castlereagh, who, in his Garter robes and diamonds, was voted the handsomest man there. The King, looking a little pale after an operation, appeared like some gorgeous bird of the East. Much of the time he. spent sighing and kissing his brooch to Lady Conyngham; "anyone who could have seen his disgusting figure," wrote a spectator, "with a wig the curls of which hung down his back, and quite bending beneath the weight of his sixty years, would have been quite sick." The poor Queen, attended only 'by a shadow of her former rabble, tried to get into the Abbey by a side door, but was driven away with shouts of "Shame!" and "Off, Off!"
A fortnight later she died, her supporters said of a broken heart, the doctors of an overdose of magnesia. The King, who was on his way.to Ireland, with the tact of a perfect gentleman, added a mourning band to his costume. Though the event produced one last glorious riot as the Home Office tried to stop the coffin from passing through the City, it was not allowed to interfere with the celebrations in Dublin. Here the King enjoyed the apotheosis of his career—
1 Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 19th July, 1B21. See Ann. rAeg..i82i. Chron., 324-90; Colchester, m, 233; Creevey, Life and Times, 141; Farington, VIII, 291-2; Hamilton 6fDalzell MS., 163-4; Haydon, II, 24-5.
coloured rags and streamers hanging from every window, whisky punch flowing in the filthy gutters, thousands of drunken Paddys shouting themselves delirious with joy. "They clawed and pawed him all over," wrote an onlooker, "and called him Ethereal Majesty. . . . They absolutely kissed his hands and feet. Alas! poor degraded country!" The only drawback—for the Vice-Queen, as Lady Conyngham was called, accompanied him—was what a correspondent of Creevey's described as an attack of the wherry-go-nimbles in the royal stomach and the failure of the stewards at the Curragh races to prepare a convenience with a large enough seat. Byron from Italy commemorated the occasion in verse:
"Lo! he comes! the Messiah of royalty comes!
Like a goodly Leviathan roll'd from the waves;
Then receive him as best such an advent becomes
With a legion of cooks and an army of slaves!
"Spread—spread for Vitcllius, the royal repast,
Till the gluttonous despot be stuff'd to the gorge!
And the roar of his drunkards proclaim him at last
The fourth of the fools and oppressors called 'George!’ "
Events could not be expected to remain on so lofty a plane for long. If the first year of the reign had been a nightmare and the second culminated in a fairy-tale triumph, the third posed a question mark. The seventh anniversary of Waterloo saw English industry precariously ascending the crest of another wave of short-lived, hectic demand and English agriculture descending deeper into a trough of inexplicable depression. The accursed system, wrote Cobbett, as he rode across the green, anxious shires, was staggering about like a sheep with water in its head, "turning its pate upon one side, seeming to listen but has no hearing, seeming to look but has no sight; one day it capers and dances, the next it mopes and seems ready to die."1 Abroad, with the Holy Alliance Sovereigns marching and counter-marcliing their armies like fire-brigades across their neighbours' territories to extinguish one national and liberal revolt after another, the Vienna settlement of Europe achieved after so much blood seemed on the verge of collapsing. The people of
1 Rural Rides, I, 7-8.
England, particularly its younger generation, were growing increasingly hostile to such authoritarian interference by its allies and increasingly critical of Castlereagh, who, as Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Commons, was at once the champion of the collective system abroad and the pillar of repressive administration at home. This stately, honourable aristocrat, now Marquis of Londonderry, with his handsome face and impassive courtesy, had come to symbolise for them, not only the jack-booted Austrians and Cossacks who shot and gaoled Italian and Polish liberals in the name of dynastic autocrats, but the slashing yeomanry of Peterloo and the spies and informers who dogged the footsteps of English reformers. The whole chilling array of luxury, display, indifference and disdain which Britain's aristocracy presented to the victims of
her industrial and agrarian revolutions seemed embodied by one man.
Yet that mask of cold indifference—a facet of the stoic courage with which the nation's rulers had faced Napoleon—concealed a deeply sensitive nature. Like his colleagues Castlereagh had borne without flinching the toil and peril of office in a revolutionary age too long, and, under that "splendid summit of bright polished frost," unguessed at even by his dearest intimates, the strain of overwork and public opprobrium had begun to tell. That summer he spoke of living amidst the ruin of empires and, riding one day in the Row, he told a friend that the business of carrying on the Government had become intolerable and that, once out of it, no power on earth would bring him back.1
In the August after his Irish triumph the King set out on another progress. Before embarking for Edinburgh he gave an audience to the Foreign Secretary who was about to attend a Congress of European Sovereigns at Verona. The King was so struck by his Minister's distraught state that he spoke of it to Lord Liverpool. So did Wellington who had an equally disturbing interview with his colleague. Some mysterious fear seemed to be haunting that strong, calm mind; some obsession about a conspiracy to accuse him of a nameless crime.2 During his conversation with Wellington he broke down and cried.
1 Broughton, II, 187; Creevey Papers, II, 38.
2 He had been much shocked by the disgrace of a wealthy Irish Bishop who had been caught with a guardsman in a London tavern, and believed that there was a plot to accuse him falsely of the same crime. Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th August, 1820: Brownlow, 198; Croker, I, 224-5; Greville (Suppl.), I, 155-6, Hobhouse, 12th Aug., 1820; Lieven, Private Letters, 189-94; Stanhope, 272-3; Toynbee, 129-31.
Two days later it was learnt that the Foreign Secretary, rising' suddenly from a bed of fever, had cut his throat. To those who knew him intimately his passing seemed an inconceivable loss: that of the1 noblest and kindest of men and the wisest, most steadfast statesman of his time. Yet when the body of "carotid-artery-cutting Castlereagh," as the radicals called him, was borne to the Abbey door, a knot of rough-looking men in the roadway gave a fierce, exultant hurray.1 "Posterity' wrote Byron,
"will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here he the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and . . .!"
Tidings of another death reached London about the same time. "Shelley, the great atheist," wrote Charles Lamb, "has gone down by water to eternal fire!" A few weeks earlier the poet had sailed-from Spezzia in a small yacht and was never seen alive again. His remains were burnt on the shore near Via Reggio to conform with the Tuscan quarantine laws: "Marble mountains touched the air with' coolness and the flame of the fire bore away towards heaven quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty." A Tory newspaper's comment was that the poet would now discover whether there was a hell or not.
Such eroding bitterness and division was symbolic. It sprang from the inability of those who ruled to cope with change. Being able to think only in patterns of thought which they had defended so long against foreign violence, they regarded with abhorrence all who found those patterns outworn, and were in turn anathema to them. Those who, suffering or perceiving injustice, demanded a reform of the country's laws and institutions, they denounced as Jacobins and potential assassins, and were themselves denounced by them as tyrants. By their defiant, but pathetic conservatism, they made Crown, Church and Constitution suspect to millions. They not only failed to find a common denominator for readjusting British society after the war; they failed even to realise one was needed. They could
1 Cooper, 329-30. See Creevey Papers, II, 47; Croker, I, 226; Hobhouse, 20th August, 1822; Peel, I, 321. For a tribute of deep. affecdon to Castlereagh see Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 25th August, 1822, et seq. and Brownlow, passim.
not reconcile, they could only denounce; they could not lead, they could only repress.
Because of this, Britain in the hour of victory, with as noble a material and spiritual heritage as any nation had ever had, faltered and almost failed. With the means, physical and intellectual, of solving all her problems—which were not in reality very great—she staggered like a blind man from distress to distress. Yet she was not only immensely rich, but more advanced in real civilisation than any other country. There was no land in Europe where so many were so free, and none anywhere where some had a freedom so complete and satisfying. There was none where men had such mastery over material phenomena and enjoyed such comfort, elegance and happiness. There was none where man had done so much— in home-making, the shaping of landscape and the manufacture of amenities—to adapt his environment to his nature.
But the dispossessed peasants starving in the midst of plenty, the pallid machine-minders at the closed factory gates, the poachers in the county lock-ups awaiting transportation, felt that they had no longer any part in that inheritance. "Suppose," the flash coves sang in Salford gaol after Peterloo,
"the Duke be short of men?
What would old England say?
They'd wish they had those lads again
They sent to Botany Bay!"1
For when the war, which had united men in sacrifice, was over, society was seen to assume a new face. The rich man in time of trouble withdrew to his castle and left the poor to fend for themselves against bewildering economic forces which made the rich still richer but engulfed the ancient communities of the humble like a flood. And the officers of the realm—princes, peers, legislators, judges, parsons, lawyers, lifeguards, bumbles—instead of endeavouring to rescue the poor from their unmerited plight, behaved as though the only purpose of the State was to preserve the wealth and property of the rich.
Yet the rich were not the oppressors the champions of the poor made out. They were seldom sadists or robbers or even tyrants. They were, for the most part, cultivated and kindly Englishmen, brought
1 Bamford, II, 177.
up in a Christian tradition and with a sense of personal responsibility and honour. Yet, intoxicated by their good fortune—the riches, luxury, elegance and power heaped on them by the nation's triumphs—the gentlemen of England had unconsciously come to think of these as the end of their country's existence. They regretted that the poor must suffer, but when their economists told them that the wealth of the nation—that is, their own wealth—depended on the periodic unemployment, starvation and degradation of their humbler countrymen, they accepted it as an inevitable dispensation of Providence and did their best, not unsuccessfully, to banish it from their minds.
Yet Wellington and his fellow officers had not applied the principles of laissez faire on the battlefields of the Peninsula. Nor had they shrunk from any duty demanded of them. In war they had been ready to suffer and sacrifice everything that their country might live. Throughout its struggle against Napoleon Britain had found its leaders equal to every need. All she now needed in .peace was a reform of her financial system to harness and canalise the productive forces unloosed by her inventors, and of her laws and institutions to give renewed effect to the moral principles in which ninety-nine out of a hundred of her people believed. Those principles, founded on die Christian religion, were recognised by Englishmen of all classes. They were that a man should be free to live as he chose in his own home and follow his craft without the interference of arbitrary tyranny. They comprised a belief in the moral right of the individual to liberty, self-respect and the ownership of property. A system of society in which so many were being deprived of their traditional livelihood, of their customary standards of living and of any real freedom of choice by the action of remote economic forces over which they had no control, in which they were forced to work under conditions which robbed them of health and pride in their labour and to live in habitations which deprived them of self-respect, was a system which, by England standards, was in need of reform. It wanted the first essential of a society that could content Englishmen: it was unjust. For the broad framework of justice in which real liberty could operate was lacki
ng.
EPILOGUE
The English Vision
"It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open sea Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity-Hath flowed, 'with pomp of waters, unwithstood,' Roused though it be full often to a mood Which spurns the check of salutary bands, That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.—In everything we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold."
Wordsworth
" 'Tis well an old age is out And time to begin a new."
Dryden
T