Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  William was killing two birds with one stone. He wasn’t just hurting the French by banning brandy. A new British distilling industry would lead, as the Act promised, to ‘the greater consumption of corn, and the advantage of tillage in this kingdom.’ Farming was Britain’s key industry, and a distilling industry in London meant a new market for English grain. The Act’s main beneficiaries were English farmers – and through their rents, the landowners whose support the new King needed in Parliament.

  To encourage distilling from corn (meaning any of the four grain crops, wheat, barley, rye or oats) William’s Act took advantage of the manufacturing process for raw spirits. Distillers began their work by fermenting a wash, much in the way that brewers made beer. That wash could be made of almost anything – corn, wine, fruit or molasses were favourites (reformers later hinted darkly at human excrement and animal bones). When that weakly alcoholic base was put into the still and heated for the first time, it wasn’t proof spirit that condensed out of the spout. The first run-off produced coarse spirits, known as ‘low wines’, which were well below proof strength. Low wines were distilled a second time to make proof spirits, and it was these, in turn, which were sold on to compound distillers to be flavoured as aniseed water, ‘plague water’ or gin. Since Charles II’s reign, there had been separate taxes on low wines and on proof spirits. William’s new legislation now tweaked the rates on low wines so as to give a huge advantage to low wines made from British corn. Distil most materials and you paid 12d a gallon on the resulting low wines. Put malted British corn in your vat, and your gallon of low wines paid just a penny of duty.

  It was all a long way from 1638, when the Company of Distillers had specifically outlawed ‘working upon malt made of wheat or barley to the misexpense thereof.’6 They had worried what people would say if corn went into their stills instead of to the bakers. They didn’t want to be blamed for pushing up the price of bread. Now corn spirits would be distilled with official sanction.

  The new Act filled London stills with cheap corn wash, but that wasn’t the only boost William gave to the industry. The Company of Distillers’ fifty-year-old monopoly was swept away. From now on there would be open season on distilling. Brewers and other drink manufacturers were still tied up in a web of regulations and duties. Most trades were burdened with controls. No one in London could make a shoe, sew a coat, plane a chair-leg or bake a loaf of bread unless they had paid their dues and gone through an expensive seven-year apprenticeship. But anyone who could afford a vat and a still could set up shop and make spirits.

  The green light for the new spirits industry could hardly have shone brighter. Nothing would impede the flow from corn field to dram-shop. Beer-sellers carried a 200-year burden of legislation. By the 1680s, anyone who wanted to run an alehouse in Middlesex had to take out a magistrate’s licence, attend church and take the sacrament, swear an oath of allegiance to the crown, and accept the expense of quartering troops. The numbers of alehouses were limited, opening times controlled. To run a dram-shop, by contrast, involved neither licences, costs, nor responsibilities. All the gin-seller needed was a cellar or garret – failing that, a wheelbarrow – and enough money to buy a stock of new, cheap British-made spirits.

  If the aim was to get the English drinking corn spirits, William’s legislation had to be rated a spectacular success. In 1690, English distillers paid duty on just over half a million gallons of spirits. By the end of the decade that figure had more than doubled. Charles Davenant reported that ‘since the breaking out of the first war, little brandies have been imported, in the room of which are come home-made spirits drawn from cider, molasses, wheat, and malt.’7 It was nearly all happening in London, where Ned Ward, author of the satirical London Spy, was already, by the turn of the century, talking about the ‘stinking fog that arose from … distillers’ vats.’8 In 1720, when more detailed figures become available, almost ninety per cent of English spirits were being distilled in London.9 Farmers, meanwhile, benefited from the legislation as intended. It wasn’t just that they had a new market for their corn. Distillers could make use of damaged corn which not even the brewers would buy. ‘Great quantities of the worst sort of malted corn, not useful to the brewers,’ a later Act affirmed, trumpeting the success of the new policy, ‘hath been yearly consumed by those who set up works for that purpose.’ For farmers and landowners, distilling was a godsend.

  But William’s legislation almost worked too well. From the start, the new industry turned out an unruly child. Within a year, Parliament was passing an ‘Act for the better ordering … the duties on low wines … and preventing the abuses therein.’ More legislation would soon follow. Distillers were supposed to use only corn which had been malted (maltsters soaked the grain until it started to sprout, then heated it to stop the growth; malted grain fermented more easily, but the process added fifty per cent to the cost of raw grain, and also attracted a tax). Now it turned out that distillers were cutting costs by mixing raw corn into their wash alongside the malt. They dodged duties by keeping hidden stills in back rooms, and tanks which they filled ‘by private pipes and stop-cocks, and other private conveyances.’ Hours for distilling soon had to be limited so that the Excise men could keep track.

  It didn’t make much difference. In this heady atmosphere of official encouragement, the distillers had the bit between their teeth. ‘Compound distillers’, who bought the raw spirits off the ‘malt distillers’ and added the flavours to them, became ever more inventive in their search for new products. Aniseed water remained popular. The taste for juniper-flavoured spirits – Geneva proper – was starting to gain ground. Many gallons of corn spirits were flavoured to counterfeit French Nantz. Cerevisarii Comes gushed in 1692 that ‘our distillers … have various fantasies in the imitation of the flavours of brandy by rectifying from Bay Salt, Bay leaves; others from orrice, ginger, arsmart, pepperwort, pepper, clary, and many others, there being hardly a distiller but hath a different way to that of another.’ Colour came, according to one recipe, from ‘an infusion of prunes and burnt sugar.’10 There were even stories of distillers shipping their counterfeit Nantz out to sea and landing it on the coast as if it had been smuggled from France.

  Others stuck to clever marketing. Mr Baker, a bookseller, took out adverts in the papers for his ‘Nectar and Ambrosia’, sold ‘inclosed in gilt frames, by the gallon, quart or two shilling bottle.’11 Claims for the new drinks became as fantastical as the products themselves. In the London Spy, the landlady of the Widow’s coffee-house declared that her ‘Aqua Veneris’ would ‘restore an old man of threescore to the juvenility of thirty, or make a girl at fourteen, with drinking but one glass, as ripe as an old maid of twenty-four … a Puritan lust after the flesh, and a married man oblige his wife oftener in one night than without it he shall be able to do in seven.’12

  The genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Government had declared free trade in a powerful new drug. It had done everything it could to promote its manufacture and sale. It had flooded London in spirits; now Londoners were only too happy to consume them. Coming out of St Paul’s churchyard, Ned Ward and his companion ‘went through [Covent Garden] market, where a parcel of jolly red-faced dames, in blue aprons and straw hats, sat selling their garden-ware, but they stunk so of brandy, strong drink and tobacco, that the fumes they belched up from their overcharged stomachs o’ercame the fragrance that arose from their sweet herbs and flowers.’13 By 1703, Charles Davenant, for one, was starting to ring alarm bells about the new fad. ‘’Tis a growing vice among the common people,’ he warned, ‘and may, in time, prevail as much as opium with the Turks.’ Everyone knew what had happened to the Turks. To opium, Davenant added gloomily, ‘many attribute the scarcity of people in the East.’14

  No one in authority was listening. There was a brief ban on corn distilling when the harvests failed in 1699, but distillers were compensated with cheaper duties on molasses – the readiest alternative to corn – and tax rebates for spirit exports.
When the government did take a step towards restricting the trade, by requiring spirit-sellers to take out licences, the measure lasted no more than a year. William of Orange had usually been thought an abstemious man, at least by the standards of the age. No one ever called his successor abstemious. Saussure, shocked by the disrespect of Thames watermen, reported how ‘my friends have told me that on the river Queen Anne was often called dram-shop because of her well-known liking for the bottle and spirituous liquors.’15 Her reign opened with yet another ‘Act for encouraging the consumption of malted corn,’ meaning an Act to promote distilling. The brief experiment in spirit licensing, it declared, had proved ‘a great hindrance to the consumption of English brandies.’ (‘Brandy’ still covered all spirits.) From now on, common spirit-shops would still need retail licences, but distillers who sold their own spirits were let off the hook. There was an exemption, too, for ‘anyone whose business was mainly in other goods’ – in other words, for the corner-shops where most Londoners bought their staples. The only proviso was that spirit-sellers shouldn’t ‘permit tippling in … their houses.’

  Along the way there had been sporadic attacks on spirit-drinkers by do-gooders, brewers and satirists. Brewers, in particular, were starting to worry. Outside London most spirits were sold in alehouses, so they made a direct hit on brewers’ profits. It was no surprise when they started getting together petitions to have spirit duties put back up again. A 1700 Satyr upon Brandy warned off potential converts to spirits with the first description of a gin hangover:

  His skull, instead of brains, supplied with cinder,

  His nose turns all his handkerchiefs to tinder …

  His stomach don’t concoct, but bake his food,

  His liver even vitrefies his blood;

  His trembling hand scarce heaves his liquor in,

  His nerves all crackle under’s parchment skin;

  His guts from nature’s drudgery are freed,

  And in his bowels salamanders breed.

  The authorities had yet to wake up to their own hangover. In thirty years, the only brief flurry of nerves for distillers came when the Peace of Utrecht ended war with France in 1713. The distilling industry had been set on its feet when the French brandy trade was shut off by William. Distillers now worried that peace would bring back competition. To make matters worse, the corn harvest looked bad. And Madam Geneva’s enemies did their best to get a bandwagon rolling against her. One satirist published The whole trial, indictment, arraignment, examination and condemnation of Madam Geneva … taken in short-hand by Dorothy Addle-Brains, Fire-woman of the Jury. At her mock-trial, Madam Geneva (‘a gentlewoman born of Dutch parents in this nation’) faced charges of plotting ‘to make mad, and intoxicate the heads of … journeymen taylors and shoemakers froes, tinkers and porters, doxies, butcher’s wives, young strumpets, rotten bawds, tarpaulins and soldiers … old basketwomen, and other honest and well-meaning people.’ A succession of cobblers’ wives and market-women testified to their own drunkenness, laziness, and neglect of their husbands. Sentenced to death, ‘Madam Gin being made sensible of her heinous crimes by Mrs Prudence Pratapace, the independent Puritan Lady, she was conveyed to Tom Turdman’s Fields … where she bewailed her faults, and made open confession of her manifold crimes, with floods of tears, acknowledging herself guilty of death was turn’d off, and her body conveyed in a hurdle to Mumpers Hall, where her … friends caused her to be embalmed, and laid ten days in state.’

  But Madam Geneva’s enemies had hired the funeral drapes too soon. Supporters like Daniel Defoe leapt to the defence. ‘Our business,’ he wrote in The Review, ‘is to encourage every branch of trade by which our produce may find a vent, by which our people may find employment, our general commerce be increased, and the value and rent of lands kept up; and this, especially the last, the distilling of malt has so great a concern in, that it must for ever pass with me for a trade as profitable to the public as necessary to be supported, and as useful to be encouraged in proportion to its magnitude, as any trade in the nation.’ To ram home his point he filled the paper with tales of woe from impoverished distillers.16

  The distillers needn’t have worried. Official support was as strong as ever. French brandy continued to be banned. The only new Act passed in 1713 went their way, putting an end to the Company of Distillers’ backdoor attempt to win back their monopoly through Elizabethan charter legislation. And this time the law was unequivocal. ‘Any person may distil brandy or spirits from British malt,’ the Act declared, ‘and such … persons shall not be prosecuted for so doing.’ Free trade in spirits stayed firmly in place.

  * * *

  By this time Geneva proper, spirits flavoured with juniper, were so popular that Geneva was starting to be used – at least by opponents – as a catch-all for cheap corn spirits. Corn spirits had been an import from Holland in the first place, and so was juniper flavouring. Holland had been a fertile source of new drinks over the years. The custom of hopping ale to make beer had been a Dutch one. Some even blamed the Dutch for Englishmen’s habitual drunkenness. ‘As the English returning from the wars in the Holy Land brought home the foul disease of leprosy,’ was one assessment, ‘so in our fathers’ days the English returning from the service in the Netherlands brought with them the foul vice of drunkenness.’17

  The English had suffered the strength of Dutch spirits in the wars of the mid-seventeenth century, when ‘the captains of the Hollanders men of war usually set a hogshead of brandy abroach, afore the mast; and bid the men drink lusty, then they might fight lusty: and our poor seamen felt the force of the brandy, sometimes to their cost.’ In the wars of William’s and Anne’s reigns, the Dutch were allies, and ‘Dutch courage’ was available to English soldiers as well. Into the army camps in Flanders, Daniel Defoe recorded, ‘the Dutch sutlers carried … during the late long wars against France, a certain new distilled water called Geneva, being a good wholesome malt spirit, if rightly prepared, wrought up with juniper-berries.’ It won some important endorsements. ‘Nay, they tell us in Holland, that even the great Duke of Marlborough gave it a character … and that he recommended the (moderate) use of it … when they were going at any time to engage the enemy.’18 Supporters would later chalk up victories like Blenheim in 1704 and Ramillies in 1706 to Madam Geneva’s credit. It wasn’t long before the common soldiers developed the taste. And it was the soldiers, according to Defoe, who ‘tasting this liquor, brought the desire, as well as the fame of it, over with them at the ensuing peace; and our distillers preparing it as well here, as the Dutch abroad, they supply’d the people with it.’

  The people didn’t seem to need much encouragement. By 1713, when the wars ended, English distillers were already producing two million gallons of raw spirits a year. Some of those spirits were traded out to the country; some went abroad (Madam Geneva would play a walk-on role in the slave trade as part of a triangular route from London to West Africa); some went into medicines; and some appeared as counterfeit brandy to fool the rich. But the vast majority ended up on the streets of London. Gin was made sweetened or unsweetened, sometimes tinted to the colour of brandy, sometimes sold clear. It could be stirred into ale to make a popular drink called purl. More often, in the London brandy-shops, it was mixed two to one with water and sold in quarter-pint drams.

  César de Saussure stumbled on one of those dram-shops when he visited London a decade later. By then, thirty years of unrestricted trade in spirits had had their effect. ‘These taverns,’ he reported, ‘are almost always full of men and women, and even sometimes of children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away, though these liquors are a sort of poison, and many people die from making too free a use of them.’19

  But the poor, of course, weren’t the only ones drinking too much in the decades after the Glorious Revolution. If they found it difficult to walk at the end of the evening, they were only copying their betters. ‘It is not the lower populace alone that is addicted
to drunkenness,’ Saussure confirmed. ‘Numbers of persons of high rank and even of distinction are over fond of liquor.’20 Gamblers steadied their nerves with punch; long evenings in the coffee-house were lubricated by booze; young rakes reeled out of Tom King’s into the Covent Garden dawn. To call the early eighteenth century a hard-drinking age would be something of an understatement.

  * * *

  Sir Robert Walpole learned to drink at his father’s table at Houghton. ‘Come, Robert,’ his father was reputed to say, ‘you shall drink twice while I drink once; for I will not permit the son in his sober senses to be witness of the intoxication of the father.’21 The letter-writer Mrs Delaney recalled of Walpole’s Tory opponent that, ‘Bolingbroke, when in office, sat up whole nights drinking, and in the morning, having bound a wet napkin round his forehead and his eyes, to drive away the effects of his intemperance, he hastened without sleep to his official business.’ As for John Carteret, who would eventually replace Walpole, ‘The period of his ascendancy was known by the name of the Drunken Administration. His habits were extremely convivial; and champagne probably lent its aid to keep him in that state of joyous excitement in which his life was passed … Driven from office, he retired laughing to his books and his bottle.’22

  Hard drinking was barely even a vice. Samuel Johnson would recall that ‘all the decent people of Litchfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of.’23* Daniel Defoe, in 1702, thought that ‘an honest drunken fellow is a character in a man’s praise.’ It was part of the age’s clubbishness. All over London, men met in coffee-houses or rooms above pubs to drink, converse and do business. Drink was everywhere. Strike a business deal and you sealed it with a handshake and a dram. Go to the doctor and your medicine would be spiked with alcohol. Business meetings, magistrates’ sessions, gatherings of old friends or wedding feasts; all were likely to be held in inns or taverns. There was nowhere else to congregate. Nor did Londoners only drink in their leisure time. Benjamin Franklin, apprenticed to a Lincoln’s Inn Fields printer on his first visit to London in 1725 – later he would return as agent for the state of Pennsylvania and advocate of American Independence – recalled how ‘my companion at press drank every day a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint in the afternoon about 6 o’clock, and another pint when he had done his day’s work.’24