Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  In fact he loved his subjects no more than they loved him. Lord Hervey records the king’s running commentary upon the faults and follies of the English. ‘No English or even French cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner could set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, or English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any Englishwoman how to dress herself . . .’ The palm in all these activities went of course to his German compatriots. This plain favouritism brought problems in a larger sphere, and it was feared by his ministers that he might try to steer England’s foreign policy in a Hanoverian direction without consulting the nation’s best interests. What had Westminster to do with Russia or with Sweden except as a way of obtaining wood? He had never been allowed to visit Hanover during the reign of his father but, after his own accession, he made many and prolonged visits to his electorate. He was a Guelph, one of the most ancient dynasties of all Europe, and it can be claimed with some confidence that he took a wider view of the continent than did his ministers.

  Certainly he was meticulous in his duties; he was not one of those sovereigns who lose all cares of state on the hunting field. He read everything that was put before him, and every day was divided into its separate duties. Even the affairs of the heart were regulated. He visited his mistress, Henrietta Howard, at seven in the evening; if he was a little early he paced up and down outside her door with his watch in his hand until the tremendous moment came.

  Walpole seems quickly to have got the measure of him, and confided to Hervey that ‘his majesty imagines frequently he shall do many things, which, because he is not at first contradicted, he fancies he shall be let do at last. He thinks he is devilish stout, and never gives up his will or opinion; but never acts in anything material according to either of them but when I have a mind he should.’ He concluded that ‘he is, with all his personal bravery, as great a political coward as ever wore a crown, and as much afraid to lose it’. He advised that ‘the more you can appear to make anything to be his own, the better you will be heard’.

  So Walpole had to be an artist of stage management as well as of decorum. The weights and balances of power were still somewhat ambiguous and he had to tread very carefully. In Westminster itself, of course, and in what were later to be called the corridors of power, Walpole was still pre-eminent. Robin ruled the roost. His command of men and management in parliament was paramount; the front bench was composed almost entirely of his nominees, and he knew how to touch the ‘secret springs’ of others’ loyalty by promotion or by the discreet distribution of secret service money. He promised the king a quiet life, than which nothing suited George II better. ‘Consider, Sir Robert,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘what makes me easy in this matter makes for your ease too.’ They were friends for life.

  Since the king was not called upon to do very much his reputation seemed to rise, and a French envoy noted in 1728 that ‘the king is much more popular than George I. As much as he can, he tries to make himself popular.’ This was in part the result of the efforts of Queen Caroline, who added a much-needed tone of levity and entertainment to what might otherwise have been a rather stiff court. Clearly his private animadversions against the English did not reach the public ear. The growth in wages and commerce, as outlined in a previous chapter, could have done nothing but increase his status.

  Of course Walpole had many and various opponents; anyone with a dislike of the country’s administration could find a ready target in the rotund figure of the first minister. A large number of dissident Whigs regarded him as their enemy; he had not only kept them out of power but he was in the process of creating a despotism in the halls of Westminster. The Hanoverian Tories were by nature and instinct opposed to any Whig autocrat, especially when he held the strings of commerce and of patronage in his hands. And then there were the Jacobites, waiting hopefully for the day when the monarch over the water would return to claim his proper kingdom. These multifarious opponents might agree on ousting Walpole but they could not really concur in a coherent and positive alternative policy.

  Many of the public prints were opposed to Walpole, most notably the Craftsman which as its name might imply was dedicated to exposing the men of craft or subterfuge. The first issue, published at the end of 1726, declared that ‘the mystery of State-Craft abounds with such innumerable frauds, prostitutions, and enormities, in all shapes, and under all disguises, that it is an inexhaustible fund, an eternal resource for satire and reprehension’. Thus was launched a sustained invective against Walpole and his allies.

  A month later in the Craftsman came a character assassination of the first minister as a ‘man, dressed in a plain habit, with a purse of gold in his hand. He threw himself into the room, in a bluff ruffianly manner. A smile, or rather a sneer sat on his countenance. His face was bronzed over with a glare of confidence. An arch malignity leered in his eye.’ A later number issued a more general denunciation. ‘Corruption is a poison, which will soon spread itself thro’ all ranks and orders of men; especially when it begins at the fountain-head. A spirit of baseness, prostitution and venality will universally prevail.’

  There was even a serial publication of a ballad, ‘History of the Norfolk Steward’:

  A story concerning one Robin

  Who, from not worth one groat

  A vast fortune has got

  By politics, Bubbles and Jobbing . . .

  Other periodicals and pamphlets joined the hunt, assisted by notable combatants such as Swift and Pope, but nothing was more successful than a London musical.

  In a letter of summer 1716, Swift suggested that his friend and fellow Scriblerian, John Gay, should write ‘a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there’. This was the cue, taken up eleven years later, for the most famous and successful musical comedy of the eighteenth century. The Beggar’s Opera was described by many names – comic opera, ballad opera, burlesque, satire, musical – just as victory in war still had many fathers. But no one knew quite what it was. In the course of the century, some of the theatres played it as low farce and others as sentimental tragedy. It was both, and neither. It goes from pathos to pantomime in the space of a line, and from cynicism to lyricism in a moment; there are passages in which the heterogeneous tones and styles cannot be distinguished, leading to bewilderment or exhilaration according to taste.

  When we consider Pope’s Dunciad, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we note the resemblances. This was a doubting and ambiguous age that found its quietus in satire and ridicule. To that end The Beggar’s Opera adopted all the popular modes and forms of the time, from street ballad to farce and folk song. All the life of the streets was somewhere within it, in implicit protest against the phalanx which ruled the state.

  The eighteenth century is not supposed to have been a felicitous age of drama, with its ‘serious’ tragedies filled with sententious moralizing and sentimental pieties that sank John Dryden, for example, below the waterline. But The Beggar’s Opera did provide surprise and delight to the London stage, written as it was according to the Daily Journal ‘in a Manner wholly new’. It was still new when Bertolt Brecht purloined it for The Threepenny Opera of 1928.

  The Beggar’s Opera was first presented on 29 January 1729, at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (not to be confused with the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane) where it ran for sixty-two nights. This marked an overwhelming public response, when most other new plays lasted for only six or seven. It concerns two young women who are in love with, and believe themselves married to, a resourceful highwayman named Macheath (‘son of the heath’). Polly Peachum, the daughter of a receiver of stolen goods, and Lucy Lockit, the daughter of the keeper of Newgate Prison, vie for his love in a setting of taverns and Newgate apartments filled with pimps, thieves, whores and all the other inhabitants of contemporary low life. Nothing but rough words and rough sentiments can be hear
d, while the lovers’ complaints are ringed with ambiguity and satire. It was unforgettable and was for the period a breath of fresh air (if the term can be allowed for such insalubrious elements) after a period of achingly boring acting on moral stilts.

  The fact that Newgate Prison is the setting for much of the plot confirms its central place in the consciousness of the eighteenth century. Everybody knew it, by reputation if not by sight and smell. It had become the common name for any prison, and a ‘Newgate bird’ for any prisoner. It had stood on the same site in various incarnations for 600 years and was once more rebuilt in 1770, by which time it had inspired more poems and plays than any other building in England. All the characters of The Beggar’s Opera revolve around it, as if it were a dark sun, just as some of the most famous personalities of eighteenth-century London were associated with it.

  The role of Polly’s father, Peachum, for example, was loosely based upon Jonathan Wild; Wild was a receiver of stolen goods and a notorious ‘thief-taker’ who would impeach the unnecessary, incompetent, or injured members of his own gang in return for a payment of £40. He devised the robberies and then advertised the stolen goods in the columns of a newspaper, thus gaining the rewards for his own crimes. It was a common trade of the time, but Wild was its supreme exponent. He was hanged in 1725 but such was his continuing fame that Henry Fielding wrote his supposed biography, The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, eighteen years later. Wild was a cunning and violent man in a profane and ruthless age. His surname was his character. Fielding himself described eighteenth-century London as a wilderness, ‘a vast wood or forest in which the thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Arabia and Africa’.

  The hero or anti-hero of the opera, Macheath, is a highwayman, one of the great professions of the eighteenth century. Although Gay portrays him as a poor piece of work, entirely dependent upon the bottle, the highwayman himself was often seen as a cavalier adventurer, a gentleman of the road, a man of honour. His victims were recommended to him by landlords or tapsters of the various inns, where they were called ‘worth seeing’ or ‘worth speaking with’.

  In his diary Horace Walpole recalled that ‘a black figure on horseback’ stopped the chaise in which he was riding with a Lady Browne. The highwayman asked for the lady’s purse, saying, ‘Don’t be frightened. I will not hurt you.’ He added, ‘I give you my word that I will do you no hurt.’ When she gave him the item he told her, before riding away, ‘I am much obliged to you. I wish you good night.’ This was perhaps the acceptable face of eighteenth-century crime, although it did not of course prevent the perpetrators from being hanged. Gay may even have helped to burnish the reputation of thieves and prostitutes. One contemporary remarked that ‘highwaymen and women of the town are not romantic figures, but our poet had made highwaymen handsome and lively, and women of the town beautiful and attractive. Over all he has cast such a glamour of romance and sentimentalism that even Newgate comes to resemble a select pleasure resort.’ But the real pleasure came in coins and notes.

  This was a world of money, of stocks, of bubbles, of bullion and new paper notes of 1695 from the Bank of England. The language of trade and finance occurred naturally to Gay. He did not have to introduce it, or comment upon it; it came to him effortlessly because it reflected the temper of the time. Such terms as ‘business’, ‘account’, ‘interest’, ‘profit’, ‘debt’ and ‘credit’ are of many applications but they float up into the play with the bubble of money. This is a world of greed and gain. It is a culture in which someone could be bought or sold as easily as a piece of plate. Self-interest is the key as large as that which opened the great doors of Newgate itself. ‘Honour’ itself is false, when even pickpockets can call themselves ‘men of honour’.

  Who was, then, the gentleman? Lockit was known as ‘the prime minister of Newgate’, and Fielding wrote that ‘Jonathan Wild had every qualification necessary to form a great man’. These were representative of the men who effectively ruled London and its surrounding countryside much more successfully than the men of Westminster who were nominally the masters.

  When Peachum recites the names of the members of his gang, he mentions ‘Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bob Bluff, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty’. From that time forward Walpole was often disparaged as ‘Bob Booty’ or ‘Bluff Bob’. He had actually attended the first night and with characteristic sang-froid had applauded the references to himself, even asking for an encore. Yet the allusions to him may be of a more general application. As Lockit puts it,

  Lest the Courtiers offended should be:

  If you mention Vice or Bribe,

  ’Tis so pat to all the Tribe;

  Each crys – That was levell’d at me.

  The Italian opera was a relatively new fashion, introduced to the London stage in 1705. There had always been musical dramas and ballad operas ever since the Mysteries and Miracle Plays of the medieval period. Shakespeare’s characters break into song at every conceivable opportunity, and The Tempest might be described as an English opera. But the Italian style, with its use of recitativo and aria, its masque-like scenery and improbable plots, its castrato and its prima donna, captured the imagination of the early eighteenth century. In The Beggar’s Opera Gay satirized its happy endings, as well as its more melodramatic moments, but seems to have loved its deliberate excess. Contemporary moralists and critics (there was sometimes little difference between them) condemned the Italian opera for being depraved, enervating and effeminate; Gay shows no signs of agreeing with them, while stealing from the operas themselves the constant strain of excitement and exhilaration.

  When two rival sopranos came to blows on the stage of the Opera House, in Haymarket, the admirers of either lady pitched in with what one report described as ‘cat-calls, howlings, hissings and other offensive manifestations’ so that ‘the evening concluded in one general and alarming riot’. It was the scene Gay revisited in the jealous rages between Lucy Lockit and Polly Peachum.

  He adapted his music from the airs and ballads sung all around him; some were anonymous folk ballads while others were taken from fashionable operas and popular songs. A washerwoman could have sung them, or a porter whistled them. Tunes and melodies were always in the air.

  Gay himself was a Devon boy, born and raised in Barnstaple where he attended the local grammar school. At some point in his seventeenth year he made the familiar journey to London where he was apprenticed as a draper’s assistant; drapers’ assistants were in this period often unfairly characterized as effeminate but Gay himself seems to have been diffident, uncertain, almost invisible. He once wrote that ‘the world, I believe, will take so little notice of me, that I need not take much of it’. He ascended from apprentice to literary hack by producing small prose items for a twice-weekly periodical entitled the British Apollo OR Curious Amusements for the INGENIOUS. He emerged as a public writer, rather than a private hack, with a number of poems and pamphlets which were well received.

  Then began the long, cruel search for patrons. Patrons were more invidious and inconstant than Grub Street. Yet impoverished authors still needed them. This was not an age when publication alone brought many rewards. Swift characterized the aspiring authors good-naturedly in A Tale of a Tub. ‘They writ, and rallied, and rhymed, and sung, and said, and said nothing; they drank, and fought, and whored, and slept, and swore, and took snuff; they went to new plays on the first night, haunted the chocolate-houses.’

  Gay turned his hand to everything in the fashionable mode – farces, satires, heroic tragedy, mock heroic and the strange mingling of moods and modes that are enshrined in the titles he chose such as Trivia, The Toilette and The What D’Ye Call It? He may justifiably have despaired of literary immortality, but he had been able to secure his immediate future with an appointment as a commissioner of the state lottery with rent-free lodgings in Whitehall. It was not a great deal, but it was something. He still complained of ‘disappointments’ but he remained on
the treadmill of the court, kept revolving by gossip and malevolence. He may have consoled himself with the fact that the true poets of the age were the bankers and jobbers who conjured gold out of thin air and raised glittering palaces without any foundations at all. His career, like that of so many others at the time, was one of ambition and dependency, of fawning and favouritism, always in hope of further advancement but frequently overlooked.

  All this changed with the first performance on that late January evening of 1729. No one had seen anything quite like it before and, soon enough, fire-screens, fans and playing cards were adorned with scenes from The Beggar’s Opera. The manager of the theatre, John Rich, packed the theatre to bursting. On the evening of 23 March, for example, ninety-eight spectators were accommodated on the stage itself. William Hogarth painted six versions of the climactic prison scene. Pope wrote to Swift that ‘John Gay is at present so employed in the elevated airs of the opera . . . that I can scarce obtain a categorical answer – to anything.’

  The actress who played Polly Peachum, Lavinia Fenton, was surrounded by admirers wherever she went, and had to be escorted home after each performance. One observer remarked that ‘the audience catches her fire and enthusiasm. The curtain drops. A wild burst of applause – “Polly!” “Polly!” – from every side of the house. A pretty bow, a kiss, then off the stage she runs . . . past the scenery, out of the stage door, into a waiting coach-and-four – and away, away, away over the muddy roads of London.’ The poet Edward Young remarked that she ‘has raised her price from one guinea to 100, tho’ she cannot be a greater whore than she was before, nor, I suppose, a younger’. But she did manage to catch a duke, and became the duchess of Bolton. Thus did the social, theatrical and financial worlds mingle.