Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Pitt was now free to pursue a continental strategy, with his enemy in retreat, but already he had more extensive ambitions. In the spring of 1758 an allied force captured the French fort of St Louis in Senegal; its principal commodity of slaves was now secure for the British Crown. At the end of the year an English force took Gorée, an island off the coast of Dakar, which thirty years later would contain the notorious ‘House of Slaves’. So from the boiling and fever-stricken coastlines of West Africa came slaves and ivory, gum and gold dust, that were packed for the Caribbean or for England and then stored in factories with armed guards supplied by the local chieftains.

  News came in this year, also, that Robert Clive had emerged victorious from the battle of Plassey and had taken control of Bengal, with its 30 million inhabitants, in a campaign Clive himself described as a medley of ‘fighting, tricks, chicanery, intrigues, politics and the Lord knows what’. The victory led directly to British domination of South Asia and to the subsequent extension of imperial power. Yet not all welcomed these developments. There was a sense of unease over this meddling with exotic and alien foreign lands. There seemed to be no sure foundations on which to build. Only in the nineteenth century were these doubts resolved.

  Within three years the French had been compelled to leave India. Without effective sea power they were destined for disappointment. The East India Company soon had all the trappings of an oriental state, with its own police force and native army. It was the tiger in the jungle, dripping with blood and jewels. India became the cockpit in which it was shown that trade was war carried on under another name. In the poetry of the period, in fact, allusions to Africa and India became commonplace; they had become part of the imagination. Yet there was still no talk of empire.

  The West Indies had become the most profitable possession, even if the prize had to be shared with the French, the Spanish and the Dutch. An expedition sailed in the winter of the year and took Guadeloupe, the home of cotton, sugar and molasses; for Pitt the island of sugar was a greater prize than Canada, so much stronger were commercial than territorial ties. It sent forth each year 10,000 tons of sugar and in return required 5,000 slaves. It was considered to be a fair bargain. In the hundred years after 1680 some 2 million slaves were forcibly removed from their homes to the work camps of the West Indies.

  The conditions of the enslaved workers were notorious. Another sugar island of the Indies, Jamaica, was described by Edward Ward in Five Travel Scripts (1702) ‘as sickly as an hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot at hell, and as wicked as the devil’. The slaves could not breed in these torrid conditions, so even more had to be transported. These were the least of the slaves’ torments. Many of England’s overseas possessions were no more than penal colonies rivalling any of those in Stalinist Russia.

  Slaves were simply beasts of burden. They were already suspended on a cross of three points, known as ‘triangular’ trade: they were purchased on the west coast of Africa with the proceeds of cloth or spirits before being transported across the ocean where they were sold to the plantation owner; the merchant seamen then returned with their holds filled with sugar, rum and tobacco. It was simplicity itself. A few local difficulties sometimes marred the smooth running of the enterprise. The slaves were manacled to the inner decks with no space to move, with women and children forced promiscuously among the male prisoners. When a ship was in danger of foundering, many of them were unchained and thrown into the sea; when some of them hit the water they were heard to cry out ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ The putrid and malignant diseases from which they suffered, in close proximity to one another, spread all over the vessel. The ‘middle passage’ across the ocean often created the conditions of a death ship.

  Yet the church bells were ringing all over England. Even as the stinking and putrescent slaves were marched onto Jamaican or Bajan soil the new year in England, 1759, was being hailed as an ‘annus mirabilis’. The early capture of Guadeloupe was only the harbinger of overseas victories that guaranteed England’s global supremacy. Horace Walpole remarked that the church bells had been worn thin by ringing in victories, and wrote to Pitt ‘to congratulate you on the lustre you have thrown on this country . . . Sir, do not take this for flattery: there is nothing in your power to give what I would accept; nay there is nothing I could envy, but what you would scarce offer me – your glory.’ That had always been considered the French virtue above all others; gloire and le jour de gloire were later to be immortalized in the second line of ‘La Marseillaise’. But in 1759 they had been snatched away.

  After the capture of Guadeloupe, Dominica signed a pact of neutrality with the victors. Canada, or New France as it was then known, was to come. In June General Amherst captured Fort Niagara and, in the following month, Crown Point. These victories were followed by the fall of Quebec in the autumn, when Major-General James Wolfe stole up the Heights of Abraham like a thief in the night. The capital of the French province lay on a precipitous rock at the confluence of the St Lawrence and St Charles rivers. Early assaults had come to nothing against what seemed to be an impregnable position. Wolfe wrote in his dispatches that ‘we have almost the whole force of Canada to oppose’.

  Do or die. He planned to land his force on the bank of the St Charles, to scale what seemed to be the insuperable heights, and then to attack Quebec from the relatively undefended rear of the town. Recovering from their surprise at the success of the enterprise the French attacked but were beaten back. The French commander, Montcalm, was shot as he stood; Wolfe received a wound in the head, followed by two other bullets in his breast and his body. Yet in death his was the victory. The beaten and demoralized French army evacuated much of Canada and retired to Montreal; a year later the garrison at Montreal also surrendered, and Canada joined the list of England’s overseas territorial possessions.

  The consequences of human actions are incalculable. With the threat of the French removed from the British settlers over the ocean, they began to resent the presence of English soldiers. Who needed the protection of the redcoats now that the enemy was gone? And so from small events great consequences may arise. An action that Voltaire derided as a conflict ‘about a few acres of snow’ gave rise in time to the United States of America.

  The events in the European theatre were no less promising. The threat of French invasion was diverted. The reports of an invasion force, complete with flat-bottomed boats for landing, provoked Pitt into calling out the militia to guard the shores. At Quiberon Bay in November 1759, off the coast of southern Brittany, the French navy was caught and for all purposes destroyed. There would be no further threat of a French invasion.

  And that, it might seem, was that. England had achieved maritime supremacy and gathered up more territorial possessions than ever before. The economic strain at home was beginning to show, however, with multifarious taxes imposed to bolster the revenues for the war. Yet if there was a sense of war weariness, it was not evident to the first minister. Pitt had been successful in Canada, the East Indies and the West Indies but he was determined to guide the destiny of Europe and confirm the strength of his country’s global trade. The duke of Newcastle wrote to a colleague that ‘Mr Pitt flew into a violent passion at my saying we could not carry on the war another year; [he said] that that was the way to make peace impracticable and to encourage our enemy; that we might have difficulties but he knew we could carry on the war and were one hundred times better able to do it than the French . . . in short, there was no talking to him’. Pitt knew that his colleagues were now in favour of a negotiated peace; negotiation meant, for him, compromise with the French. He would not rest until their most important possessions were in his hands. But the most carefully laid plans do not always come to fruition.

  Suddenly all was changed. On 15 October 1760, George II rose early to drink his chocolate; he then felt the need to visit the water closet from which the valet-de-chambre, according to Horace Walpole, who seems to have known the most arcane secrets of the royal family, ‘heard
a noise, louder than royal wind, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in’ and found the king on the floor with a gash on his forehead. The king expired shortly afterwards, bequeathing a new king to a not necessarily grateful nation.

  18

  The violists

  In January 1759, the year of victories, the British Museum was formally opened at Montague House; it was largely designed to accommodate the extensive collection of Sir Hans Sloane who, in the manner of an antiquary of the old school, had collected books, manuscripts, works of art and objects of natural history. It represented prize specimens from all over the world, and what better home might it have than London? The collection included a pointed flint hand-axe, one of the first evidences of primordial antiquity; the mirror of Doctor Dee, the conjuror who had held out a vision of the English Empire to Elizabeth I; some birds-of-paradise from Papua New Guinea as a reminder of the exotic world just over the horizon; some ritual wooden artefacts from Jamaica that had now become an island of blood; an ivory figure of Xiwangmu, a Chinese goddess known as ‘the queen mother of the west’; and a brass astrolabe from Isfahan for calculating the position of the sun and other stars.

  In 1768 the Royal Academy had been established, of which Sir Joshua Reynolds became the first president. It was pre-eminent in a city that had, in the previous decade, harboured no art galleries or exhibitions of any kind. The first public exhibition was held in April 1760, at the Society of Arts in the Strand; the crush was so great that several windows were broken. But it inaugurated, if nothing else, a new relation of art with the public. There was a new market. There was a new commodity. It was perhaps no coincidence that the first recorded reference to the phrase ‘fine arts’ comes from 1767 when Dr James Fordyce stated of young women that ‘they . . . wanted instruction in the principles of the Fine Arts’.

  There had been in the earlier part of the century associations for young artists, most notably among them a new academy in St Martin’s Lane where William Hogarth was a member. The members were, or had been, apprentices to one of the decorative arts; but now they sought other opportunities based on European models, and were particularly interested in ‘life drawing’. The aspiring painters among them would previously have been confined to ceilings, stages and portraits, but their ambitions were also lifted. They had become interested in the style of the light and agitated line, or what Hogarth called ‘the serpentine line of beauty’.

  Soon enough the novels and plays of the age would be full of a new and interesting figure, the young artist. The young artist who is hired to superintend the lessons in drawing for young ladies. The young artist who is invited to paint a country house and its occupants. The young artist who has recently removed himself to Rome where he might study the classical masters and perhaps act as a cicerone for Englishmen and Englishwomen on the grand tour. The young artist who earned a precarious living in London, loitering around the Royal Academy or the auction houses in the hope of inviting stray custom. The virtuosi of course considered only works in oil by the Italian masters, or canvases that at least resembled them, to be worth examination. But watercolours and line drawings were coming to seem respectable on the walls of the aspiring middle class. It was no longer considered pretentious or laughable to style yourself an ‘artist’. This was one of the new professions.

  So the Royal Academy became a notable centre for aspiring artists who were bolstered by their membership of what was already a grand national institution. Art had arrived in the public arena. William Blake entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1779; James Gillray had entered in the previous year, and Thomas Rowlandson in 1772. In 1789 James Mallord William Turner made the journey to Somerset House as a student. In the following year the Royal Academy opened its doors to the public. An entirely new national enterprise had begun under the most favourable circumstances.

  A new London concert society, the Concert of Ancient Music, began giving performances in 1776 at what became its regular venue, the Crown & Anchor in the Strand. Its name suggests an association with ale and spirits but in fact it was a ‘great assembly room’ with staircases and lobbies. This was the meeting place of a respectable and indeed formal group of musicians devoted to the English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It soon became common for them to treat as ‘ancient’ any music composed twenty years before, which is perhaps an indication of how the grip of ‘modernity’ – what was recent, what was new – imbued the nature of the fine arts in the period.

  There was a suggestion of lightness, or what in another era was known as ‘pleasaunce’, about English fine art. In Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) Archibald Alison remarked that ‘The fine arts are considered as the arts which are addressed to the imagination, and the pleasures they afford . . .’ They might include an essay, a print, a watercolour, an epigram, a light air, a Chinese bowl, all of which comprise elegant pleasures that, in the words of the philosopher Lord Kames, furnish ‘love of order’ and ‘delicacy of feeling’.

  The members of the Concert of Ancient Music were independent professionals, no longer necessarily tied to a court or a church. The feudal ties had been severed, with sometimes unintended consequences. Haydn was overwhelmed by the liberality of his fees in London after the rigours of the Esterhazy court; he earned extravagant sums for concerts and for individual commissions; after receiving £800 for a concert in 1794 he remarked that ‘this one can only make in England’. The sum is equivalent to £45,000. It was the true mark of a new musical culture.

  The first professional concert series took place in the 1760s, in the same period as the first public exhibitions of art were also held in London. A concert room was built in Hanover Square in the subsequent decade, together with the Pantheon in Oxford Street whose manager brought Hadyn to London. There came a time when many large towns and cities had their resident orchestras.

  Another sign of that new culture could be found in the unlikely purlieux of Clerkenwell where in Jerusalem Passage a ‘small coals’ man, Thomas Britton, organized a series of weekly concerts where could be heard performances of music, vocal and instrumental, that were acclaimed as ‘the best in town’. A ‘small coals’ man was a coal-merchant, and above his store-room he had created a musical space where some of the most ingenious composers and instrumentalists of the day came to perform in front of an appreciative audience. So the public recognition and reward of music emerged in venues high and low.

  Music had of course always been the accompaniment of social life. In the sixteenth century England had been described as a ‘nest of singing birds’. But in the eighteenth century it took on a public and more formal structure. This was no longer the private and improvised music in which Samuel Pepys participated. Music was now expected at pleasure gardens and at tea gardens, by chalybeate wells and in theatres, at masques and polite assemblies. Musical evenings were organized with spinet and harpsichord, and chamber music became a fashionable entertainment. Music clubs and music rooms and concert rooms became the arena for professional musicians; the amateur singers around the drawing-room table were no longer the mode. In the eighteenth century music had become the natural and inevitable accompaniment to all public or semi-public gatherings. It invited pleasure rather than duty or contemplation. You could not go to an assembly hall, a theatre, a ballet, or a pantomime without being surrounded by the sound of violins and violas. Sometimes they even invaded the fashionable shops and the coffee-houses. The players were known to Samuel Johnson as ‘violists’.

  19

  A call for liberty

  The accession of George III in the autumn of 1760 marked a profound change in the English monarchy. He was the first of the Hanoverian kings to be born and educated in England, and the first to avoid the broad German accent of his predecessors. In his draft for the speech from the throne to parliament he declared that ‘I glory in the name of Briton; and the peculiar happiness of my life will ever consist in promoting the welfare of a people whose loyalty and warm affection to me I
consider as the greatest and most permanent security of my throne.’ These were unexceptionable sentiments, no doubt written by a secretary. But they would soon be tested.

  He had come to the throne at the height of Pitt’s war that had endured for four years, and had already brought signal advantages to the nation. Yet the new king hated the war, and hated Pitt. He associated them both with his grandfather, George II, with whom he had conducted a family feud ever since he could reason. He believed that his grandfather had been a ‘king in chains’, in thrall to greedy and mendacious ministers. He believed that Pitt had used him and his father, Frederick, prince of Wales, to leap into the royal closet; he denounced the minister as possessing ‘the blackest of hearts’ and as having been a ‘snake in the grass’. It was inevitable that he would wish to make his own way. His mother had often repeated to him, ‘George, be a king!’ He did not intend to disappoint her. The image of Duty was always hovering before him.

  He seems to have inherited a strain of obstinate self-righteousness from his Hanoverian predecessors; he had the deficiencies of a closed mind, including overweening self-confidence combined with long spells of resentment and sullenness. Lord Waldegrave, his early governor, described him in his Memoirs as ‘scrupulous, dutiful, ignorant of evil and sincerely pious; but neither generous nor frank’. He was in certain respects something of a zealot, or prude, and sincerely regretted the lack of decency or propriety at court. A week after his accession he issued a proclamation ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness and immorality’. He had a high opinion of the royal prerogative and would no doubt have gone to the death in defending the Anglican Church; fortunately he did not live in a period which demanded such self-sacrifice or indeed such strident leadership from any king.