Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  An attempt to ameliorate the harshest conditions, and also to divert the rage of the people, was attempted by the magistrates of Speenhamland at a meeting held in the Pelican Inn near Newbury in Berkshire. It was concluded that, if the price of bread rose above a certain level, the poor would receive a special subsidy from the parish funds. It seemed a remarkably efficient system of benefit and was adopted by other counties where it became known as the ‘Speenhamland system’. It was soon, to all intents and purposes, a national system from Dorset to Yorkshire. Yet it had its critics, who believed that it kept wages artificially low; the farmers felt no need to pay their workers more if the parish was about to supplement their incomes. It was deemed by some to be demoralizing, and there were complaints that some labourers threatened the parish overseers for insufficient aid. So began the argument over ‘welfare dependency’ that continues to this day.

  Even the most liberal provisions were not enough to stay the rising tide of anger from reform societies that had weathered the storm of Pitt’s ‘terror’. In late June a crowd of many thousand, organized by the London Corresponding Society, met in St George’s Fields south of the Thames where they demanded the end of war and a reduction in the price of food; the old demands of manhood suffrage and annual parliaments were made, but the principal cry was for ‘Bread! Bread!’ Baskets of biscuits were distributed stamped with the legend ‘freedom and plenty, or slavery and want’. This was not the Jacobin activism of the previous year but a more potent domestic combination of rage, frustration and hunger. Bread riots also erupted in Birmingham and Coventry, Nottingham and Sussex. In July some demonstrators broke a window of Pitt’s residence in Downing Street; he described it ironically to his mother as ‘a single pebble’. In the following month the Sheffield Constitutional Society held an open-air meeting on Crooke’s Moor where it was pleaded, in imitation of Luke’s gospel, that ‘when we ask for bread, let not the father of his people give us a stone’.

  When the new session of parliament opened on 29 October 1795, the price of bread had reached its highest level. Pitt’s carriage was surrounded by a jeering crowd shouting ‘No Pitt! No War! Bread! Bread! Peace! Peace!’ The king’s own carriage was mobbed by ill-wishers and at one point a stone, or bullet, pierced its window. A ballad-seller, hawking Paine’s The Rights of Man for a penny, was arrested; he was promptly rescued by the crowd and chaired in triumph. Pitt took advantage of the situation by bringing forward a bill for ‘better securing the king’s person’. This was accompanied by the ‘Two Acts’ or ‘Gagging Acts’ that were designed to curtail the right of assembly and to widen the scope of high treason. All public meetings comprising more than fifty people were to be supervised and controlled by local magistrates; prior notice of, and specific details about, any meeting or public lecture had to be given in writing. As for the bill against treason, the death penalty could be applied to people who advised the death or imprisonment of the king and, more significantly, who attempted to change his counsels or opinions. Pitt also summoned more militia to London, and told William Wilberforce that ‘my head would be off in six months were I to resign’. Wilberforce commented, with a hint of understatement, ‘I see that he expects a civil broil.’ A physician whom Pitt consulted, Walter Farquhar, also reported that the functions of ‘his stomach are greatly impaired and the bowels very irregular’ which he attributed to ‘the excess of public business and the unremitting attention upon subjects of anxiety and interest’. So Pitt was in deadly earnest; he feared revolution.

  It is an open question whether he was right in his judgement. Despite the apparent severity of the ‘Two Acts’ they were rarely enforced with rigour, and the usual process of muddling through seems to have been paramount. When in November a further protest meeting was held at Copenhagen Fields a contemporary noted that

  You may have seen in the papers of prodigious numbers being at the meeting. This is not true in the sense such accounts would be understood. In the course of the day many thousands were doubtless in the field, but never at one time. I was there between two and three and I don’t believe there were five hundred in the field, and I saw it at the fullest time so far as I can understand.

  This was nothing like the march on Versailles.

  There was undoubtedly a revolutionary fringe hoping to take advantage of the general misery; some of them were from Ireland, some from France, and some of them home-grown revolutionaries. Reports reached the Home Office of secret meetings and plottings, but nothing ever came of them. This poses the larger question of England’s apparent immunity from the revolutionary disorders that had swept France. A number of explanations present themselves, all with a modicum of truth. The fact that England was at war with France did of course much to dampen any enthusiasm for republican ideals; it would have been like sleeping with the enemy. The sceptical attitude hardened what can essentially be viewed as the conservative cast of the English people, accustomed to an established order and to the traditions of historical existence. Edmund Burke himself, as we have observed, appealed in his speeches and pamphlets to the significance of precedent and continuity in the life of the nation, a contract between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

  The role of the Churches should not be underestimated. There was a broad and wide church polity that softened religious unrest and division. It was an advantage, of course, that the major religions all took for granted the nature of human inequality; Anglicans and Methodists were united in their assertion of the virtues of loyalty and obedience. It has often been suggested that in England the ‘lower orders’ have never risen without an impulse from above to rouse them; the circumstances of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811 may be exceptions to this argument but certainly, in the 1790s, there was no disaffected aristocracy to lead the charge as there was in Paris.

  More subtle explanations for the absence of revolutionary enthusiasm may be adduced. The English had always been known as a practical and pragmatic race. That is why they had taken the lead in the progress of the Industrial Revolution. The French, on the other hand were known to be speculative and enthusiastic; they followed their theories and ideas like ignes fatui wherever they might lead them. This was, at least, the caricature. Whether a stubborn paysan would concur is another matter.

  Nevertheless it was believed by many English contemporaries that the revolution had simply got out of hand, that it had been so driven by first principles that it had strayed from its proper path. The more ardent French revolutionaries saw the events that surrounded them as a miracle play in which they took on the most important roles. They identified themselves with the people; they identified themselves with the national will; they identified themselves with la patrie. William Pitt observed that it was ‘a species of tyranny which adds insult to the wretchedness of its subjects, by styling its own arbitrary decrees the voice of the people, and sanctioning its acts of oppression and cruelty under the pretence of the national will’.

  One other national myth was at work on the other side of the Channel. Ever since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and perhaps earlier, the English were accustomed to believe themselves to live in a land of liberty. There are traces of this conviction in the thirteenth century, and in the sixteenth century; perhaps it has always been an aspect of national consciousness. The fact that this had never really been the case did not deter its exponents, many of whom would declare the danger to ‘English liberties’ at any opportunity. Such was the profound sense of many of the English people. They were not likely to follow Danton or Robespierre or even Buonaparte. They were still predominantly in support of George III and William Pitt, king and nation in harmony, even though the king was mad and the nation in distress.

  29

  The mad kings

  David Garrick first played the part of King Lear at the Goodman’s Field Theatre in Whitechapel, in the spring of 1742; he was twenty-five years old, a relatively youthful age that suggests both precocity and ambition. Two fri
ends watched his performance from the pit, and suggested alterations. He listened carefully and took notes. He came back in the same part six weeks later and caused a sensation. This was Lear as raw nature, full of fear and trembling, moving from pathos to anger, from despair to grief, keeping ‘the audiences in a tumult of continuous passion . . . his performance was interrupted by open sobs and weeping’. Tears were an important element of the social world. Thomas Gray was told that readers had wept over every line of his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750). The members of parliament often broke down and had to be led out of the chamber, weeping after a quarrel. It was reported that one parliamentarian, George Tierney, ‘sobbed so, he was unable to talk; I never saw a more affecting scene’.

  Horace Walpole recorded how two executioners fought over the rope used to hang a notorious highwayman, ‘and the one who lost it cried’. Anna Seward, a celebrated poet of the period known as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, returned to her childhood haunts and ‘could not restrain the gushing tears, through almost the whole of the five hours I passed in that dear village’. She was a champion weeper.

  The words of a contemporary, observing the role of Garrick as Lear, emphasize the new sensibilities of the eighteenth century. The members of the audience ‘seemed to shrink away and cower’ when he cursed his daughters’ ingratitude. When they erupted in vehement applause, as Garrick hit upon a brilliant stroke of art, he whispered to one of the other actors onstage, Tom King, ‘Damn me, Tom, it’ll do.’

  It was said that Garrick ‘speaks tragedy truly and natural’. That was the key response: this was nature rather than art. This was the language of real feeling. It was the wholly new art of whisper, and gesture, and unstudied enunciation. It does not matter that it would now seem absurdly stylized. All versions of what is natural or realistic change and decay. When Garrick played Macbeth he turned to the first murderer and said, ‘There’s blood upon thy face.’ The line was not in the play. The actor started back, and put a hand to his cheek. ‘Is there, by God?’ He had heard a fellow actor speak as a human being, and he was surprised to the point of consternation. The neo-classical stage had been established upon decorum, declamation and dignity. Its successor, which may perhaps be called Romantic, relied upon expressiveness, activity and more realistic detail.

  Garrick did not really play Lear as conceived by William Shakespeare. The original was deemed, in the eighteenth century, to be too crude and wayward. It did not preserve the unities. It was, in many respects, tasteless. Its ending was unsatisfactory. The play Garrick performed was that rewritten by Nahum Tate in 1681. It was considered to be the proper Lear, the acceptable Lear, purged of all its absurdities and obscenities. Tate himself regarded the scenes of Shakespeare’s ‘old honest play’ to be ‘heaps of jewels unstrung and unpolished’.

  In Tate’s play the Fool is removed altogether, since tragedy and farce were not deemed to be compatible. In this version, too, Cordelia falls in love with Edgar to provide a more gentle diversion. There is a less strenuous ending in which Lear, Edgar and Cordelia are reunited to live happily ever after. As one critic of the time suggested, Lear as amended by Tate ‘will always be more agreeable to an audience’. The love affair itself ‘can never fail to produce those gushing tears, which are swelled and ennobled by a virtuous joy’. The prevailing sentiments of the day are here revealed. One critic, Thomas Cooke, preferred Tate ‘because almost every character . . . is an instance of virtue being rewarded and vice punished’. He added: ‘I have read many sermons, but remember none that contains so fine a lesson of morality as this play.’ This was all that needed to be said. Ethics, and not aesthetics, was the test of true art.

  The audience of the time could not have endured the tragedy and horror of Shakespeare’s play. If it was reduced to storms of tears by Garrick’s performance, how could it have coped with Lear’s death? Gloucester’s blinding takes place discreetly offstage. Even Shakespeare’s stern editor, Samuel Johnson, could not bring himself to reread the last scenes of the play until it became his duty to do so. It seems almost as if he and his contemporaries were afraid of madness and deep feeling. In many respects it was not an age of confidence or of stability at all. It was one that needed comforting. It needed consolation.

  Garrick played the part of the mad king for the rest of his career. He cut and modified the text for his various performances, sometimes reintroducing more of the Shakespearian original. People stood for hours outside the theatre where he was playing, waiting for tickets. When again he took on the part in 1774 the writer, Hannah More, said: ‘I thought I should have been suffocated with grief: it was not like the superficial sorrow one feels at a well-acted play, but the deep, substantial grief of real trouble.’ Garrick’s Lear concluded with a performance in June 1776 thirty-four years after his first entry in the theatre at Whitechapel and one month before his retirement from the stage. He had begun a farewell tour, screwing up the emotions of the audience to an unprecedented pitch. Sir Joshua Reynolds, after seeing him, was prostrate for three days. Garrick furnished new scenery for this last year of Lear, and provided more resplendent historical costumes. It was agreed that the applause was ‘beyond description’. Whenever he came upon, or retired from, the stage he was wildly applauded.

  The centre of all feeling lay in the ‘mad scene’ when the insane old king rages on the heath. It was painted by Benjamin Wilson, a friend of the actor, in 1762 as a study of the magical or the sacred. Garrick stands at full length wearing a shirt, breeches and a robe of scarlet trimmed with ermine. This was the costume of royalty, however dimmed. He raises his right arm towards the storm-tossed sky, from which a shaft of light drenches him in radiance. The gesticulation became part of a repertoire of theatrical images; it was reproduced in prints and on porcelain. It became the token of madness, and was re-employed in many other works.

  A more accomplished artist, Benjamin West, painted the same storm scene sixteen years later as a Gothic nightmare in the style of Henry Fuseli or even William Blake. It is in certain aspects close to Wilson’s vision of the king, but the dramatic figures and expressive style suggest a sea-change in sensibility; this is no longer the world of neo-classical restraint but of Romantic wildness. In Wilson’s study Lear is very much an eighteenth-century figure addicted to sentiment; in West’s version, the king is beside himself with sorrow. He points up at the storm as if claiming a place there, and his expression is one of longing as well as of fear. The painting was approximately 12 feet by 9 feet, so that it positively towered above its spectators; it was part of the ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ established in the spring of 1789 by Alderman John Boydell in Pall Mall as a tribute to the national genius and as an example of a new taste for the passionate sublime. It was also naturally related to the passionate intensity with which, a generation before, the Methodist preachers dominated their congregations. Garrick himself was described as introducing ‘a new religion’. The age of reason and satire was also the age of rapture.

  We may note the strange coincidence that in the year of West’s composition, 1788, the real king became mad. George III began to talk rapidly and continuously, passing in and out of delirium. Benjamin West, by this time, knew him well. King George had in 1772 appointed him to be historical painter to the court, and West completed two portraits of his royal patron. He had observed him closely for some years, and it is not hard to believe that some elements of George appear in the frenzied figure of King Lear. In the autumn of 1788 West had shown his sovereign his new landscape of Windsor Castle in which a lion, for some reason, had been placed. The king insisted that it looked more like a dog and immediately scored marks over the image before drawing his own. He did it with tremendous energy accompanied by a great flurry of words. All was not well.

  It was in any case an age much possessed by madness. Insanity was known as ‘the English disease’ together with its companion, melancholy. It was attributed to the natural sensitivity and imaginative nature of the English confined to an island of
ghosts and spirits. Garrick himself is said to have visited Bedlam in order to study the words and postures of the insane. He wished to introduce a touch of nature to the requirements of art. One critic, on seeing his performance, noted that ‘as madness is defined to be right reasoning on wrong principles there is consistency in the words and actions of a madman’. Garrick provided this. Yet also, according to a different observer, ‘Garrick had displayed all the force of quick transition from one passion to another: he had, from the most violent rage, descended to sedate calmness’. On studying West’s painting the critic George Cumberland suggested that the king’s ‘loss of reason has arisen from the tender rather than the inflammatory passions; or there is a majestic sensibility mixed with the wildness of his distraction’.

  Controversies arose over the origin of Lear’s madness. Was it the shock of losing his throne? Or was it anger at his daughters’ ingratitude? The polite classes of the eighteenth century were aficionados of insanity.

  Henry Fuseli stated that one medical man who visited Bedlam believed that the larger part of its inmates were women unhappy in love, while the second category in terms of numbers were ‘hackney and stage coachmen’, whose constant shaking in their vehicles disturbed the pineal gland. But Garrick did not visit Bedlam only. He had a case study closer to home. A certain gentleman and friend of the actor lived in a house in Leman Street, Goodman’s Fields, where he had been playing with his two-year-old daughter near an open window. Accidentally he dropped her onto the paved area below, whereupon the young girl was instantly killed. The man lost his senses and ‘remained at the window, screaming in agonies of grief’. For the rest of his life he would go over to the window and play with an invisible girl, drop her, and fill the house ‘with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish’. Then he would fall into silent melancholy, and slowly look round at the fateful scene, ‘his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him as if to implore compassion’. Garrick stated that it was there ‘I learned to imitate madness’. According to one who watched his performance, ‘he had no sudden starts, no violent gesticulation; his movements were slow and feeble; misery was depicted in his countenance; he moved his head in the most deliberate manner; his eyes were fixed or, if they turned to any one near him he made a pause, and fixed his look on the person after much delay . . .’.