The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  1 C. M. Maclnnes, A Gateway of Empire, 324.

  2 Many owed their lives to the noble firmness of their interned compatriot, Lady Ann Fitzroy—sister of the future Duke of Wellington—whose force of character overcame even the stubborn inhumanity of the Commissary in charge.—See Long, 172-91.

  Despite their follies and obtuseness the British people never lost their feeling for common morality, their contempt for blasphemy, arrogance and destruction. To the progressive and beneficent theories behind the Revolution nine out of ten of them were blind. But ruined abbeys, desecrated churches1 and murdered women and children aroused their unswerving sense of decency. In a crowded Greenwich stage waggon at the height of the treason trials a dispute arose between a recruiting sergeant, who maintained that Tom Paine was an atheist, and a Whig gentleman's coachman who denied it. The disputants stopped the coach and decided the matter, English fashion, on the greensward. The sergeant won, and there is little doubt that the verdict, though technically wrong, was England's.2

  British anger at the Revolution was often brutal and crude. It struck out blindly at much that was good. A man of known democratic opinions could scarcely walk about his home-town without a demonstration of popular hatred.3 Every liberal ideal came temporarily into disrepute: parliamentary reform, the movement against the slave trade, the infant Trade Unions, factory legislation. A Tory Bishop even accused the new evangehcal Sunday schools of teaching atheism and blasphemy, while good Mr. MacRitchie, seeing a shepherd reading a newspaper on the Pentland hills, breathed a curse on the French politics that were ruining the country. Classicism itself came in for suspicion owing to the fondness of democratic orators for allusions to Roman tyrannicides. Plutarch's Lives was the most popular book in revolutionary France, while the radical Thelwall in his lectures was in the habit of taking Greek and Roman history as his subject, and by an ingenious twist making it reflect on living persons and present events.4 Cockburn afterwards recalled how his old schoolmaster, Dr. Adam of Edinburgh, was spied on by his pupils and harried by the authorities for his innocent remarks about the Tarquins. To fools—and brave and honest fools were plentiful in Britain—the very liberty for which the country was fighting came to have a " Jacobinal sound." Like bulls in Borodale, as Coleridge recorded, they ran mad with the echo of their own bellowing.

  1 Calvert, 79; Malmesbury, III, 268, 273.

  2 Times, 5th Sept., 1794.

  3 The Friend, Section I, Essay V. 4 Crabb Robinson, 1, 66.

  For all this there was a heavy penalty to be paid in division and bitterness. For the fury of national patriotism in the hour of danger shut the door on many young and generous spirits who had early espoused the cause of the Revolution. " To hope too boldly of human nature," wrote the wisest Englishman of his generation, " is a fault which all good men have an interest in forgiving." In the frenzy of that time, it was not forgiven. Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin, was the general verdict. The youthful Wordsworths were harried by their neighbours from Alfoxden, and the two major conservative prophets of the coming era were dogged on lonely rambles over the Mendips by Dundas's spies.

  Unhappily neither of the great men who led the forces of Government and Opposition in the first years of the war was temperamentally fitted to give the nation the flawless internal unity she needed. Pitt was reserved and impatient: his nerves overstrained by his inherent inability to relax. He treated criticism with cold contempt. Sir George Beaumont—Wordsworth's patron—told Farington in November, 1795, that Pitt's personal deportment had become " dry and rejecting. . . . This manner seems to grow upon him." The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments. Pitt and his supporters never tried to draw the Opposition into the national effort: to disarm criticism by entrusting it with a task.

  Fox, on the other hand, with his generous sympathy with the rebel and under-dog, showed no sign of realising the overwhelming danger of the country and the magnitude or the Government's problems. In the delightful riverside retreat to which he had withdrawn after the excesses of his youth and the turmoil of Westminster, he seemed to loose touch with reality. He allowed his followers to indulge in irresponsible and unpatriotic faction that did their Party and the nobler causes for which they stood infinite harm. Instead of pleading for the poor and ignorant, the Foxites— as Coleridge said—pleaded to them. At the moment that their country, forsaken by false allies, was facing the greatest military force the world had seen, they never rose in the House without denouncing Ministers as tyrants and robbers. In their hatred of the Government their radical proteges even had inflammatory pamphlets piled on the backs of asses to be scattered about the highways, thrown into cottage windows and down the shafts of coalpits.

  A crisis was reached in October, 1795. On the 27th the London Corresponding Society held a mass meeting in Copenhagen Fields, at which an Address was passed virtually calling for civil war. A hundred and fifty thousand persons were present, and though only a fraction of them were anything more than curious spectators, the violence of the speakers, the example of France and the known roughness and ignorance of the London mob were sufficient to occasion alarm in an unpoliced city. Two days later the King on his way to open Parliament was hooted by organised rowdies in the Mall. Parson Woodforde, on one of his rare visits to London, was in the crowd, the greater part of which was as loyal as himself, just before the King reached Old Palace Yard, showers of stones were flung at the royal coach and a bullet from an air-gun broke one of the windows. " My Lords," announced the intrepid old man as he entered the Chamber, " I have been shot at."

  The outrage provoked an outburst of passionate loyalty. When next night the King attended the theatre at Covent Garden the audience rose and sang the national anthem six times over. The Government, striking while the iron was hot, introduced Bills against Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings. Promoters of all political gatherings of more than fifty persons were to give notice to the magistrates, who were empowered to attend and arrest on the spot for seditious speech. Second offences could be punished with transportation. The passage of these measures— which, however, left the freedom of the Press inviolate—was attended by bitter debates in the Commons and by efforts to arouse popular tumults. Three large meetings were held in Mary-le-bone Fields—the site of the present Regent's Park—and Burke, now a confirmed alarmist, hourly expected to see a guillotine set up on Tower Hill. But the Bill passed by an overwhelming majority, and when Wilberforce went down to his native Yorkshire to oppose 2 Whig appeal to the freeholders he was greeted by thousands of "West Riding weavers calling themselves " Billymen" to mark their support of Pitt, and shouting, " Twenty King's men for one jacobin!

  After the new Act became law open political agitation died away. The radical clubs confined their assemblies to forty-five members and their membership dropped quickly. Within a year even the London Corresponding Society was £185 in debt. Pitt

  was much amused by the report of one society whose members met in muzzles and conversed only by signs.1 The parliamentary Opposition went still further in absurdity, for it presently withdrew for long periods from Westminster altogether, leaving its constituents unrepresented and the Government unopposed. Only beneath the surface the sullen discontent of a dissentient and embittered minority remained.

  Yet the young Prime Minister, prematurely aged by his struggle against the revolutionary hydra, was no reactionary. Under the cold, chilling surface which he displayed to a world whose common joys and sorrows he had never wholly shared, beat a heart boyish in simplicity, native tenderness and virtue. There was a side of Pitt's early-arrested nature which was unintelligible to contemporaries like Fox, who had been experienced men of the world before they had reached their twenties. About this time he began to display interest in Hannah More's tracts with their studies of humble life. Towards the end of 1795 he went down to stay with a friend in Essex and, after talking one evening of the good fortune which an industrious and virtuous labourer could enjoy
in Britain, was taken by his host to view the dwellings of the poor in the town of Hal-stead. " The Minister," Lord Rosebery has written, " surveyed it in silent wonder, and declared he had no conception that any part of England could present a spectacle of such misery."2

  It was perhaps because of this incident that Pitt, in a year dark with storm, gave so much of his thought to a far-reaching scheme of social reform which, had it been adopted by Parliament, might have changed the tenor of English history. He had already made partial attempts to adjust the social system to the new conditions of economic life, exempting dwellings with only one hearth from hearth tax and modifying the old harsh law of settlement which still gave parish authorities the right to expel newcomers who might become chargeable to the rates. Early in 1796 he took a more momentous step. At the end of the previous session, Samuel Whit-bread—" the great fermentator "—had introduced a measure fos: fixing minimum wages, erroneously asserting that, while wages had risen threefold in the past two centuries, the price of food and clothing had multiplied seven and fifteenfold. Pitt, in demolishing

  1 Farington, I, 137. 8 Lord Rosebery, Pitt, 1891, 169,

  these1 extravagant claims, took the wind out of Whitbread's sails by a plea for family allowances, compulsory national insurance, and a general system of technical education. He declined to consider a minimum wage as an infringement of economic law: " trade, industry and barter will always find their own level and will be impeded by regulations which violate their natural operation and derange their proper effect."1 But to the chagrin of the Foxites he promised to introduce a Bill which should place the whole question of poor relief on a national basis.

  The measure was delayed by the general election of the summer. But on November 12, 1796, Pitt laid it before the House. It provided that a father, unable to support his children, should receive a shilling a week for each child until it became self-supporting, and that poor and industrious persons whose wages fell below a certain level should have a legal claim on the rates for any deficiency. Up to this point the Bill did no more than give a national stamp to the provisions of Speenhamland. But in its remaining clauses it was revolutionary. By a bold use of national credit it empowered parish authorities to advance money for the purchase of a cow to any industrious man unable to support his family by his own unaided efforts. It established a Parochial Fund, to be raised by weekly subscriptions and rates, for contributory old-age pensions. And it created in every parish or union of parishes a School of Industry for training children in some craft or trade until they grew up. To feed them the uncultivated waste in every parish was to be enclosed by the Overseers. To meet the needs of agriculture boys over 14 and girls over 12 could be hired out at harvest time for a period of not more than six consecutive weeks. The work of the schools was to be supervised by the magistracy and the clergy. " With reform," the Prime Minister declared, defending a project far in advance of his time, " you disarm the Jacobins of their most dangerous weapon."

  Pitt had copies of his Bill printed and circulated to experts. In their marginal comments a few approved whole-heartedly. But the general verdict of experience and authority was adverse. Indoor work for Schools of Industry, it was stated, would unfit boys for field labour; public morals would be ruined by allowing illegitimate children to qualify for relief; the labourer would sell or eat

  1 J. H. Rose, Pitt and Napoleon, 1912, 82.

  the cow advanced him by the parish. Most scathing of all was the great jurist, Jeremy Bentham, on whose chilling logic the next age was to rear the structure of Victorian utilitarianism. To him Pitt's remedies seemed wildly sentimental and dangerous. The Bill, it was felt, required more disinterested virtue than either the poor or the guardians possessed.

  It was certainly far in advance of the prevailing level of British administrative science. The fury with which it was assailed by the magistrates of Mary-le-bone and St. Giles proved this. Their sole conception of their duty was to keep the rates down and their only use for pauper children sale to the north-country factories. Assailed by so much detailed criticism, the bill was withdrawn for amendment. Pitt never had another opportunity of introducing it. Few could see any reason for so costly a measure in a time of war and high taxation: in any case food prices had dropped with the better harvest of 1796, and the early part of the winter was exceptionally mild. The English mind could only envisage the immediate task of winning the war, and could not look beyond it. Within a few weeks the nation was in the throes of the worst financial crisis of its history, and any scheme for increasing the alarming burden of tax and ratepayers had ceased to be practical politics.

  With so much suffering and the chances of victory receding as Europe made her peace with the triumphing Jacobin, it was not surprising that there were patriots who sometimes despaired of the war. Even so close a friend of the Prime Minister as Wilberforce at one time brought forward a motion for peace. Noblemen like the Marquis of Buckingham, who had been among the first to panic at the Revolution, now talked of compromising with the sacrifice of a few colonial conquests, and argued that in its half-bankrupt state France was no longer to be feared. In the spring of 1795 a captain of the naval recruiting service told a traveller that, though Britain might beat France to loggerheads at sea, she would never be able to give laws to her. Even Nelson seemed to think peace inevitable and wrote home about buying a neat cottage in which to end his days.1

  1" . . . As all Powers give up the contest, for what has England to fight ? I wish most heartily we had peace, or that all our troops were drawn from the Continent and only a Naval war carried on, the war where England can alone make a figure."-Nicolas, II, 8.

  But Pitt, though more anxious for a genuine peace than any Englishman living, knew how hard it would be to obtain. Each successive Revolutionary government, he told the House, based its policy on " the same unqualified rights of man, the same principles of liberty and equality—principles by which they flatter the people with the possession of the theoretical rights of man, all of which they vitiate and violate in practice."1 Adherence to pledged word had no place in their scheme of statecraft. A composition could only be followed by a few years of uneasy peace before the same storm broke in England. For Pitt saw in Jacobin France all that his father's training and his own frugal apprenticeship had taught him to dread: a " system of dividing the orders of the community," of representing property as " the easy prey of the indigent, the idle and the licentious," and religion and moral duty as useless superstitions. He knew how easily such doctrines might take hold of ignorant multitudes in the great cities if their rulers sought appeasement with those who championed them.

  And the country, instinctively rather than intellectually, agreed with him. " How the storm gathers and blackens on the Continent," confided Miss Iremonger to a friend, " it really makes one tremble." She did not come of a trembling race. " My heart and my imagination are saddened," wrote Hannah More, " by the slaughter and devastation of my species with which every newspaper is full." But it never occurred to her to give in. The English view was expressed by Captain Harry Carter, the Cornish smuggler, who declared himself unafraid of all the lions in France. Gillray's comment on the peace proposals of the Opposition was to portray Britannia on her knees yielding crown, trident and Magna Charta to a flaming-headed, jack-booted monster while Fox and Sheridan, grovelling at her side, offered up the Fleet, the Church and the keys of the Bank. In another of his cartoons Pitt, overrunning the lurking, traitor crew with their daggers and craven howls, drives godlike in his sun-chariot behind the Lion and Unicorn crying, " Inexorable peace or Eternal war! "

  So it was that instead of despairing of the Coalition, Britain, in the fatal summer of 1795, did her best to revive it. She offered an asanual subsidy to Russia of a million sterling in return for a force

  1 War Speeches, 121.

  of 50,000 men and to Austria a guarantee of a four and a half million loan for a renewed offensive on the Rhine. She sent a new ambassador to Spain, and tried, first by reason—and
then, when it was too late, by bribery—to avert the final betrayal planned by her upstart Minister, Godoy, Such efforts were unavailing. Russia aodt Austria took Pitt's money but continued to make their main concern the final partition of Poland. Godoy—" a Birmingham Vilhers " who had made himself indispensable to an amorous queen and a half-wit king—preferred Jacobin flattery and bribes to British and withdrew from the Coalition, ceding Spanish Santo Domingo to France. But the war went on.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Before the Storm 1795-6

  " The plot seems to thicken as if the most serious part of the war were but beginning."

  Capt. Collingwood to J. E. Blackett, 11th May, 1796.

  WITH Austria confining her efforts in the campaign of 1795 to the Italian Riviera, Britain had four choices. She could concentrate her forces in Corsica for amphibious operations on the Austrian flank. She could open a new offensive in the West Indies. She could take the King's advice, renew the war in Hanover, where she still had 30,000 German auxiliaries and British cavalry on her pay-roll, and trust to Russian collaboration for a reconquest of Holland. Or she could aid the rising Royalist tide in France by a landing with all she had on the Brittany coast.