The Years of Endurance (8 page)

For by freedom the English meant something more than freedom for themselves, though they certainly meant that. Conventional and conservative in their prejudices, often thoughtless and mentally lazy, they yet genuinely valued freedom for its own sake: for others, that is, as well as for themselves. And their ideal of liberty was never an abstraction. It was based not on generalising but on measuring: on an impartial calculation of the comparative rights and wrongs of every individual case. Burke's dictum, " If I cannot reform with equity, I will not reform at all," was a curiously English saying for an Irishman. It expressed the intensely personal interpretation of the national conception of freedom.

It derived from the Christian faith acknowledged by the peoples of all the other lands of Europe s
ave those of the Turk. Heretics
in Catholic eyes, backsliders in those of Geneva, the rustic English by the very freedom of their beliefs kept perhaps nearer to the Christian pattern of life than any other people. Dogma counted less for them than fair dealing, ritual than honesty. By their laws neither priest nor king had any power to constrain the individual conscience, for such constraint seemed to them unjust. Save for Holland, England was the only European country in which men might worship God in any way they pleased. The multiplicity of their beliefs was bewildering. A French visitor thought that the only point in which they agreed was in every Englishman believing in some particular peculiar to himself alone.

It was true that there was a State Church to which the majority of Englishmen still belonged and whose membership conferred civic privilege. But this was regarded not so much as a religious matter as one of political convenience, and was partly aimed at stopping clerical power from falling into the hands of those less tolerantly inclined.
¹
The Church of England was supported by Parliament not because it had a monopoly of truth but because it was thought the most suitable medium for promulgating Christian teaching. " Gentlemen," said Lord Chancellor Thurlow to the deputation of Nonconformists which waited on him in
1788
to ask for a repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, " I'm against you, by God. I am for the Established Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for the Established Church than for any other Church, but because it is established. And if you can get your damned religion established, I'll be for that too! "
²

After a century's monopoly of the loaves and fishes it cannot be said that the Church or England was in a very flourishing state. There was a good deal of pluralism, in some cases amounting to downright scandal, much neglect both of church and parishioner and a general atmosphere of comfortable complacency. Almost
a
quarter of the nine thousand parishes were without resident incumbents, and in many churches there was an uninspiring atmosphere of damp and decay: weeds grew in the graveyard and small

¹
The denial of political rights to the small Catholic minority in England, which in Ireland amounted to a grave social injustice, was persisted in from a widespread belief that Catholics used political power to establish religious despotism. The most popular British festivals were those that celebrated past escapes from " Popish tyranny."

²
Crabb Robinson,
Diary
, I, 378.

boys played fives in the shady corner under the belfry. And the new classes which commerce was creating in place of the old world of status were little regarded by comfortable clergymen obsessed by thoughts of tithes and good living.

Yet here also the fidelity of the English to the principles of freedom came to their aid. Those whom the Church neglected, the rejected of the Church cared for. The missionary journeys of the early Methodists among the pagan outcasts of industrial Britain evoked a Christian revival in the quarter where it was least expected and most needed. Wesleyans and Evangelicals, Nonconformists of the older denominations and Quakers stepped in and did God's work where well-endowed complacency failed. Among the roughest of the rough—the lonely weavers of Yorkshire and Lancashire and the foul-mouthed miners of Durham and Cornwall—thousands of men were to be found practising a faith as pure as that taught by Christ to the fishermen of Galilee and using with quaint but moving effect the phraseology of the Bible. This noble work of reconversion— the supreme triumph of eighteenth-century English individualism— served not only spiritual but political ends. As much as any other single factor the faith and discipline of Methodism helped to save Britain from the fate of revolutionary France.

This may be claiming too much. England with her solid heart of sober, quiet folk had such reserves of strength that it is hard to estimate her breaking point. The living oak could carry an astonishing burden of dead wood. To comprehend the real England one must probe beneath the rich variegated surface—the splendours of aristocratic salons and provincial parks and palaces, the gambling dens and cockpits of the metropolis, the grim sores of factory and foetid slum—and seek her in the calm continuity of family life. The lessons handed down from mother to daughter, the hereditary craft taught the boy at his father's knee, the sturdy children playing together in the orchard, the clean-dressed, home-spun village people taking the road to church on Sunday morning, here were the enduring roots of national life. It was of these that the Anglican creed was the decorous, devout expression, commemorating the virtues of the past and consecrating the aspirations of the present. The highest tribute ever paid the Establishment was that of the Duke of Wellington, who, looking back over a quarter of a century of war and revolution, declared with whatever exaggeration:

'" It is the Church of England that has made England what she is— a nation of honest men."

In the pages of John Nyren's
The Cricketers of My Time,
published in 1833, the author recalled the men of Hambledon with whom he had grown up in the seventies and eighties of the previous century. In his gallery of cricketing heroes we see the fathers of the men who tended the guns at Trafalgar and manned the squares at Waterloo. We can watch them over his old shoulders, making their way with curved bat and eager eye up the woodland road from Hambledon village to the downland pitch at Broad-Halfpenny on the first Tuesday in May. The dew is still on the grass and the sun is shining high over " Old Winchester " as they take the field against All England. Here is little George Lear, the famous long-stop, so sure that he might have been a sand-bank, and his friend, Tom Sueter, the wicket-keeper who loved to join him in a glee at the " Bat and Ball "; Lambert, " the little farmer " whose teasing art, so fatal to the Kent and Surrey men, had been mastered in solitude by bowling away hours together at a hurdle while tending his father's sheep; and "those anointed clod-stumpers, the Walkers, Tom and Harry" with their wilted, apple-john faces and long spidery legs as thick at the ankles as at the hips. " Tom was the driest and most rigid-limbed chap; . . . his skin was like the rind of an old oak, and as sapless. . . . He moved like the rude machinery of a steam-engine in the infancy of construction, and when he ran, every member seemed, ready to fly to the four winds. He toiled like a tar on horseback."

What Wellington became to his Peninsula veterans and "Daddy" Hill to Wellington, Richard Nyren was to the Hambledon cricketers and John Small to Nyren. " I never saw," his son recorded, " a finer specimen of the thoroughbred old English yeoman than Richard Nyren. He was a good face-to-face, unflinching, uncompromising independent man. He placed a full and just value upon the station he held in society and maintained it without insolence or assumption. He could differ with a superior, without trenching upon
his
dignity or losing his own." And
his
fidus Achates,
yeoman Small, was worthy of him. He loved music, was an adept at the fiddle and taught himself the double bass. He once calmed a bull by taking out his instrument and playing it in the middle of a field. His fellow-cricketer, the Duke of Dorset, hear
ing of his musical talent, sent
him a handsome violin and paid the carriage. " Small, like a true and simple-hearted Englishman, returned the compliment by sending his Grace two bats and balls, also paying the carriage.
⁵
'

In the English memory there are few lovelier scenes than that famous pitch on the Hampshire down. When " Silver Billy " Beldham—the first bat of the age—was in or runs were hard to get and the finish close, Sir Horace Mann, that stalwart patron of the game, would pace about outside the ground cutting down the daisies with his stick in his agitation and the old farmers under the trees would lean forward upon their tall staves, silent. " Oh! it was a heart-stirring sight to witness the multitude forming a complete and dense circle round that noble green. Half the county would be present, and all t
heir hearts with us.—Little Ham
bledon, pitted against All England, was a proud thought for the Hampshire men. Defeat was glory in such a struggle—Victory, indeed, made us only ' a little lower than angels.' How those fine brawn-faced fellows of farmers would drink to our success! And then what stuff they had to drink! Punch!—not your new
Ponche a la Romaine,
or
Ponche a la Groseille,
or your modern cat-lap milk punch—punch be-deviled; but good, unsophisticated, John Bull stuff—stark! that would stand on end—punch that would make a cat speak! . . . Ale that would flare like turpentine—genuine Boniface! "

" There would this company, consisting most likely of some thousands, remain patiently and anxiously watching every turn of fate in the game, as if the event had been the meeting of two armies to decide their liberty. And whenever a Hambledon man made a good hit, worth four or five runs, you would hear the deep mouths of the whole multitude
baying away in pure Hampshire—
‘
Go hard! —Go hard!—
Tick
and turn!—
tick
and turn! ' To the honour of my countrymen
...
I cannot call to recollection an instance of their wilfully stopping a ball that had been hit out among them by one of our opponents. Like
true
Englishmen, they would give an enemy fair play. How strongly are all those scenes, of fifty years by-gone,, painted in my memory !—and the smell of that ale comes upon me as freshly as the new May flowers."

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. From the high hill which rose out of the woods beyond the pitch one could see on clear days half southern England—valley and down and forest. Over that wide countryside the sea winds never ceased to blow from every point of the compass, free as the hearts of oak the land bred. Waving trees and smoke fluttering like a ragged banner, feathery heath, lonely cottages at the edge of moor and forest, ragged cows and geese and ponies pasturing in the wild by ancient prescribed rights. Tidal rivers flowing through marshes to the ocean with black cattle grazing at their salt edges and wooden cobles and crab-boats tossing on their silver bosom, land of semi-nomads, gatherers of shellfish, fowlers, longshore fishermen and armed smugglers—of Slip-jibbet and Moonshine Buck tip-trotting by in the dark
with
tubs of Geneva for the parson and " baccy for the Clerk." Sometimes travellers and shepherds near the coast would see the fleet of England riding at Spithead in one of the broad bays of the Channel shore; " pleasant and wonderful was the sight as seen from Ridgeway Hill, with the West Bay and the Isle of Portland and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, all lying in the calm sunshine," wrote Elizabeth Ham in after years, " I see it now."
¹

Further inland were the familiar objects of the country scene: the reapers in the golden field, the cottages of wattle and timber with their massive brick chimneys and deep-abiding th
atch, the mill with its weather-
boarded walls and throbbing wheel amid willows and alders, the saw pit with sweating craftsmen and stacked timber, the leafy lane with the great hairy-footed horses drawing home the wain laden with hay and laughing children. Along the high roads bright liveried postilions glinted like jewels before swaying post-chaises, and postmen riding or mounted high on coaches passed in the scarlet livery of England. With infinite slowness, soon overtaken by these fast-moving ones, a vast tilted stage-waggon crawled like a snail behind its eight horses, their neck bells making discordant music while the carrier trudged beside idly cracking his whip in the air. Along the road were haymakers at their work, mansions with ancient trees and cropping deer, and at every village the blacksmith's forge with old Vulcan looking out from his open door, " grey and hairy as any badger." And perhaps as it grew dark and the lights were lit on the coaches, the traveller might overtake a neighbouring gentleman's hounds, as John Byng did one May evening, coming home from an airing.

Within the candle-lit windows of the wayside cottage and the farmhouse on the hill, old John Bull would sit dozing with his pot
¹

1
MS.
Diary of Elizabeth Ham.

beside the kitchen fire, the dog and cat asleep at his feet, the good wife at her wheel, the pretty maid his daughter coming in with her pail, the children playing with the caged bird, the tinder-box on the shelf, the onions and flitches hanging from the ceiling. From this home he was presently to go out to face and tame a world in arms. For the moment he was content and at his ease, perhaps more so than was good for his continuing soul. In the tavern down in the village old England still lived on where over their pipes and bowls, gathered round the bare rude table, the local worthies with russet, weather-beaten faces cracked their joke and trolled their song. Though their summer was brief, before winter aches and penury encompassed them, they knew how to be merry. Cricket matches and fives playing, the crowd at the
fair gathered round the cudgellers
high wooden stage, the squeak of a fiddle or the shrill cry of a mountebank with his Merry Andrew on the village green on a warm summer evening, the carolers and the mumming players coming out of the Christmas snows, these were the outward symbols of a race of freemen taking their pleasures in their own way as their fathers had done before them. It seemed a far cry from these peaceful scenes to the rough humours and turbulent racket of London—the butchers of Sheppards* Market and May Fair elbowing their way through the dirty streets to a hanging at Tyburn, the footpads in the shadows of Park Lane, the foetid cells of Newgate—or the restless, sullen money-making of Manchester and Birmingham. Yet all were part of an English whole whose meaning it was hard to compass in a word, but whose people were in a greater or lesser degree adherents of two dominant ideals—justice and their own freedom.