A History of Britain, Volume 2 (53 page)

It was the genius of John Gay to take the coffee-house truism that the lawbreakers and the law-makers were interchangeable and turn it into the greatest hit of the eighteenth century: his ‘Newgate Pastoral',
The Beggar's Opera
(1728). The audiences who roared abuse at Peachum the Thieftaker of course recognized him as Jonathan Wild, just as they cheered Macheath the highwayman as a stand-in for Jack Sheppard the housebreaker, who had gone to the gallows a year before Wild and had become a street hero for escaping from prison no fewer than four times. But although there was a minor figure in Gay's show called ‘Bob Booty', it was just as obvious that Peachum, the extortionist and swaggering man of parts, the man who pretended to civic virtue while bleeding everyone white, was also a thinly veiled caricature of Walpole himself.

So when
The Beggar's Opera
took London and then the provinces by storm it took anti-Walpole satire out of the pages of opposition journals and into the taverns, coffee-houses and theatres. Perhaps it stung to be depicted as the Gangster-in-Office, but Walpole had a hide like an elephant and was certainly not about to fold his tent and depart at the behest of John Gay. He also comforted himself with the knowledge that much of the wave of opposition fury stemmed from their consternation that the new king, George II, whose hatred of his father had led them to believe he would inaugurate his reign by disposing of his prime minister, had instead succumbed to Walpole's inexplicable spell. But although the newly aggressive tide of criticism did not for the moment do much to disturb his stranglehold on power, it did bear witness to a rising tide of revulsion at the world of which Walpole complacently boasted: a sense that beneath the platitudes about peace and stability lay brutality, corruption and
misery. Dig beneath the dross, the moralists said, and you will find disease and death.

A walk through the seamier areas of London, through the rookeries and alleys, was a walk over bodies. The supply of very potent, very cheap gin had created an entire sub-culture of dependency and violence in the city comparable only to the crack-houses of the 1980s. Hogarth's famous graphic nightmare of a world in deathly auto-destruction was, of course, a polemical exaggeration. But not altogether, since we know of at least one mother, Judith Dufour, who became notorious for strangling her own baby daughter and selling every stitch of her own clothing to satisfy her craving for a dram. There came a point, though, when someone got tired of stepping over half-dead babies in the gutter or infant corpses thrown into the Fleet Ditch along with the ‘blood, guts and dung' that, according to Pope, one expected to find there.

Thomas Coram had made his fortune in Massachusetts from the Atlantic timber trade. All that he wanted was to settle down to a quiet life in Rotherhithe where he could see the Thames and the tides. But the sight of the tiny abandoned corpses in the streets would not let him alone, and he also knew that the mortality rate for infants born in the poor house and sent out to wet nurse was close to a 100 per cent. Opulent London was a hecatomb for babies. So Coram determined to tap some of the city's fortune to establish a foundling hospital, a place where infants, legitimate or illegitimate, could be deposited, no questions asked, and would be given a decent chance of survival. For almost twenty years he made himself a nuisance to his friends, lobbying the great and the good and going so far as to petition the king, until the necessary funds were raised.

He also had to beat back accusations that a place to deposit bastards would reward depravity with impunity and thus further encourage it. Working with Hogarth, Coram had a fund-raising letterhead shamelessly designed to milk every kind of sympathy. In the drawing on the letterhead, Coram himself appears as a saintly patriarch leading his happy and smiling charges towards a better future. The campaign worked. George II – seldom a pushover for hard-luck stories – melted, along with the queen, and after that the Quality lined up to donate.

The hospital opened its doors in 1741 to its first children. The governors trooped into their council room where they looked at art that had a bearing on their newly discovered mission – Francis Hayman's
The Finding of the Infant Moses in the Bullrushes
(1746), for instance. But the most arresting sight would have been the enormous, full-length portrait of old Captain Coram himself, set against the kind of classical column
usually reserved for princes, aristocrats or military heroes. The portrait was as close as Hogarth ever got to a revolutionary act, for it audaciously transferred to this bluff old fellow the customary attributes of royalty; the royal charter, for example, with its seal lay in his hands. The world and its oceans – the orb made literal – was seen as the source of Coram's virtuous fortune. Even the hat by his right foot was significant, for it was meant to remind spectators of another of the tireless Coram's campaigns – to protect British hatters from foreign competition. Needless to say, he had requested that his only remuneration for that advocacy be one of their hats. In other words Coram, in Hogarth's grand depiction (as well as in reality), was everything Walpole and his cronies were not: selfless, philanthropic, modest in his appearance and imbued with civic religion. He was a free man. He was a patriot.

Virtue and good intentions, though, would not alone guarantee the realization of Coram's vision. The hospital was so overwhelmed with demand when it opened that it needed a lottery to decide admission. Anxious mothers lined up to draw coloured balls from a bag. Draw a white ball and your baby was in; draw a red ball for the waiting list; a black ball would send mother and baby back to the streets.

But acceptance brought with it its own kind of poignancy. Inside a cabinet, still kept at the Foundling Hospital, are preserved some of the saddest things left to us from the eighteenth century: the keepsake tokens given to babies by their mothers on the point of abandoning them to the hospital. Although some social historians assume that the appallingly high rates of infant mortality would have inured these mothers to loss, the whole history of response to the Foundling Hospital, not to mention the care and affection given to ensuring that some sort of memento would survive, says otherwise. Though all the objects record a kind of emotional desperation, not all of them speak of destitution. A mother-of-pearl heart with the initials of the infant engraved on it was expensive enough to have been made for a mother from a relatively well-off family, doubtless being protected from disgrace. In many other cases, however, the extreme simplicity of the pieces does suggest hardship. Often they were nothing more than objects that the mothers happened to have in their possession at the moment of parting: a hazelnut drilled through for a string, to be worn as a pendant or amulet against misfortune; a thimble; a homely sewn heart; or just a flimsy piece of ribbon to be transferred from a mother's hair to a baby's wrist.

History can be a heartbreaker. For the reason we know about these objects, the reason we still have them, is that they never reached their intended recipients. Those responsible for the children's welfare, for better
or worse, had decided it would not be in their best interests to give them a reminder of the shame of their origins. Yet, somehow, neither could they bring themselves to destroy them. Instead they went to that most eighteenth-century of limbos: a cabinet of curiosities.

The Foundling Hospital could not create an asylum of health and good cheer overnight. Close to 40 per cent of the first generation of infants died within its walls, although even that was an enormous improvement over the rate of the orphaned or abandoned. And the cause of Coram's Hospital had another kind of effect too: the creation of a new kind of culture, self-consciously apart from the country of aristocratic estates and county hunts – the middle-class parish at work, well-off but busily charitable, interested in virtue rather than fashion, redemption rather than wit. There had been public philanthropy before, of course – organized by the trade guilds as well as Crown, nobility and the established Church. But this was the first time that men and women who belonged to the world of the commercial economy – tradesmen, merchants and bankers – came together with well-known writers, artists and sculptors in a campaign of conscience to attack a notorious social evil.

They were also committed, not just to correcting ills but to a constructive vocation too – and what they wanted to construct were patriots. If the children deposited in the Foundling Hospital survived they were to be turned into model Britons of the future: not the gin-soaked delinquents of the alleys or little criminals on their way to a date with Tyburn's tree, but hard-working, God-fearing, industrious and enterprising model citizens. ‘Patriotism' was on the lips of the men and women who launched these little crusades of moral and civic reform in the commercial and port towns of Britain, and increasingly it meant not just a sense of native pride but a commitment to social and political virtue as well. Patriotism, in fact, described itself as everything the Walpole political machine was not: modest in display; disinterested in conviction; impervious to corruption; jealous in the defence of the ‘liberties of freeborn Britons'; hostile to arbitrary power. Though the anti-‘Robinocracy' opposition was made up of very different political types – Tories and Jacobites, independent Whigs, lobbyists for colonial trade and the aggressive expansion of maritime power – they all felt that if there were indeed a new Great Britain, it was they, not Walpole and his creatures, who embodied it. They attacked his devotion to the excise as a way of keeping the land taxes low, and especially the powers given to the collectors who could search warehouses and shops, locking up alleged malefactors without showing due cause. In 1733, when Walpole attempted to expand the powers of search and seizure still further, he was met with a coalition
of resistance, not least from meetings of merchants and tradesmen throughout the country who demanded that their MPs vote against the bill as a violation of Magna Carta. When Walpole was heard to refer to a group of them lobbying against the bill at the door of the House of Commons as ‘sturdy beggars', the news, relayed quickly through the press, triggered a storm of public indignation: ‘Would not every
FREE BRITON
think the promoter of it [the Excise Bill] An
ENEMY
to his country? Would he not justly incur the Censure of the Roman Senate and deserve to have that sentence denounced against him “Curse on the Man who owes his greatness to his
COUNTRY
'
S RUIN
.”'

When the offending bill was withdrawn, the cities, towns and boroughs of England were jubilant. Effigies of Walpole were burned; parades and processions marched through the streets trumpeting the imminent end of the Great Corrupter and the Robinocrats. As it turned out, the celebrations were premature. But the writing was on the wall, not least because, over the years that followed, the opposition press succeeded in painting a picture of Walpole's government as more committed to its own selfish interest than to the interest of the country, especially when it came to standing up for the rights of merchants on the high seas. In 1737 a print called ‘The British Hercules' depicted a bare-footed jack-tar, modelled heroically in the manner of the Farnese Hercules in Rome, holding a paper inscribed ‘I wait for orders' in front of a prostrate lion and an idle fleet at Spithead. Xenophobic propaganda drummed up the cause of captains whose ships had been boarded by Spanish coastguards. When one of Captain Jenkins' ears had been sliced off, it was claimed, by a Spanish cutlass, and introduced to the House of Commons by ‘Patriot' opposition leaders, like William Beckford, as a victim of dastardly papist brutality on the high seas, prints were published showing captured British seamen starving in Spanish dungeons. More than forty addresses and petitions were sent to parliament from the port cities – Bristol and Liverpool – as well as London and Edinburgh. Walpole's way, as ever, was management: a negotiated ‘Convention' with Spain, which, because it kept the right of Spanish coastguards to search for contraband, triggered another outpouring of bellicose indignation. A young MP, William Pitt, aired his precocious oratory by attacking the Convention as ‘nothing but a stipulation for national ignominy . . . the complaints of your despairing merchants, the voice of England, has condemned it'. The pressure for war, both inside and outside parliament, was becoming irresistible. It would happen with or without Walpole. The Spanish saved him by obtusely refusing to ratify the Convention, thus giving Walpole a belated
casus belli
.

In 1739, the new maritime patriotism got its first
bona fide
popular
celebrity: Vice Admiral Edward Vernon. With just six ships Vernon had managed to capture the Spanish Caribbean depot of Porto Bello in the isthmus of Panama, the principal base for coastguards, in November 1739, and overnight he became the toast of the taverns, the clubs and the streets. Inns were renamed for him, and Porto Bello roads and streets sprang up not just in London but all over the country. Villages were renamed Porto Bello in Staffordshire, Sussex and Durham. In Fleet Street, a pageant featured a painted pasteboard showing Porto Bello, in front of which a kneeling Spaniard surrendered to a triumphant Vernon. Silver tankards, Staffordshire stoneware mugs, engraved glass goblets, snuff boxes and teapots bore Vernon's likeness, the icon of his little fleet and the universally echoed slogan ‘six ships'. In the spring of 1741, the Vernon bandwagon took to the hustings at Westminster and five other constituencies in an organized campaign to throw out Walpole's placemen and elect the naval hero as a public thorn in his side. At Westminster, on the very doorstep of parliament, and where the public street campaign was especially rowdy, troops were used to close the polls early to avoid humiliation.

The Vernon clamour could embarrass the Walpolean regime, but it could not win the war. After Porto Bello came the anticlimax of a botched attack on Cuba. Armed with accusations that he had, once again, betrayed the true cause of the nation, Walpole's opponents combined in a concerted attack, and this time had the parliamentary numbers to make it count. Before he could be pushed, Walpole chose to walk in February 1742. With him went peace. In decade after decade following Walpole's fall Britain would be at war, and whatever the coalition of enemies the country faced, at the heart of them would be the arch-competitor on land and sea, France. Just as in the sixteenth century England's national identity had been beaten out on the anvil of fear and hatred of Catholic Rome and Habsburg Spain, so British identity was forged in the fires of fear and hatred against Catholic, absolutist France. In 1744 an invasion panic struck southern England. George II was off in Germany leading his troops (as he had insisted) beneath the standard of the Electorate of Hanover. Garrisons had been emptied to supply the war on the continent. Britannia had to fend for itself. Only the Channel separated Britain from the frightening spectre of Jesuit inquisitions, wooden shoes, slavish prostration before the Bourbon despot, the end of good ale and the beginning of barbarous food. The ever dependable Protestant wind came between the French fleet and a landing. But both government and people knew that this was only a respite and not a victory. It did not take a strategic genius to predict that, sooner or later, the government of Louis XV would play the Jacobite card, in either Ireland or Scotland, or both.