Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze (19 page)

Jacobitism had become something more diffuse; the king across
the water was wreathed in mist. The mist was partly made up of romantic memories and partly of dreams for a better future. Nine years later, in 1745, when the mist briefly evaporated and a real Jacobite army was marching through England behind a real Stuart prince, the main emotion among English Jacobites was one of alarm. The Pretender didn’t realise it himself, but after twenty-one years Jacobitism in England had turned into something quite different from a campaign to restore him.

Instead, it had become a general form of protest against those in power. As long as there was Jacobitism, there was an alternative to the Hanoverians. Jacobitism became a way of withholding support. That way, the King of England and his ministers, like everyone else, had to live with uncertainty. It had metamorphosed into a general spirit of subversion. Disgruntled Tory squires toasted the ‘King over the Water’ to express their disenchantment with London, the times and Walpole’s ministry. Jacobite songs like ‘The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again’ became a way to cheek anyone in authority.
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Smugglers adopted Jacobite oaths and slogans. Wesley, attending an execution at Tyburn, saw that two of the condemned men had white cockades in their hats. In the great age of popular satire, it was easy to find ways of annoying the establishment without going so far as to overthrow it. The accession of James II on 11 June could be marked by a sprig of rue and thyme; the Pretender’s birthday, four days later, by a white cockade.

And if the aim was to give those in authority sleepless nights, Jacobitism certainly had its effect. Sir Robert Walpole, for one, could never convince himself that his position was secure. ‘I am not ashamed,’ he told the House of Commons in 1738, ‘to say I am in fear of the Pretender.’ And there was still enough of real substance in Jacobitism to keep the fear alive. In 1734 there were disturbances in Suffolk Street on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. The divisions of the Civil War and the Glorious
Revolution were still there, and so were French armies, Jacobite cells, and Jacobite plots.

It wasn’t just Robert Nixon’s packet of phosphorus that alarmed Walpole, or his blurry paper attacking government legislation. It was what lay ahead. The Gin Act was due to come in on Michaelmas Day – 29 September – and already that looked like a flashpoint. ‘There are great endeavours,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘to inflame the people, and to raise great tumults upon Michaelmas Day, when the Gin Act takes place … These lower sorts of Jacobites appear at this time more busy than they have for a great while. They are very industrious, and taking advantage of everything that offers, to raise tumult and disorder among the people.’

Tumult and disorder followed the Westminster bomb by no more than a fortnight. In the event, the alarm was given by the Deputy Lieutenants of Tower Hamlets. They were barricaded inside the Angel and Crown tavern in Spitalfields, on Tuesday 27 July, and calling desperately for reinforcements. Outside, the East End had erupted in violence.
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It was feeling against the Irish that triggered it. London was full of Irish workers. They flooded into the capital in search of jobs on building sites or out in the fields and, like all immigrants before and after them, they were accused of stealing English jobs. Within hours of the trouble starting, Walpole had informers mingling with the crowd, and sending back regular reports from public houses. ‘Some of [the crowd] told me,’ Joseph Bell scribbled hastily to his master, ‘there was such numbers of Irish who under-work them, they could not live and that there was an Irish man in the neighbourhood who employed numbers of them & they was determined to demolish him and drive the rest away.’ It turned out that the contractor for Shoreditch Church ‘had paid off his English labourers and imployed Irish because they worked cheaper.’
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The same thing was happening in the weaving industry. Out in the countryside,
there were disturbances against low-waged Irish harvest-workers.

But if the Irish problem had started it, there was plenty more discontent simmering under the surface. As he mingled with the crowd, Joseph Bell heard hints which would realise all Sir Robert Walpole’s worst fears. ‘In other parts of the crowd,’ he wrote to the Prime Minister, ‘they told me their meeting was to prevent the putting down Ginn.’

On the first night of the riots, Irish public houses were attacked. A squad of fifty soldiers under Major White, officer on duty at the Tower, found itself up against a crowd he estimated at 4,000. On Thursday, a boy called Thomas Larkin was shot dead in Brick Lane. The next night was even worse. Richard Burton, a brewer’s assistant, ‘saw the mob coming down Bell Yard, with sticks and lighted links. One of them made a sort of speech directing the rest to go to Church Lane, to the
Gentleman and Porter
.’ The crowd was organised by now. These were no longer spontaneous demonstrations. Quite a few of the leaders had papers with lists of Irish pubs on them. ‘One of them was called
Captain Tom the Barber
, and was in a striped banjan. I would have taken notice of him,’ Richard Burton told the Old Bailey later, ‘but he turned away and would not let me see his face.’ The authorities were having to take ever stronger measures to deal with the situation. Clifford William Phillips, a Tower Hamlets magistrate, was woken by neighbours about ten o’clock, despatched a message to the Tower for help, and then set off towards the riot. ‘The street was very light,’ he recalled afterwards, ‘and I could see (at a distance) the mob beating against the shutters with their clubs and hear the glass fly … I heard the hollowing at my house, and the cry in the street was
Down with the Irish, Down with the Irish
.’ As Richard Burton remembered, it was only the appearance of magistrate and soldiers that prevented worse violence. ‘Justice Phillips coming down, and the captain with his soldiers, they took some of [the crowd], and
the rest made off immediately, and were gone as suddenly, as if a hole had been ready dug in the bottom of the street, and they had all dropped into it at once.’
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In the end that was the worst night of violence. By the weekend the authorities had flexed their muscles. Irish workmen had been laid off and the trouble was over. But the July riots showed what a powder-keg London had become. Some of Walpole’s informers insisted the trouble was all to do with Irish labour, but others couldn’t get deeper fears out of their minds. ‘It is very difficult to judge whence this riot arose,’ reported the Tower Hamlets magistrates. ‘Some say the Irish … were the causes, but I am afraid there must be something else at the bottom, either Mother Gin or something worse. Captain Littler of the Guards said he heard the words High Church among them.’ ‘High Church’ had been one of the slogans of the Sacheverell riots which broke out against the Whig ministry in 1710. For Walpole, it was a sure sign of Jacobite involvement. Meanwhile, a witness at the rioters’ trial, Peter Cappe, told how he had seen a group of watermen on the Thursday night swearing ‘they would lose their lives before they would suffer one stone to be laid on [Westminster] Bridge.’ Another of Walpole’s correspondents reported ‘great discontents and murmurings all through this mobbish part of town. The Ginn Act and the Smuggling Act sticks hard in the stomachs of the meaner sort of people and the Bridge Act greatly exasperates the watermen insomuch that they make no scruple of declaring publiquely that they will joyn in any mischief that can be set on foot.’
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As he read through the reports, Sir Robert Walpole found plenty to alarm him. There was the mysterious figure of ‘Captain Tom the Barber’ and the lists of Irish houses. This was no grassroots disturbance. Another report claimed that among ‘the greater and more ignorant part of [the] mobb’ there were ‘many intriguing
persons of better sort amongst them in disguise particularly several who are strongly suspected to be popish Priests.’
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‘Although the complaint of the Irish was the first motive,’ Walpole wrote to his brother, ‘the Jacobites are blending with all other discontents, endeavouring to stir up the distillers and gin retailers, and to avail themselves of the spirit and fury of the people.’
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As if he wanted to add to Sir Robert’s woes, the King had gone off on one of his summer trips to Hanover. An agent who managed to infiltrate a Jacobite cell reported that ‘the conversation turned chiefly upon the advantages that their party will receive by His Majesty’s frequent visits to Hanover.’
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Then a Jacobite arms cache was found.
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Further signs of trouble came when a distiller in High Holborn, Francis Griffiths, received an anonymous letter:

Sir, Strike and free yourselves and country. Rise in arms against the dog that governs this unfortunate land and fight for your right King. [Resist], and your properties and you will much oblige your Country and me youre King of right
.

Take Place

J. St
.
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There may have been distillers in London who were fool enough to think James Stuart wrote personal notes exhorting them to rebellion, but Francis Griffiths wasn’t one of them. He contacted an agent called John Ibbut and passed it on to the authorities.

By now, the chances of bringing in prohibition without trouble seemed remote. ‘By the seditious ballads and discontent that appears about the Gin Act,’ a Tower Hamlets magistrate wrote to Walpole, ‘it looks to me as if it would be very difficult to carry it thoroughly into execution, of which the Jacobites will not be wanting to take advantage and set us in a flame if they can.’ From another of the Prime Minister’s regular correspondents came an even more chilling
warning. ‘It is the common talk of the tippling ale houses and little gin shops,’ he wrote, ‘that Sir Robert Walpole and the Master of the Rolls will not outlive Michaelmas.’
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Sir Robert Walpole was rattled. A fortnight before Michaelmas, Joseph Jekyll told Thomas Wilson ‘that Sir Robt. Walpole was afraid to use rigorous methods against the Rioters.’
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The Prime Minister, the ‘Great Man’, ‘Bluff Bob’, had been in office for fifteen years; he had the support of the King; he was undisputed master of Parliament. But now he was rattled. It wasn’t just disgruntled distillers or Captain Tom the Barber. Storm-clouds were gathering. All the different strands of opposition to his ministry were starting to come together.

It all went back to the Excise Crisis in 1733. Then Walpole had been forced to abandon a prized scheme to extend Excise duties and cut the Land Tax. Crowds had pursued him from the Commons with the slogan of ‘no slavery, no Excise, no wooden shoes.’ He had been caricatured as the ‘Excise Monster’, riding on a barrel and trampling Magna Carta. At a key moment in the crisis, the King’s support had wavered, and the scheme had been lost.

For ten years before that he had hardly encountered strong opposition. But Excise had struck a chord on all sides. Excise was seen as foreign, an instrument of tyranny – hence the jibe about wooden shoes. It was an assault on English liberties. ‘The Excise man,’ as one writer grumbled a few years later, ‘is our constant companion from the crown of our head to the sole of our foot. If we clean our hair, he examines the powder, even the washing the ladies’ linen does not escape inspection. He walks abroad in our shoes, at our tables he seasons our meat … Is it daylight? He peeps in at our windows. Is it night? He shines in our candles. Have we sweets or sours, light or darkness, the custom house officers or Excise men are our constant attendants.’
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The City of London, until then carefully managed by Walpole, had rebelled. The Lord Mayor, John Barber, had promoted an anti-Excise resolution from the Court of Common Council. The City MPs, John Barnard and Micaiah Perry, had led the parliamentary opposition, and in the ensuing elections the ministry had lost control of London. The Excise Crisis had drawn in all London’s diverse oppositional elements: its merchants, its Jacobites, its satirists, its anti-government newspapers. The Tories and the ‘Country’ Whigs had united. Popular protest had thrown fuel on the flames. The King had wavered. It had been enough to shake Walpole’s ministry to its foundations.

There had been a lull in the opposition after the Excise Crisis. Bolingbroke had returned to France; Pulteney declared himself weary of the whole business. But three years later the Gin Act, another Excise measure, looked likely to drag Walpole back into the same turbulent waters. Micaiah Perry, for one, was a long-term supporter of the distillers. And by now Sir Robert had other problems to struggle with as well. He had lost the bishops. The Mortmain Bill in the last session of Parliament – another of the Acts which Robert Nixon had exploded – had provoked a rift with ‘Walpole’s Pope’, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. At court, there was trouble brewing with the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Relations between the King and his son were famously bad. By summer 1736 Frederick was starting to provide a focus for the opposition. Meanwhile in Parliament there was fresh blood coming in to challenge the ministry. ‘Cobham’s Cubs’, William Pitt and George Lyttelton, had entered the House the year before. Guided by Viscount Cobham and Lord Chesterfield, a leading Excise rebel, these ‘boy patriots’ would provide a fresh nucleus of opposition to Walpole’s ministry.

If Walpole was expecting political trouble out of prohibition, he didn’t have long to wait. It came, not surprisingly, from the
Craftsman
, the magazine sponsored by Henry Bolingbroke, the Tory leader, and William Pulteney to foster ‘Country’ ideals, and a ‘Country’ coalition between Tories and opposition Whigs. The editor, ‘Caleb D’Anvers’, was sharp and funny, and he knew exactly how to get on the ministry’s nerves. Madam Geneva soon caught his eye as a way to stir up political mayhem.