London (140 page)

As the two men, the rich aristocrat and the homespun tradesman, entered the room arm in arm, Lord St James’s expression turned to irritation as he saw two men waiting for them.

“What the devil are you doing here, Bocton?” he exclaimed sharply, addressing the suaver of the two men.

Though the paternity of Lord Bocton was not in the slightest doubt, one would never have thought it to see him and his father together. The old earl adopted the dress of the more flamboyant young bloods of the next generation, who were known as the Regency bucks. Instead of breeches and stockings he wore tight trousers secured under the instep. He favoured a cutaway tailcoat, brightly coloured ruffled shirts, a floppy bow-tie or a cravat. He liked to wear a tall hat and carry a cane, and his collection of waistcoats was dazzling. He was as rakish as the Regency bucks too, for it was said that he had never missed a prize fight or a race meeting and was known to bet upon anything.

Lord Bocton did not bet. Though he had a white flash in his dark hair, like his father, he was tall and thin like his mother’s family. He still wore the silk stockings and silver buckled shoes fashionable twenty years before, a black, buttoned-up waistcoat, a stiff white collar and a coat that was always dark green, so that his father used to remark, with perfect truth: “You look like a bottle.”

“Who’s this?” he enquired, nodding towards his son’s companion.

“A friend, father,” Lord Bocton began.

“Didn’t know you had any,” the earl snorted. “How did you like the speech?” He knew very well that Lord Bocton had not liked it at all. “Bocton here,” he continued to Carpenter, “is a Tory, you see.”

There were three political allegiances a man could hold in the reign of George III. The Tories, the party of squires and clergy, were for King and Country. Protectionist, since their income usually came from modest landholdings, they supported the Corn Laws whose tariffs on imports kept the price of their grain artificially high, and were naturally suspicious of any kind of reform. Stubborn old King George, mad or sane, suited them pretty well. The Whigs, as they always had, believed in keeping the king under Parliament’s thumb. A merchant party still led by great aristocrats whose wealth often included mining and trading interests, they were sympathetic to free trade and modest reform. It was absurd, they agreed, that while a handful of voters could send a member to Parliament from one place, some growing commercial cities had no representation at all, leaving the government of England, as Carpenter truly pointed out, not unlike the vestry of St Pancras. They were also sympathetic to the religious Dissenters, the Jews and, some at least, even to the Catholics who under the old Test Acts were still unable to hold any public offices. Their cause of reform might have prospered even under King George, but for one problem.

The French Revolution might have promoted freedom in much of Europe, but in England it did just the opposite. Even in the early years, the ferocity of the revolutionaries – the Jacobins as they were called – and the awful bloodshed of the Terror and its guillotine, alarmed many peaceful Englishmen. But then Napoleon had risen to power in France and tried to invade the island kingdom. When gallant Admiral Horatio Nelson put a stop to that by smashing the French fleet at Trafalgar, the French emperor tried to destroy England’s trade in Europe. No wonder then if most men in England, including the Whigs, rallied around the Tory prime minister Pitt, the incorruptible patriot, to defend England from this menace. Not only that, to most men of property the revolution became associated with the war, and the people’s rights it proclaimed seemed to promise only fearful bloodshed and disorder.

“We want no Jacobins here,” the English Parliament declared, and battened down its hatches against these treacherous revolutionary seas. Combination Acts were passed, forbidding unions and unlawful assemblies. To advocate reform of any kind during these years made a man suspect; and even after Wellington had terminated Napoleon’s career at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 this fear of revolution persisted.

There was, however, a third political group – a small band of radical Whigs known as Jacobins who continued to speak out for reform, for tolerance and freedom of speech. Their leader, during the darkest years of the struggle with Napoleon, had been Charles James Fox – dissolute, debt-ridden, lovable but, even his opponents conceded, the greatest orator England had ever known.

While he had declaimed in the Commons, Fox knew that in the House of Lords he could always count on the vote of the sporting Earl of St James. In Lord Bocton however, Fox possessed a younger, but implacable enemy.

“Since you ask, father,” he replied, “I thought the speech unwise.” He looked severely at Zachary Carpenter. “We should not agitate the people.”

“You fear a revolution, my lord?” Zachary enquired.

“Of course.”

“And you fear the people?” the radical pursued.

“We all should, Mr Carpenter,” Bocton calmly replied.

This exchange not only signalled the two men’s dislike for each other; a more profound, philosophical chasm was apparent in their precise – though different – use of language. It was a difference that marked a divide not only between English political parties but also between the two halves of the English-speaking culture – the Old World, and the New.

When an American spoke of the Revolution, he meant the act of free, mostly property-owning men breaking away from a corrupt aristocracy and a despotic monarch. When he spoke of “the people”, he meant responsible individuals like himself. Carpenter the radical, by and large, meant the same things. But when Lord Bocton spoke of revolution, he carried in his mind a historical memory that dated all the way back to Wat Tyler’s revolt. Indeed, the last really huge London disturbances – the so-called Gordon Riots of forty years before, which had started as an anti-Catholic protest and then turned into a vast horror of looting and slaughter – were still a vivid memory to many. Similarly, though he had no fear of his footman, or the individual estate workers he had known since childhood in Kent, when he spoke of “the people” he had visions of a terrifying, lawless mob. Nor was this just because he was a lord. Many respectable shopkeepers and craftsmen, though they might want reform, had the same fear of general disorder.

“My immediate fear, Mr Carpenter,” Lord Bocton coldly observed, “is that you and my father are about to provoke a riot.”

There was good cause for this fear. The ending of the war with Napoleon four years before might have brought peace to Europe, but it had certainly not brought tranquillity at home. Large numbers of returning soldiers were still unemployed; the textile industry was adjusting to the loss of its large orders for military uniforms; grain prices were high. Naturally the government was blamed and many believed the radicals who told them that all their troubles came from a corrupt, aristocratic clique who ruled the land. There had been some scattered riots; the government had been alarmed. But then, just weeks ago, troops had charged a crowd in the northern town of Manchester and more than a dozen people had been killed. It had become known as the Peterloo Massacre, and every public meeting since then had been tense.

“I cannot understand your letting this happen in your house, father,” Lord Bocton complained.

The Earl of St James was unabashed. “What my son really means,” he cheerfully explained to Carpenter, “is that if
he
had this house, there’d be no radicals here. What he can’t understand is why I’m still here at all. He thinks I’ve lived too long already – eh, Bocton?”

“That is outrageous, father!”

“Then he’ll have the money, you see.”

“I am not thinking of money, father.”

“Just as well.” The earl looked at his son with glee. “Money, money, money,” he said happily. “It’s there to be enjoyed. Perhaps I’ll spend it all.” In fact the earl was far richer than his son realized and this amused him hugely. “Did you know, Bocton,” he suddenly remarked, “I’m going to build a new house next year? In Regent’s Park.”

During those times when poor King George was incapacitated, his heir ruled, as the Prince Regent; the last period had lasted so long that it had become known as the Regency. And whatever one thought of the Prince Regent – he was certainly vain and lazy – no one could deny that he had style. It was his architect, Nash, who had built the sweeping, colonnaded thoroughfare of Regent Street; and already he had begun an even more splendid development of stucco terraces and magnificent villas around the great horseshoe of parkland to be known as Regent’s Park. The earl watched as Lord Bocton, who had known nothing of this, was unable to prevent his face from twitching at the thought of the expense.

“You have a grandson to consider as well as a son, sir,” he said with reproach. At the mention of his grandson the earl’s eyes softened a little. Young George was a very different matter. But he was not going to spoil his fun. “Are you not in any case, father, a little old to trouble yourself with such a move?” Lord Bocton went on.

“Not at all,” his father genially declared. “I shall live to be a hundred. You’ll be over seventy then.” He glanced out of the window. “No riot,” he observed. “All’s quiet, Bocton. You can go home now.” And putting his arm through Carpenter’s, the sporting old rogue led him off.

When they were well away from the house Lord Bocton turned to his lugubrious companion.

“What do you think, Mr Silversleeves?”

Silversleeves shook his head. “An interesting case, my lord,” he agreed, before pausing regretfully. “Though I cannot …” he almost said “in conscience” but thought better of it, “I cannot yet do what you propose.”

“But there is hope?”

“Oh yes, my lord.” Silversleeves considered professionally. “His sense of responsibility: diminishing, without a doubt. Believes he’ll live to be a hundred: delusion. Spending all his money: incapacity. His radical notions – that, sir, I take to be the kernel of it – that is what will ripen into madness.” He sighed. “I’ve seen it time and again, my lord: a man gets an idea, it grows, finally it gets him. From enthusiasm to obsession; from obsession to lunacy. It’s just a question of being patient.”

“So you’ll be able to lock him up?” Bocton asked bluntly.

“Oh, I’m sure of it, my lord. Sooner or later.”

“Sooner, I hope,” Lord Bocton remarked. “I count on you.”

For Mr Cornelius Silversleeves was the deputy superintendent of the great Bethlehem Hospital, recently moved to a vast new premises in Southwark. Or, in the common vernacular, Bedlam.

Penny was lucky in his godfather. Jeremy Fleming lived in a pleasant, narrow old house off Fleet Street only a short walk from where his grandfather’s cake shop had been. A widower whose children had married and left home, his concave face creased into a smile of delight at the thought of having company and he assured Eugene he might live in his house for as long as he pleased. He was also sanguine about Eugene’s prospects of working in the financial world; for in his lifetime as a highly respectable clerk in the Bank of England he had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the City.

The first day, Fleming showed Eugene the Tower and St Paul’s. The second day they visited Westminster and the West End. On the third day he informed Eugene: “Today we begin your education.” And at nine o’clock sharp they set off in a hired pony and trap, clattered over London Bridge and made their way out to Greenwich.

“If you want to understand the City,” Fleming explained, as they looked out from the slope above Greenwich, “you need to come here first.”

The scene before Eugene was certainly very different to the one that had greeted him three days before. There was a bracing easterly wind, an open blue sky; the distant city was so clear it might have been a painting and the great curve of the river lay gleaming below. But it was to a series of other patches of water, like huge ponds near the river that Fleming now directed his attention.

“London dock over there at Wapping; there’s Surrey dock over on the left; West India directly opposite; East India further off.” His face broke into a happy smile. “The docks, Eugene: aren’t they grand?”

In the last twenty years the river, which had scarcely changed since Tudor times, had been transformed. The Pool of London below the Tower had become so crowded that something had had to be done. First one, then another huge dock and canal system was cut in the marshlands along the river; quays and roadways were built; and the gigantic system of London’s docklands had begun. It was necessary. Eugene’s head was soon swimming as Fleming related the volumes of trade flowing in from Britain’s ever-growing commercial empire – the mighty sugar trade of the Caribbean, the tea trade of India where, thanks to some brilliant military campaigns, Britain now effectively ruled a large part of the subcontinent – and the vast commerce with Europe, Russia and the Americas north and south. During the last hundred years London had transformed itself from a major port to the hub of the greatest trading metropolis in the world.

“But you must never forget,” Fleming went on, “that this is only possible because of one thing.” He indicated two frigates moored just upstream at Deptford. “The navy.”

After two centuries of struggle against the Spanish, Dutch and French, the vessels fitted and supplied at Tudor King Harry’s naval base at Deptford had confirmed their supremacy of the seas. If Queen Elizabeth’s buccaneers had begun England’s trading empire, Nelson and his successors had now guaranteed it. “No navy, Eugene,” his godfather remarked, “no city.”

Eugene asked many questions. Had, for instance, the War of Independence with America affected commerce?

Fleming shrugged. “Not much. You see trade’s like a river, really. You can try to stop it but it usually seeps through. Tobacco used to be the thing, but it’s cotton now. They grow it, we manufacture. Independence or not, bad feeling or not, trade carries on.”

“Not always, though,” Eugene pointed out. In the long conflict with Napoleon when the mighty French emperor had barred English trade from most of Europe, only the smugglers had managed to get through.