The Age of Elegance (20 page)

The old King, in whose honour these simple pieties were observed, was a prisoner in his castle, blind, mad, helpless, and living in a world that had ceased to exist. The bells still rang to celebrate Ins birthday; the sentries still stood outside his palaces; the enactments of Government were issued in his name. Men, mostly old, prayed for him, spoke of him with affection and thought of him wistfully in their rejoicings at the triumph of his arms. But he himself was impervious to all: a ghost left over from the days of Pitt and Chatham, who had conversed with Johnson and Wolfe, been painted by Ramsay, and who now, dressed in velvet cap and dressing-gown, wandered from room to room or flitted across the terrace at Windsor with sightless eyes and unkempt snowy beard, his long, tapering, kingly fingers feeling for an imaginary sceptre. And, as in the days of his sanity, he still, though alone, talked continuously: those who loved him comforted themselves with the thought that it was with angels.
¹

Part
II

Her Fresh Green Lap

"There lives not form nor feeling in my soul Unborrowed from my country."

Coleridge

A foreigner with a more extended view of Britain than that enjoyed by the Allied Sovereigns would have seen two islands—a dominant one with a population of ten million English, two million Scots and half a million Welsh, and a subordinate one inhabited by
five
million Catholic Irish peasants and a million Protestants of Anglo-Scottish descent who alone held the right to sit in Parliament, and enjoy high
office.
The condition of the two islands was thus dissimilar: the one a closely-knit commonwealth pursuing its own interest, the other a dependency garrisoned by a ruling caste, foreign in religion and partly so in race. The gulf between them had been widened by the Act of Union which had merged
the Irish Parliament into an im
perial legislature at Westminster in which its members could always be outvoted.

¹
D'Arblay, III, 267. See Ashton, II, 130-2; Bessborough, 223; Colchester, II, 353-4; Dyott, I, 306, 373» 53i; Gaussen, II, 322; Gronow, II, 305-6;
Paget Brothers,
149; Simond, II, 115.

Neither this, nor the periodic racial and religious risings and the permanent agrarian unrest of Ireland had kept its sons out of Britain's fleets and armies, to which they were drawn by their love of fighting, craving for drink and extreme poverty. This last, because of bad farming and a vicious system of land tenure, was chronic. It was intensified by an alarming rise in population which drove thousands of Irish emigrants every year into the cotton factories of Lancashire and Clydeside and into the London slums. They constituted the chief residuum of unskilled labour for Britain's new machinery—a development whose influence on the national life of England had yet to be realised.

For except in Protestant Ulster the Irish were a very different race from the sober, law-abiding English and the thrifty, tenacious Scots. The difference was partly one of climate, partly of religion, economics and history, partly of diet. The English lived on meat, beer and wheaten bread, the Irish on potatoes and whisky. They were at once a tragic, reckless, kind-hearted, superstitious and, by English standards, lawless and unreli
able race, always doing wild th
ings and in so gay and absurd a manner that their irresponsibility was a jest rather than a reproach. Their only point in common with the English, apart from their courage, was their passion for horses. Ireland's vivid green Atlantic landscape, with its mournful bogs and misty mountains, its stinking hovels and elegant, filthy, drunken capital, seemed to belong to a foreign country. Here women, half-naked, with matted hair hanging over their bosoms, sat at cabin doors smoking pipes and staring at melancholy horizons, and men in blue cloaks and slouching hats carrying shillelaghs stood jesting at street corners in sinister groups. In this other island the most savage crimes were constantly being committed for religious, patriotic or agrarian reasons by a peasantry whom Harry Smith found the lightest-hearted, kindest, most generous creatures he had ever known.
¹

Ireland was not the only part of the British Isles which presented a contrast to the wealth and splendour of London and the garden of

¹
Smith, I, 337. See Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
5th Jan., 1822; Ashton, II, 201-2; Bell,
1,
181,187, 192; Bury, II, 109, 112, 115-16; Colchester, II, 591-2; Farington, VIII, 64, 121; Granville, II, 45<5-7, 458; Grattan, 327-8; Gronow, II, 87;
Hamilton of
Dalzell,
MS. p. 277; Keats,
Letters,
6th July, 1818;
Lavengro,
57-9; Lockhart, V, 179; NevilJ, 56-60; Newton, 193; Peel, I, 206-7, 231, 236-7; Simond, I, 65; II, 135, 259, 324-6, 332, 339; Woodward, 314-24.

Kent and Sussex. There were the marshes and fens with their half-animal fishermen and fowlers, poor primitive villages along the rocky, western coasts with mud walls and blackened, ragged thatch, the northern moors and the Welsh valleys where a sturdy people— almost as broad as they were high—talked in a strange tongue, wore traditional dress and lived a life apart.
¹
Scotland, too, though its wealth had increased immeasurably in the past half century, was a poor land compared with England. The country women still went about bare-footed, except on Sundays when they attended kirk in fine shawls, black velvet bonnets and looks of ineffable piety. They lived in bare, unfloored cottages, mostly of one room, with dung piled against sodden turf walls. Even in its noble capital—"Auld Reekie"—with its labyrinth of crooked closes and tall medieval houses, the cry of "gardy loo" still warned the passer-by that the ordure of the past twelve hours was about to descend into the roadway. For all the fine new farms of the Lothians and the Lanarkshire cotton mills, Scotland's chief wealth was still the frugality and honesty
²
of its deeply religious people.

Beyond the Lowlands were the feudal Highlands—the primitive land of mountain and flood made fashionable by Walter Scott's poems and novels. Here, in poor shepherds' huts full of animals and peat-smoke, lived a race whose splendid physique and proud bearing recalled the soldiers of ancient Rome or the noble savages of North America.
³
There were only 300,000 in all, but, their former loyalty to the House of Stuart having been gloriously expiated on England's battlefields, their kilts, pipes and sporrans had lately become a national institution.

Of England's own ten millions, a tenth lived in the capital. Apart from its suburbs of new villas engulfing ancient villages it was really five towns, the mercantile City, the royal West End, the riverside

¹
When Richard Ayton landed in the Pwllheli peninsula in 1814, Cymric amazons emerged from filthy wigwams and proceeded to twist and pull about his umbrella with cries and grunts of amazement. Daniell, I, 167. See
idem,
69
et seq.-,
Festing, 159-60;
Marlay Letters,
256; Simond, I, 210-37.

²
Simond noted in 1810 that the woman attendant at the Edinburgh Penitentiary to whom he gave half a crown, at once put it into the box for poor prisoners. Simond, I, 273-4. In the Highlands the inns were without locks and travellers' luggage could be safely left all night in unguarded carriages in the highway.
Idem,
302. See Lockhart, IV, 218. Keats, III, 166,
idem,
170-1; Clapham, I, 28-9, 37; Simond, I, 28-9, 263-4; II, 39-40, 56; Lady Shelley, II, 57-8.

³
The same proud indolence, the same carelessness, the same superiority to want, the same courage, the same hospitality and unfortunately, I hear, the same liking for spiritous liquors." Simond, I, 301. See
idem,
I, 302-24; Bewick, 74-7; Keats, III, 164, 191-213; Letts, 247.

port, the Borough of Southwark, and the slums. These last crowded out of sight—though not always out of smell—of the rich, behind the grander houses, and spread ever further eastwards into the Essex and Kentish meadows, leaving a string of low, clingy towns on either side of the Thames. They were still what they had been in the Middle Ages, fever-ridden haunts of vice and wretchedness: a maze of alleys and lanes fading into the unwholesome vapour that always overhung them, of dirty, tumbledown houses with windows patched with rags and blackened paper, and airless courts crowded with squabbling women and half-naked children wallowing in pools and kennels. The improvements effected by eighteenth-century humanitarians were constantly being counteracted by the influx of newcomers from every part of the kingdom.

Apart from London and the Scottish and Irish capitals there were only two towns in Great Britain, Manchester and Liverpool, with 100,000 inhabitants, and five others—Bristol, Glasgow, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield—with over 50,000. At Liverpool, which had taken Bristol's place as the country's first outport, rows of warehouses, eight or nine stories high, extended for half a mile along the waterfront, where thousands of men perpetually unloaded ships from the far ends of the earth. Here was the former base of the slave trade —the sinister, golden traffic on which the port's wealth had been raised—and the chief home, supplanting Bristol, of the West Indian interest. Richard Ayton, in his
Voyage round Great Britain,
thought Liverpool, with its fine residential houses, elegant Grecian buildings, clean broad streets and spreading smoke pall, silhouetted against the Cheshire hills, the most beautiful town in England after London; it brought to his mind "the country in the pride of its industry and enterprise and under the most striking signs of its wealth, consequence and power."

The manufacturing towns, or rather overgrown squatters' villages —for they had none of the traditional dignity associated with English cities—now spreading fast around the new steam factories, iron works, and mines of the Midlands, South Lancashire, Clyde and Tyne, were astonishing phenomena. As travellers approached them through the encircling mists, they heard the rumbling of wheels and the clang of hammers, and saw long rows of furnace fires. Puckler-Muskau's picture of Birmingham serves for all: flame and smoke belching from diabolical chimneys, factories larger than palaces with every window blazing through the night as men made goods and weapons for the destruction of Bonaparte, and, gleaming above the lurid town, the spires of ancient churches silhouetted in the moonlight. Classically-minded young ladies, passing through such places, were reminded in their journals of "the realms of Plutus."
¹

Yet, though increasing fast, the industrial population was only a small fraction of the country, hidden out of sight on remote heaths and in lonely Pennine valleys. More than three-quarters of the English people still lived in ancient villages or small market towns. Even a generation later, after a further feverish expansion, only one in eighty was working in the cotton trade—the country's largest urban industry. There were far fewer miners than there were tailors and bootmakers, and more domestic servants than cotton-workers. Set against "Britain's calm felicity and power," London's Alsatias and the helot settlements beside the Irk and Swayle seemed accidental and unimportant. Only a prophet could have foreseen that, in these, and not in the pastoral and still feudal south, lay the England of the future. Here, Washington Irving wrote, everything was the growth of ages, of regular and peaceful existence, conveying an impression of "a calm and settled security, an hereditary transmission of homebred virtues and attachments that spoke deeply and touchingly for the moral character of the nation."

One saw this traditional life on Sundays in the villages: the well-dressed family groups converging through the fields and lanes as the church bells pealed—a continuous chain of sound at that hour across England—the spacious pews of the gentry lined with black leather, the old peasants in the aisle, the choir with their strings, clarinets and serpents in the gallery, the old men and girls in white gowns on either side of the chancel, the dignified high-church rector and parish clerk intoning "England's sublime liturgy," the happy neighbours meeting afterwards in the churchyard that Harry Smith and his fellow-warriors recalled with such nostalgia on a Sabbath morning in the little Pyrenean town of Villa Alba.
²
One saw it in the market towns

¹
Wynne, III, 343. The author of
A Guide to all the Watering and Sea Bathing Places
(1815 ed.), 349-51. thought Birmingham a wonderful town, "the houses well built, the streets... broad and well paved and the spirit of industry so universally predominant that scarcely a child is unemployed." See Bamford, II, 333, 335; Hammond,
Rise of Modern Industry,
221-32; Letts, 127, 129-130; Newton, 25-6; Simond, I, 278; II, 76, 79, 83; Smart, 249-51; Lady Shelley, II, 41.

2
Smith, I, 108. See Cooper, 16; Farington, VII, 125; Howitt, 570-3;
Lavengro,
2;
Old Oak.
57-8;
Romany Rye,
65.