The Age of Elegance (39 page)
Simond, staying in Orchard Street, was kept awake all night by Irish labourers having a free-for-all in a slum alley at the back. Above the noise of their rattles he could hear one old watchman calling out to another, "If I go in, I shall have a shower of brickbats/' and the other replying, "Well, never mind, let them murder each other if they please!"
To foreigners British liberty seemed always on the verge of degenerating into licence. In Edinburgh, hooligans roamed the streets at night with bludgeons, knocking down revellers with shouts of "Mire him!"; English public schoolboys rose against their masters and had to be driven back to their class-rooms by the military. An attempt to raise the prices of the London theatres provoked the galleries to shout down every play for months and break up the houses.
1
For the common people, though allowed a licence known to no other country, were, like the poor and uneducated everywhere, quite uninhibited. When their passions were roused, they acted passionately. Two Jews caught stealing in a Bristol stables had their hands tied behind their backs, their beards stuck together with pitch and their noses filled with snuff till they knocked each other senseless. A party of picnickers who fouled some fishermen's lines off Hammersmith, were pitched, with a stream of blasphemy, into the Thames. Nor, for all the deference of the race to rank, did the populace respect persons. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he attended divine service at the Millbank Penitentiary, was bombarded with stale bread by the aggrieved lady inmates. Appalling crimes of violence passed unpunished for lack of police. Lonely turnpike-keepers were robbed and beaten to death; gangs of smugglers and poachers fought pitched battles with keepers and revenue officers. Pickpockets surrounded the doors of the coaching inns for "Johnny Raws from the country," and during fairs and public processions packs of thieves swept through the crowds emptying pockets, snatching purses and even stripping men and women of their clothes.
2
Dusk round London was called footpad-hour. Yet the
1
Simond, I,
89-91.
See also Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
20th
Feb.,
1822;
Ashton, I,
25;
Bamford, I,
28, 127, 129, 131, 185, 245-9;
H,
67;
Bewick,
21-2;
Scott, III,
61-2;
Gronow,
n,
225-6, 310;
Keats, III,
282;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
I,
190;
Mitford,
Life,
II,
187;
Simond, II,
227-60;
Stanhope,
274;
Woodward,
466.
8
Ann. Reg.,
1819.
Chron.,
55;
Diary of Walter Treveleyan,
G. T. Warner, Harrow in Verse and Prose,
99.
See
inter alia
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
30th
Oct.,
1820;
Bamford, II,
64;
Colchester, III,
237;
Cranbourn Chase,
35-7;
Fowler,
122-3;
Gronow, II,
309-10;
Lieven,
Private Letters,
78;
Sydney, I,
122, 210;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
I,
190.
nimbleness and courage of its pickpockets was almost a matter o
f
pride to Londoners. "A man who
saunters about the capital with
pockets on the outside of his coat," a guide-book warned its readers "deserves no pity."
A little rough and tumble seemed a small
price to the English for
avoiding the ills of arbitary powe
r. "They have an admirable police
at Paris," wrote Lord Dudley, "but th
ey pay for it dear enough. I had
rather half a dozen people's t
hroats were cut every few years
in the Ratcliffe Highway than be subject
to domiciliary visits, spies and
the rest of Fouche's contrivances."
The British attitude towards the
agents of executive power was instinctively hostile; Stendhal on a visit to London was amazed to see soldiers jeered at in the streets
.
The Life Guards, who carried printed orders to avoid giving offence to civilians and repeatedly sho
wed the most exemplary restraint
under showers of stones, were known in the capital as the "Piccadilly butchers." Even the Prime Minister who reaped the glories of Vittoria and Waterloo viewed
General Graham's proposal for a
club for military officers as a threat to the Constitution.
1
Foreigners could not understand
the British attitude to popular
violence; it seemed to them like the weakness that had precipitated the Terror. But the people who quietly obeyed their voluntary ring-keepers at a rough boxing match chafed at the least restraint
by
arms. It was never really safe for a magistrate to use troops to maintain order. In the British Constitution there was no
droit
administratif
a shot fired in defence of public order by a servant of the Crown could involve both him and
his superior in the penalties of
murder.
It was in this that the English recipe for reconciling order with liberty resided. Social discipline was secured, in theory, by the rule of Law. A man might do as he pleased, but, if it infringed the liberties of others, he had to answer for it in the Courts. After the traditional chairing of the lord of misrule in north country villages, the constables spent the next day patiently inquiring who had kicked through a neighbour's door, smashed his window, or stolen his can. "The strange medley of licentiousness and legal restraint," wrote a foreigner, "of freedom and confinement—of punishment for what is done and liberty to do the same thing again—is very curious." At first it struck him as irrational, but in the end he decided that it
1
Lynedoch,
748-51;
Gronow, II,
220;
Simond,
I,
79, 91;
II,
221, 280-1.
approximated more nearly to natural law than the simpler and more arbitrary processes of other lands. The artificial composition of gardens in England, he noted, like that of her government, abridged only the liberty of doing harm.
For the judgment of their Courts the English showed an un-deviating respect. The independence of the Judiciary was as much an article of their faith as the legislative monopoly of Parliament. No one, however powerful, could evade the Law; even the Heir Presumptive had his coach seized at a levee by sheriffs' officers in distraint of debt.
1
The Bang's Ministers were as subject to this power as anyone else. A man arrested by the Executive could immediately obtain from the Courts a writ of
habeas corpus
compelling his jailors either to show lawful authority for his detention or release him.
Yet this, by itself, would only have increased the difficulty of governing such a country, but for the capacity of the ruling class for inspiring and evoking voluntary obedience. As there was no adequate standing Army, police force or bureaucracy to secure property and privilege, the gentry had to preserve these themselves. Their recipe for dealing with a rabble was to stand up and face it; it was the only attitude a rabble respected. Having no professional deputies as in more regimented lands to stand between them and those they ruled, they learnt to command respect by force of character, courage and good sense. Instinctive, unreflecting and fearless leadership was a by-product of the country's libertarian laws. It was this, probably more than anything else, that enabled her to win the war.
Training for such leadership, like most things in England, was unplanned and unconscious. It began in boyhood, when future legislators and magistrates took part with the sturdy ragamuffins of the countryside in running, swimming, bird-nesting, riding the wild ponies of the commons, making midnight expeditions, climbing trees, rocks and steeples.
2
They learnt to endure knocks and hardships, to face risks, conceal fear, be quick, bold and adaptable. They acquired, before they inherited wealth and luxury, habits of hardihood such as early rising and cold bathing; John Mytton, with his £20,000 a year, dressed in winter in a thin jacket and linen trousers without drawers, and once stalked wild-fowl all night on the ice stark naked. "Can't I bear pain well," he cried as he lay, skinned and
1
Holland,
Journal. I,
125.
2
Bamford, I,
85;
Bewick,
16-17;
Cooper,
20;
Howitt,
Boy's Country Book,
9-10;
Lockhart, V,
80-1;
Lucas, I,
33.
scorched, after a debauch in which he had set his shirt alight to frighten away the hiccoughs.
1
From their earliest years Britain's rulers indulged with passionate intensity in the field sports of the countryside. It gave them, as Walter Scott wrote of his countrymen, a strong and muscular character, saving them from all sorts of causeless fears and flutterings of the heart. Men who rode straight to hounds, shot duck in wintry marshes with breach-loaders, fished for salmon in moorland streams, learnt as boys to snare and kill wild-fowl, snakes, hares, rabbits, badgers and all forms of game and vermin, and continued to do so, whenever they had a chance, so long as they could walk or stride a horse, were not likely to fail for lack of courage. Their versatility in sport was amazing. The great Mast
er of the Quorn, George Osbalde
ston—"little Ossey" or, as he was called later, the "Squire of England"—a shrivelled-up, bantam-cock of a man with short legs, a limp, a gorilla chest and a face like a fox cub, excelled at every sport he touched, boxing, pigeon-shooting, steeplechasing, billiards, was one of the six best amateur cricketers in the country, rowed for the Arrow club—the forerunner of Leander—beat the famous professional, Barrie, at tennis, and kept harriers, gamecocks and fighting mastiffs.
2
The hunting field played a big part in such education. Under the famous East Midlands Masters a new form of foxhunting was superseding the slower and less specialised sport of the past. Its pioneers, establishing a new convention and discipline, were almost as much leaders in their kind as Nelson and Wellington. Their hounds ran from scent to view; "neck or nothing," "a blazing hour," "the pace was too good to inquire," were their watchwords. Their followers —for no man who wished to be respected spared either person or fortune in this pursuit—went like a scarlet streak across the green, enclosed shires. "Throw your heart over and your horse will follow!"
3
the great Assheton Smith used to say. It was a rule gentlemen instinctively applied in time of danger, and to which the English people invariably responded.
1
Mytton,
16-17, 127-9.
2
Osbaldeston,
passim; Creevey Papers, U.
199-200;
Dixon,
158-63, 166.
3
Dixon,
32.
See
idem,
17,47.154-63.166-7;
Aiken,
passim;
Assheton Smith,
passim; Cranbourn Chase,
42-3;
Creevey Papers,
If,
I199-200;
Lockhart, V,
81;
Newton,
51;
Nevill,
38-40;
Osbaldeston,
passim.
All Britons admired what they called "bottom." "God don't love those," they were told, "who won't strike out for themselves!" Little John Keats, affronted by boy or master, put himself "in a posture of defence"; even the gentle Shelley fought a mill at Eton. Tickell the elder of that school, we are told, "loved fighting and knew not what fear was; he went among his school-fellows by the name of Hannibal and Old Tough." Byron used to thrash a pacifically-minded Harrow friend to make him thrash others "when necessary as a point of honour and stature"; he himself fought his way out of the ridicule attached to a club foot by winning six out of seven successive battles. No one but a "game chick" could thrive in this land.
Boxing was the national nursery of manliness. A gentleman was expected to be a "proper man with his fists" and know how "to clear a lane of men" with his "morleys." Thomas Assheton Smith, when Master of the Quorn, after a set-to in a Leicester street with a six-foot coal-heaver, clamped a raw steak on both eyes and sent his prostrated opponent a five-pound note for being the best man that ever stood up to him. Some foreigners landing at Dover were amazed to see a Lord of the Treasury, dispossessed of his Ministerial box by officious customs men, put himself in a sparring attitude to regain it. Young noblemen took boxing lessons in Gentleman Jackson's rooms in Bond Street or walked proudly arm in arm with the bash-nosed champions of the "Fancy"; an engraving of Tom Cribb was part of the normal furniture of an undergraduate's rooms.
A contest between two "milling coves" was the most popular spectacle in the country. Its finer points were debated, not only by draymen and coal-heavers, but by men of culture; Keats, describing the match between Randall and Turner, illustrated its ups and downs by rapping with his fingers on the window. All England followed the fortunes of its "men of science," those prize specimens of the race who met in the green ring by the river at Mousley Hurst or sparred before the "Fancy" in the Fives Court. The heroes of the ring— Tom Hickman the Gas-Light man, Sutton "the tremendous man of colour," the "Flaming Tinman," "Big Ben Brain," the "Game Chicken," Mendoza the Jew, Belcher "the yeoman," and Tom Cribb, for ten years unchallenged Champion of England, were as great men in their way as the Duke of Wellington. And the lesser giants of the ring were only a little lower; Parish the waterman, the Giblet Pye, the game George Ballard, the tremendous little Puss, Shaw the Life-Guardsman who fell at Waterloo, and the terrific Molineaux. What, asked Borrow, were the gladiators of Rome 01 the bull-fighters of Spain in its palmiest days compared to England's bruisers? With the ring formed, the seconds and bottle-holders in readiness, the combatants face to fac
e, the English were in a kind of
heaven. The gladiators, stripped to the waist, walking round each other with their fine, interlaced muscles and graceful strength, the naked fists, the short chopping blows d
elivered with the swiftness of li
ghtning, the dislodged ivories, the noses beaten flat, the eyes torn from the sockets, the blood pouring on the grass, the pause between rounds when the "pinky heroes," poised on their seconds' knees, were revived with brandy and water, the crashing blows delivered in the jugular with the full force of the arm shot horizontally from the shoulder, and the game, battered faces under punishment, impressed themselves on the memory of the islanders more than all their country's martial victories. "Prize fighting," wrote Pierce Egan, "teaches men to admire true courage, to applaud generosity, to acquire notions of honour, nobleness of disposition and greatness of mind; to bear hardships without murmurs, fortitude in re
verse of fortune, and invincibili
ty of soul."
1
Within the framework of law and property the English rule was that a man should look after himself and have freedom to do so. If he failed no one pitied him. It was his own fault; he had had his chance. The islanders had not yet thought out the full implications of this rule; they were to have opportunities for doing so later. But at the time it seemed fair enough; it had the warrant of nature and the law of things. "Fear God," said Isobel Berners to the Romany Rye, "and take your own part. There's Bible hi that, young man; see how Moses feared God and how he took his own part against everybody who meddled with him. So fear God, young man, and never give in!" From the time they could stand Englishmen were expected to fend for themselves. There was nothing they valued like spunk. In men, indeed, they respected nothing without it. "Is not this being
1
Boxiana, passim:
Assheton Smith,
passim;
Bamford, I,
28, 127, 131, 185;
Bewick,
20-2;
Broughton, I,
06;
Dixon,
22-7, 151-4;
English Spy,
I,
152, 338-9;
II,
199:
Farington, VII,
25;
Fowler,
192-5;
Gronow, I,
120;
II,
79-8o, 214-15, 257;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
II,
85;
Keats, III,
282;
IV,
304, 323-5;
Lauengro,
48, 156-7, 166-9, 207;
Leslie,
332;
Letts,
212;
Life in London,
37, 73,173, 175;
Mytton,
passim; New Monthly Magazine,
Feb.,
1822.
W. Hazlitt, "The Fight";
Old Oak,
161-8;
Osbaldeston,
passim;
J. H. Reynolds,
The Fancy,
1820;
Romany Rye,
98, 131-2, 141-2, 145, 194-5;
Simond, I,
125-7;
n,
194-8, 227.
