The Age of Elegance (57 page)

demand bread or debating the Constitution in his penny Hampden Club, lurked a more menacing figure. The slums of London and the industrial towns swarmed with criminal types who, led by demagogues, were as capable of a massacre as their Paris prototypes. During that winter even the prisoners in Newgate rioted and attacked their jailors. The roughness of that outcast populace was a constant menace to a rich society. Such folk could not be ruled by milksops. Their blood was up; when Cashman, the man who committed the Spa Fields murder, was hanged, he shouted from the cart, "Hurrah! my boys, I'll die like a man; give me three cheers when I trip!" and then to the hangman as the mob yelled encouragement,

"Come, Jack, you , let go the jib-boom!"
¹

The rulers of England faced their peril with courage. Though unimaginative and narrow, they had strong nerves. They had not fought Napoleon and the Revolution to shrink from Orator Hunt and a pack of weavers. Even "goody" Sidmouth—"Britain's guardian gander" of invasion days—declared that no man was fit to be Minister to whom it was not a matter of indifference whether he died in bed or on the scaffold. Resolved to maintain public order, he and his colleagues made no concessions to popularity. Confronting committees of both Houses with widespread evidence of an intended insurrection, they suspended
habeas corpus,
stopped the unemployed "blanketeers" who tried to march on London, and sent Bow Street runners to Lancashire to arrest the ringleaders. They enrolled special constables, strengthened the law against attempts to seduce soldiers from their duty, and took measures to put down Cobbett, whose "twopenny trash" threatened to turn every working man who could read into an agitator. Fearful of arrest for debt, the great journalist fled to America.

These measures—even the Cambridge Union Society had to suspend its meetings—were in quieter times condemned as alarmist. Owing to the inadequacy of administrative machinery, they were vitiated by the use of
agents provocateurs
and corrupt informers. But they succeeded in their object. Within a few months the epidemic of arson, strikes and riots had ceased. Shelley wrote to Byron that Ministers had gained a victory undisturbed by a single murmur, "save those of famine which they have troops of hireling soldiers to

¹
Ashton. II,
98-9,130.
See Bury,
1,148;
De Selincourt, II,
783-4. 813-15;
Farington, VIII,
199;
Gronow, I,
220-1;
Dudley,
308;
Lockhart, IV,
125, 128;
Neumann,
36;
Robinson, I,
389;
Lady Shelley, I,
8;
Woodward,
191.

repress." By the autumn most of the Government's measures were tacitly dropped as needless, though the suspension of
habeas corpus
continued till the beginning of the following year. Even in Ireland there was quiet.

Yet though England's rulers, in their fear of Jacobinism, closed down on the political aspirations of the workers, they showed little vindictiveness. Despite their lack of imagination and understanding they still behaved, even when scared, as members of a Christian society. Though Ministers, magistrates and manufacturers were all convinced of the hopelessness of interfering with economic law, the Staffordshire gentleman who put himself and his family on short rations to feed the unemployed was characteristic of thousands.
¹
It was still unnatural for Englishmen of different classes to hate one another. When the St. Albans Justices stopped the Bilston colliers' march to Carlton House, pointing out that their action might result in a breach of the peace, the hungry, angry men listened with attention, admitted they had been ill-advised, and expressed their readiness to return home, and were helped to do so by a subscription. Bamford and his fellow radicals, though wrongly charged, were treated with courtesy and consideration by the Privy Council who examined them. The number brought to trial for treasonable conspiracy and libel was comparatively small, and most were acquitted, including Watson, the leader of the Spa Field Riots, and the bloodthirsty Arthur Thistlewood, who had carried the tricolour in the attack on the Tower. Orator Hunt was not prosecuted at all.

And, after an intense but temporary spell of suffering, trade revived, as the economist Ricardo had always predicted. The prices of manufactures having fallen to rock-bottom, foreign customers began to buy again, and, employment improving as a result, internal purchasing-power became more plentiful. By the autumn the monthly average of bankruptcies was only a quarter what it had been at the beginning of the year. Agriculture revived, too, while the lovely summer of 1817 and moderate imports of foreign grain under the sliding scale kept the cost of bread within tolerable Hmits for the urban worker. Consols, which had been down to
63,
recovered to 80. England was becoming herself again.
¹

¹
Ann. Reg.
1817;
Chron.,
2, 239;
Halevy, II,
28-9, 54-5;
Harriet Granville, I,
129;
Holland,
Journal,
I,
105;
Lockhart, IV,
25-6, 98;
Newton,
10, 78, 81, 85;
Smart,
564-6;
Young,
470-1.

2
Ann. Reg.
1817;
Chron.,
5, 16, 19-21;
Alington,
73;
Ashton, II,
141-2;
Bamford, I,
10;
II,
24-5, 31,
et seq.\
Colchester, II,
604-7;
Cole,
Cobbett,
217;
Fortescue,
British Statesmen of the Great War,
168;
Halevy, II,
18-26;
Lieven Letters,
1812-14, 30-1, 42;
Mitford,
Life,
II,
1-3;
Newton,
57;
Peel, I,
237-8;
Smart,
548-9;
Woodward,
61-2.

She was still immensely strong and rich. A gentleman wrote that if he were to shut his eyes and open his ears he would believe the country ruined, but if he were to open his eyes and shut his ears, he would think it the most prosperous in the world. Even in the terrible summer of 1816, when her trade was at a standstill and her harvest ruined, Lord Exmouth with the Mediterranean Fleet stood in under the guns of the pirate stronghold of Algiers and, in pursuance of an international policy agreed at Vienna, destroyed, in an eight-hour bombardment, forts defended by 40,000 men, ending the cruel trade in Christian slaves which had terrorised the Mediterranean for centuries. On the second anniversary of Waterloo the Regent went down the river in his crimson and scarlet barge to open the new Strand bridge—London's fourth—while the throng of buntinged boats stretched from shore to shore and flags on enormous poles flew over the heads of watching multitudes. Another bridge of cast-iron was building a few hundred ya
rds downstream, to be paid for li
ke the other by tolls levied by the capitalists who erected it. During 1818 every building site on either side of Regent Street was taken, and the great avenue, halted at Piccadilly a year before, resumed its majestic sweep towards the Marylebone fields where Nash was laying out Doric-pillared crescents. In all the environs of London neat, blue-slated terraces were rising on either side of the trunk roads, and pseudo-Grecian edifices of white stucco were replacing the red and grey bricks of the sober Hanoverian past. So were stately club houses with wonderful cellars and kitchens, vast docks with attendant slums, and grim prisons built on principles which made escape impossible. Soon, it was rumoured, Oxford Street was to be extended as far as Bayswater brook, making it the longest street in Europe. Gas was twinkling—still a little uncertainly—in shop windows, and steamers, blowing black smoke from high, thin funnels, were appearing in rivers and estuaries; Keats on a walking tour through the Highlands was astonished to see one on Loch Lomond. Others, with the help of sails, braved the waters of the Channel, or, despite an occasional tendency to explode,
[3]
carried parasoled ladies and top-hatted gentlemen on summer outings to Richmond and Hampton Court. And all the while the wheels of the north country factories turned ever faster and the smoking chimneys multiplied, and the ships of Britain carried goods to the farthest corners of the earth. Castlereagh, speaking in the Commons, described 1818 as "the most splendid year ever known in the history of British commerce." That autumn a vessel sailing from the Hoogley anchored in the river at Ochotsk and discharged her cargo, to the amazement of the inhabitants, into a Siberian warehouse.
¹

Yet underlying all this prosperity—the glittering streets and great houses where the "fifteen hundred fillers of hot rooms called the fashionable world" supped nightly on ortolans and champagne, the ever-lengthening chain of mail coaches speeding across the land, the stupendous bridges planned to span the Menai Strait, Tyne estuary and Avon gorge—the foundations remained troubled. In vain did the favoured architects of Society press forward with the new churches which Parliament had voted and towards which the pious were so liberally subscribing, so that, as Arthur Young put it, the poor might learn "the doctrines of that truly excellent religion which exhorts to content and to submission to the higher powers." Discharged sailors and soldiers still begged, half-naked, in the gutters. Stendhal, visiting the capital, was shocked by the fear of starvation that haunted her outcasts; "such," he wrote, "was the fruits of England's victory." In the bitter winter of 1819-20 a poor woman who lived alone in Stewart's-rents, Drury Lane, in a room without bed or furniture, was asked by another still poorer creature—"a heap of bones covered with rags and filth"—to let her boil a potato at her tiny fire where, being granted permission to he down on the bare floor, she died from want of clothes and nourishment.
²
Many others, of whom there was no memorial, perished like her.

The boom of 1818 which followed the post-war slump was shortlived. In the summer of 1819 the same phenomena recurred— glutted foreign markets, slashed wages, shrinking purchasing-power and men and women unable to buy the goods whose sale would have given them the wherewithal to live. With their reappearance vanished the belief that the disaster and misery out of which Britain

¹
Ann. Reg.
1818.
Chron.,
S77-83-
See Smart,
671.

²
Ann. Reg.
1820.
Chron.,
7.
See
idem,
3, 5. 11.
See also Ashton, II,
162-3;
Colchester II,
561;
III,
8;
Coupland,
Wilberforce;
Woodward,
487
.

had so painfully climbed was something exceptional, attributable solely to the transition from war to peace. The storm had returned, and without explanation. Yet the Government's attitude to it remained one of invincible helplessness. "Mr. Bamford," said Lord Sidmouth, when that honest weaver was discharged by the Privy Council, "I would have you to impress seriously on your mind that the present system of distress of the country arises from unavoidable circumstances." Convinced of this, Ministers and the ruling classes were bewildered by the growing bitterness of the poor; the kindly magistrate who visited Bamford in prison remarked that it was a pity that men should be so deluded. Yet, as the latter pointed out to Sidmouth, had the gentry investigated the conditions of their humbler countrymen, they would have seen that they were intolerable. It was England's tragedy that in the social revolution that followed the war those who had led their-country so well in battle should have felt so little call to give them leadership in peace and have confined themselves to the negative task of repressing the disorder caused by the ensuing economic anarchy. Their only remedy—one instituted more as a safeguard
for their property than as a cure for poverty— was to hasten the return to gold.

Proud and independent Englishmen who, through no fault of their own, had seen their livelihood destroyed, their savings expended, their homes sold up, did not take kindly to the cold, patronising charity which was bestowed on them by the distant rich: to soup-kitchens, mendicity societies, workhouses and the rates, in aid of wages which condemned their children: to exile and slavery and themselves to a detested surveillance. Even the good works of" the untiring Evangelicals only embittered them the more. It was at this time that the man. who had abolished the African slave trade became known to his poorer countrymen as Mr. Cantwell. Major Cartwright, the kindly, middle-class counsellor of the radical artisans, recorded a conversation with Wilberforce in which the latter expressed the hope that they would meet in a better world; "I. answered," commented Cartwright, "that I hoped we should first mend the world we were in."
¹
Cobbett, writing from America,, delighted his working-class readers with accounts of a land where there were not only no "long-sworded and whiskered captains, no Judges escorted from town to town by dragoons, no packed juries of

1
-Cartwright,-1,
300.

obsequious tenants, no hangings and rippings up," but also "no Wilberforces: think of that—no Wilberforces!"

For England's achievements and their own prosperity had a little upset the balance of her sheltered classes; in the face of their fellows' suffering their complacency had become outrageous. "What mercies do we enjoy in the midst of a roaring ocean on all sides," Wilber-force had written during the war; "never surely was there so highly favoured a country as this, above all, our spiritual privileges." Many earnest and worthy Evangelicals—though not Wilberforce himself —continued to think like this even when their starving countrymen were being mangled by steel traps or sentenced to life-long transportation for being found at night with poaching weapons. The treadmill struck Miss Berry as an excellent punishment; she watched the prisoners at Cambridge, twenty ascending the wheel at once, with a satisfaction bordering on enthusiasm. It was this heartless unconcern that provoked the young poet
Shelley, after vainly seeking
shelter one January night for a poor woman found in a fit on Hampstead Heath, to address a deprecatory householder: "It is such men as you who madden the spirits and patience of the poor; and, if ever a convulsion comes in this country, you will have your house, that you refuse to put the miserable woman into, burnt over your head!"*

To all this there was only one answer—growing and bitter resentment. When a Huddersfield manufacturer was shot at his door, a cheer went up from every roof top in the neighbourhood. The class consciousness of the rich, Bamford wrote, had filled the poor with contempt for everyone with a decent coat. Even the unjealous Keats, Haydon related, developed a "fierce hatred of rank." The Leeds clothiers at a mass meeting on Hunslet Moor voted that the Savings Bank scheme, then being instituted by philanthropists to help the working classes, was an insult when nearly three-fourths of them were out of employ. Through the propertyless workers ran a growing consciousness of exclusion from the national heritage; the ex-convict in
The Romany Rye
said he could only hope to till the soil in Britain as a serf. More than anything else this explained the almost religious fervour of the new working-class radicalism. Bamford, visiting the Waterloo Museum, doffed his hat before that of Napoleon and reverently touched the sword of Ney. Only five

¹
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
II,
39-41
See Berry, III,
341;
Smart,
725;
Southey,
Espriella,
II,
I4S-&