The Age of Elegance (58 page)

years after the war such inveterate enemies of England had become for many Englishmen symbols of liberation. "I went to the place," wrote Leigh Hunt, "where the guillotine stood—the place where thousands of spirits underwent the last pang of mortality; many guilty, many innocent, but all the victims of a reaction against tyranny such as will never let tyranny be what it was." To such, Pitt was "the great corrupter," Parliament "the borough-monger crew," and the ruling classes a pack of placemen and pensioners battening on the taxes wrung from the people. During the post-war decade a legend grew which became an article of faith to millions: of a needless, horribly mismanaged war wantonly persisted in for twenty years against European liberty; of a crippling debt made by loans "to support despotism under the guise of legitimacy": of a Court of hereditary flunkeys, a haughty, purse-proud aristocracy, an indolent, hypocritical Church—"Christless, Godless, a book sealed"—and a Government which, under an unjust Constitution, subjected the friends of freedom to spies, gaols and bastilles.
¹

Yet this movement, transformed by the English antipathy to-violence, was later to become the mainspring of parliamentary liberalism. It derived from the middle-class reformers of the eighteenth century and the days when the young Pitt championed parliamentary reform. It had only spread to the populace because of the miseries inflicted by post-war deflation and industrial anarchy. Its leader was not Hunt or Thistle wood, but old Major Cartwright, with his long brown Hanoverian surtout and wig and philanthropic countenance—the Ancient Pistol of Byron's derisory phrase. "Our venerable political father's maxim," wrote Bamford, "was 'Hold fast by the laws.' " The Hampden clubs, and the "National Unions" which took their place, were the product of the denominational Sunday schools and night classes. Cobbett's wide circle of humble but law-abiding readers, ardently perusing sedition, derived from the same homely origins. Their goal was a reform of Parliament to ascertain the needs of, and represent, the People. It was the squalor and hunger of the illiterate slums which provoked the rioting and imperilled public order, not the simple-minded fraternal delegates with their biblically-worded and Utopian resolutions. The poor, as Bamford told the Privy Council, would have been perfectly content

¹
Bewick,
149-52, 154-5, 169-71;
Bamford, II,
126-7, 248, 299J
De Quincey, III,
62;
Halevy, II,
14, 55;
Hamilton ofDalzell
MS.,
185, 222-3;
Keats, IV,
356;
Leigh Hunt, II.
190;
Romany Rye,
106;
Rose, I,
144-5;
Smart,
708.

with the Constitution if they had been able to earn the necessities of life. Since it denied them this while preserving the fabulous wealth of the aristocracy, they assumed it must be corrupt.

By the middle of 1819 the plight of the textile operatives had again become desperate. The wages of the Glasgow handlo
om weavers, once twenty-five shilli
ngs a week, shrank that autumn to five shillings, or half what they had even been in 1816. In some places they were worse: at Maybole they fell to half a crown. The streets of the manufacturing towns and villages were silent and deserted, except where strikes brought thousands of sullen spectres clattering on to the cobblestones to stop the wheels and damp down the furnaces. To all thoughtful men, and many thoughtless ones, too, an explosion seemed imminent.
¹

It was a summer of intense heat. The
Annual Register
reported that -political agitators, taking advantage of the general misery, went about disseminating their doctrine through the great centres of manufacture. Hundreds of field-meetings were held to hear harangues on the iniquities of Government and the necessity of radical reform. At one, accompanied by all the outward symbols of Jacobin revolution—inflammatory banners, caps of liberty and tricolours—50,000 Birmingham artisans acclaimed a local radical landowner as their "legislatorial attorney." Leeds and Manchester attempted to follow suit.

All this could only end in one of two ways—revolution or repression. There was a naivety about the reformers' leaders that played into their opponents' hands. They used the words and outward show of rebellion without either the intention to implement them by force or the realisation that they must inevitably provoke force on the part of their rulers. Nor did they realise the roughness and indiscipline of many of their followers—not the sober, law-abiding majority, but the inevitable lawless minority, whose savage ferocity and predilection for plunder reminded even the liberal-minded Greville of the mobs of the Terror. "Our worthy old Major," wrote Bamford, "seemed to have forgotten in the simplicity of a guileless heart, good old man as he was, that the people themselves wanted reforming, that they were ignorant and corrupt." Scott

¹
Am. Reg.
1819.
Chron.,
31, 36-7, 54, 76-7;
Halevy, II,
56;
Hansard, XLI,
420,1393;
Smart,
690-2, 706, 720-1, 724-6.

related with glee how a young Edinburgh liberal was knocked down and robbed by rowdies at the very moment that he was declaiming against the impropriety of allowing constables to interfere with popular liberty. Even Byron could not refrain from poking fun when Cam Hobhouse—victor in the turbulent Westminster election of 1820—had his watch pinched at the hustings.
¹

Most folk with property to lose were resolved to defend it. The Duke of Wellington, who had seen many popular ferments, remarked that the reformers' object was "neither more nor less than the plunder of the rich towns and houses which fell in their way." A peer declared that public meetings ought to be dispersed by grape-shot, the liberal John Ward thought that the first day of reform would be the first day of English revolution, and strikes were denounced as illegal combinations of foolish and "refractory workpeople" misled by Jacobin agitators—coercive attempts to dictate the wages paid by employers
²
and, therefore, gross interference with private freedom. "I cannot," wrote Walter Scott, "read in history of any free State which has been brought to slavery until the rascal and uninstructed populace has had their short hour of anarchical government."

As throughout the industrial North companies of workmen assembled to drill with bludgeons and pikes, sometimes under the tuition of Peninsular veterans—Harry Smith, on strike duty in Glasgow, reported that the weavers were organised in sixteen battalions based on streets—the Government urged magistrates to stand firm and marched its scanty Army into the manufacturing districts. And, as in the invasion years, it fell back on the spontaneous

¹
"When to the mob you make a speech,

My boy Hobbie O,

How do you keep outside their reach

The watch within your fobby O?

But never mind such pretty things,

My boy Hobbie O;

God save the people, damn all kings,

So let us crown the Mobby O."

1
Toynbee,
140-1.
See Bamford, II,
12-14, 20, 27, 33, 134, 280-1;
Greville (Suppl.), I,
324;
Holland,
Journal,
I,
33;
Lockhart, V,
43;
Lady Shelley, II,
28-30;
Woodward,
60-1.

²
"That kind of overbearing influence which is now most unjustly and illegally employed to deprive the master-spinners of the control of their own concerns."—
Ann. Reg.
1818.
Chron.,
104.
"After so long an absence from all profitable employment the workmen arc convinced that they have neither the right nor the power to dictate, as a body, to their employers; and the latter, we believe, are sincerely disposed, now submission has been made
?
to pass over the attempt to take the management of their affairs out of their own hands, forgiving and forgetting the insults they received during the turn-out and the loss which so much capital, so long unemployed, had unavoidably occasioned."
Idem,
124.
See
idem,
90-1, 128-30;
Halevy, II,
56-7;
Dudley,
308;
Lockhart, IV,
128;
Newton,
87.

-enthusiasm of those who felt their security at stake. A year or two earlier Wordsworth, in a letter to his patron, Lord Lonsdale, had urged the creation of an equestrian order of armed yeomanry; "if the whole island was covered with a force of this kind, the Press properly curbed, the Poor Laws gradually reformed, provision made for new churches to keep pace with the population, order may yet be preserved and the people remain free and happy." Walter Scott, always to the fore when either volunteering or repression of Jacobinism was in question, busied himself in raising a company of sharpshooters from Ettrick and Teviotdale to march on the Tyne.

To those whose homes and factories were imperilled by a servile war such well-to-do volunteers, flooding into the shabby industrial towns with their bright yeomanry uniforms and handsome horses, were saviours, to be cheered and feasted for their patriotic self-sacrifice. To the workers they seemed heartless upstarts—young farmers or millowners' sons who, having risen in the world, treated their poorer neighbours like dirt and rode over them. Bewick wrote of "the pride and folly which took possession of their empty or fume-charged heads when they got dressed in scarlet."
¹
To themselves, as they sharpened their swords in the village smithy and bade farewell to wife and sweetheart, they seemed heroes, ready to die for God, King and country.

On August
16th
the clash came. On that day, the culmination of weeks of drilling on the moors, from fifty to eighty thousand reformers—a force as large as Napoleon's at Waterloo—converged from all directions on St. Peter's Field, Manchester, to listen to Orator Hunt and demand reform. They marched, unarmed, behind revolutionary banners, in columns of five and locked-step, to the sound of bugles and drums, followed by dense crowds of stragglers of both sexes. Their menacing looks and numbers terrified the sober and respectable. As they poured into the town they were received with wild enthusiasm by the poor, particularly the Irish weavers, who flocked after them to St. Peter's Field.

As soon as Hunt began to speak the alarmed magistrates, watching from a neighbouring house, instructed their police officers to arrest him and ordered a detachment of yeomanry to force a way to the hustings. Jostled by the crowd, the yeomanry lost their heads and

¹
Old Oak,
104-5;
see
Ann. Reg.
1818.
Chron.,
129-30.
Bamford, II,
146-54;
Bewick,
154-5;
Colchester, III,
101;
De Selincourt, II,
585;
Halevy, II,
63-4;
Lockhart, IV,
310-20, 323-4, 328-32, 335;
Smith, I,
325.

started slashing with their sabres. There was a panic, the hustings were overturned and the people began to run, a few stalwarts fighting back. In the panic nine men and two women were killed, and several hundreds wounded. "The field," wrote the leader of the Rochdale column, "was left an open and deserted space. The sun looked down through a sultry and motionless air. The curtains and blinds of the windows within view were all closed. . . . Over the whole field were strewed caps, bonnets, shawls and shoes, trampled, torn and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted—some were easing their horses' girths, others adjusting their accoutrements, and some were wiping their sabres. Several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these were still groaning
...
all was silent save those low sounds, and the occasional snorting and pawing of steeds."
¹

The country's immediate response was confused. It did not strictly follow class lines. Before the sabres flashed there appeared to be two Englands, both preparing to resort to force. The effect on the industrial workers was one of stunned shock, followed by intense indignation. The response of the other England was divided. The Tory party, the local magistracy which had precipitated the events, and the advocates of firm action everywhere, regarded the affray as the timely dispersal of a dangerous demonstration by a gallant handful. When Walter Scott heard the news he wrote that the yeomanry had behaved well, upsetting the most immense crowd that was ever seen and, despite the lies in the newspapers, without needless violence. There had been a blunder, it was true, in using yeomanry instead of regulars. But the meeting had itself been illegal, an organised conspiracy to intimidate for political purposes.
²

Yet the Government had spilt blood, and the English did not like blood to be spilt. Military massacre was no part of their recipe for government. Because of this it became apparent that, instead of there being two Englands pursuing an unappeasable quarrel to its logical conclusion, there were three. The third consisted of an indeterminate majority which reacted against any Party that outraged its sense of human decency. It comprised those in every class who, with the great Lord Halifax, regarded "all violence as a kind of foul play" and

¹
Bamford, II,
157-8.
See
idem,
149-57. 287;
Ann. Reg.
1819, 106-7;
Ashton, II,
203-5;
Colchester, II,
82;
Creevey, I,
332;
Halevy, II,
64;
Woodwnrd,
62.

²
Ann. Reg.
1820.
Chron.,
85;
Bamford, II,
161-2;
F. A. Burton,
Three Accounts of Pcterlooi
Colchester, III,
87-8;
Lockhart, IV,
301;
Lady Shelley, II,
71-2.

instinctively trimmed the sails of state against those who resorted to it. They even included many employers, who, though they hated strikes and rioting, inherited their forebears' liberal instincts. This feeling was expressed by a large and by no means purely radical section of the Press, by the Common Council of London, who protested at the Regent's official message of congratulation to the Manchester magistrates, and by meetings up and down the country, one of which was attended by the great Whig magnate, Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding. Other Whig aristocrats, like the Duke of Hamilton and Earl Grosvenor, interested themselves in befriending the victims and the arrested organisers of the Manchester meeting.
¹

The reformers' leaders, who were nothing if not histrionic, did all they could to exploit the anger of the people and the sympathy of the middle class. The printing presses poured out a stream of wildly exaggerated accounts of what became known as the Peterloo massacre. Hone's satire,
The Political House that Jack Built,
ran through twenty editions, and prints were hawked through the streets bearing inflammatory legends like, "Down with 'em! Chop 'em down! my brave boys! give them no quarter; they want to take our Beef and Pudding from us!" When Orator Hunt returned to London in September, after his release on bail, an enormous crowd, running it was said to over a hundred thousand, met him at Islington. The procession included crippled heroes from Peterloo, red flags, emblems of mourning, a large dog with a collar labelled "No dog tax," and an escort of horsemen. Among those who watched it with sympathy was the poet Keats.
²

But, like the Government before them, the radicals overplayed their hand. Lacking all sense of responsibility and constructive statesmanship, they toyed with fire. The men they led were passionately angry, and everyone who lived near the manufacturing districts felt the hot breath of that anger and knew what it portended. For weeks after Peterloo the youth of industrial Lancashire was surreptitiously engaged in making pikes, grinding scythes and converting hatchets, old swords and mop-nails into weapons; "anything," wrote Bamford, "which could be made to cut or stab was pronounced fit for

¹
Bamford, II,
214-15, 2x8;
Berry, III,
1
8
or
Colchester, II,
94-5,107:
Hatevy,
60-1, 64-5,71-2;
Hamilton o/DalzeU
MS.,
122-4, 186;
Keats,
TV,
12-14;
Lady Shelley, II,
87-8;
Shelley,
Essays and Letters,
289-90;
Woodward,
62-3.

¹
Ashton II,
205-9;
Halevy, II,
65
;< Keats, IV,
14;
Lady .Shelley,
90-2.