The Age of Elegance (59 page)

service." At Manchester a special constable was stoned to death. At Newcastle keelmen assaulted the magistrates with showers of brickbats and cries of "Blood for blood!"
¹
By inciting and advertising-such activities the radicals, most of whom were men of boundless vanity, frightened the very middle-class allies who, by co-operating with them against the Government's rigid conservatism, might have: made some measure of parliamentary reform possible.

The Governments remedy was to strengthen the laws. Before. Christmas it introduced six Bills prohibiting private drilling, the-bearing of arms and certain kinds of out-of-door meeting, and virtually muzzling the cheap Press. Even the street ballad singers were temporarily suppressed by anxious magistrates. The feeling for strong measures was reinforced by the return to England of Wellington with the withdrawal of the occupying armies from France and his accession to the Cabinet at the end of the year as Master General of the Ordnance. Like a soldier, he saw the situation in terms of force, and knew that in such matters resolute decision was everything—a knowledge of which the Government's vain and noisy adversaries were devoid.

The sense of imminent doom was heightened that January by a change on the throne. Two years earlier, after a brief spell of radiant happiness as a bride, the Regent's only child, Princess Charlotte, had died in childbed. Her death left the English without hope of a crown they could respect.
²
A year later passed, with the Queen's death, the last royal symbol that enshrined the moral feeling of t
he nation; the weight had gone,
wrote Scott, that slammed the Palace door on whores. At the beginning of 1820 the old King drew himself up in his bedclothes, said, "Tom's a cold!" and turned his face to the wall. His only son with surviving legitimate offspring, the Duke of Kent, preceded him to the grave by a few days. A week later his successor went down with pneumonia. At that moment the succession turned on five middle-aged brothers, every one of whom seemed to the

¹
Ann. Reg.
1819.
Chron.,
58, 70, 76-8;
Bamford, II,
161-5, 197-200;
Colchester, III,
83-4, 93. 95-6, 102-3;
Dyott, I,
338;
Farington, VIII,
2^3;
Lockhart, IV,
323-6, 335;
Lady Shelley, II,
89.

²
"One met in the streets people of every class in tears, the churches were full at all hours, the shops shut for a fortnight (an eloquent testimony from a shop-keeping community), and everyone from the highest to the lowest in a state of despair."—
Lieven Letters,
34-
Brougham wrote that it was difficult for persons not living at the time to believe how universal and genuine the national grief was. Brougham, JI,
312-3.
See Bamford, II,
138;
Burghersh,
22;
Bury, II,
144-5;
Colchester, III,
26-7;
D'Arblay, III,
418-22
Farington,. VIII,
146V9, 15J-2, 155-6;
George IV,
Letters,
II,
209-12;
Harriet Granville, I,
132;
Newton,
108-9,

nation either a bad life or a bad hat, and on the Duke of Kent's eight months' old child, Victoria. When King George IV was proclaimed and the officers of State and Judges dutifully waved their hats, the people, accustomed only to hiss and pelt him, stood silent and still.

As the bell of St. Paul's tolled through the fog for George Ill's funeral, the news reached London that the ultimate heir to the French throne had been assassinated. With Spain, Italy and Germany all stirring against the legitimist rulers imposed on them by the Vienna settlement, it seemed like the signal for the renewal of Jacobin revolution. At that very moment a fanatic gang led by Arthur Thistlewood, the ruined gamester who had tried to capture the Tower during the Spa Fields riots, was preparing the assassination of the British Cabinet. Their plan was to break in on them as they dined together in Grosvenor Square and, with a bomb and hand-grenades, to massacre the lot, including the Prime Minis
ter, Castle
reagh, Sidmouth and Wellington. One of the assassins, a butcher named Ings, was equipped with a sack for the Ministerial heads which were to be exhibited to the mob and borne on pikes to the Mansion House, where Thistlewood was to be proclaimed President of a Provisional Government. But for the unreliability of two of the broken men to whom he entrusted his plan, the entire Administration might have perished over the walnuts and wine. As it was, the conspirators were surprised by police officers and a platoon of the Coldstream Guards just as they were about to sally forth from the hay-loft off the Edgware Road where they had secreted their bombs and cutlasses. Though the leader of the police was killed and Thistlewood himself and most of his gang escaped in the melee, they were quickly rounded up. Five of them suffered the fate they had prepared for the Cabinet, the executioner displaying their dripping heads to a groaning crowd.
¹
They died maintaining that high treason had been committed against the people of England and that, as patriots, they were justified in trying to exterminate the borough-mongering gang who were starving millions. Insurrection, Thistlewood declared, had become a public duty.

That spring the country prepared to crown its new King. The

¹
Thackeray heard as a child that, as one of the heads slipped and rolled across the scaffold, a cry went up of "Yah! butterfingers!"—Oman,
Colonel Despard,
22-48;
Broughton, II,
126-7.
See
idem,
120;
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
23rd
Feb.,
7th, 8th
March,
1829.
Hobhouse,
15-16, 21-3;
Lieven,
Private Letters,
16;
Neumann,
17-19;
Lady Shelley, II,
98-9;
Two Duchesses,
343-4;
Woodward,
63-4.

price of ermine soared, and Runde
ll, Bridge and Rundell, the Lud
gate jewellers, submitted estimates for emb
elli
shing the Crown jewels at a cost running into six figures. At the same time it became known that agents of the Crown had been making inquiries about the Queen's life in Italy. Rumours circulated of a green bag full of salacious details and of a large sum offered her to renounce the Crown. What was still more disturbing to those who knew, was that the King was again in love, this time with the buxom daughter of a rich London shopkeeper married to an Irish peer. His previous mistress, Lady Hertford, had been a constant irritant to the mob; a few months before, when his yellow chariot had broken down after a visit to her house in Manchester Square, they had besieged it for an hour, while he cowered behind its purple blinds, calling him and her all the naughty names in their robust vocabulary. Now, showering presents on Lady Conyngham and her daughter—for the lady, a lover of the proprieties, insisted that her family should be honoured with her—the brandy-logged, dropsical monarch was not only insisting that his wife's name should be excluded from the Litany, but was urging his embarrassed Ministers to introduce a Bill of divorce.

"If he does," wrote Harriet Granville, "it will be the most tremendous piece of work that ever was made in a country!"

But Queen Caroline was no Josephine. Like her brother who had fallen at Waterloo, she was a fighting Brunswick, with a strong, taste for melodrama. Five years before, when, on leaving England, she had first felt free to express her personality, she had toured Italy in a blue-lined gilt and mother-of-pearl phaeton, shaped like a sea-shell and driven by a child dressed as an operatic angel in spangles and flesh-coloured tights. Now, leaving behind the Italian courier whom she had promoted to be her chamberlain, she was on her way home, beside herself at her husband's decision to exclude her name from the Prayer Book, and appropriately clad in a low-cut bodice, short petticoats and Hessian boots. She meant, she said, to secure her rights or blow the King off his throne.
¹

The efforts of the royal emissaries and of her own legal advisers to head her off were all in vain. On June 4th, 1820, she landed at Dover. All the way to London the church bells rang and cheering crowds lined the way. The people of the capital received her with intense

¹
Bury, I- See
idem,
80, 283, 342;
Creevey,
Life and Times,
102-4;
Farington, VIII,
88;
George IV,
Letters,
350-2;
Granville, II,
83, 535;
Newton,
4-5.

enthusiasm. Their only regret was that she had not brought her lover Bergami: King Bergami they called him. They unhorsed her carriage and dragged it past Carlton House with indescribable din and tumult, smashed the windows of Cabinet Ministers' houses and let off thousands of squibs; several nervous persons were so frightened that they died.
Everyone was forced to ill
uminate in her honour and doff their hats in the streets. The Duke of Wellington, stopped in Grosvenor Place by roadmenders with pickaxes, replied to their request, "Well, gentlemen, since you will have it so, God save the Queen—and may all your wives be like her!"
¹

The Government had hitherto refused to proceed to extremities against Caroline, for, unlike their impatient, lovesick master, they realised what would happen if they did. They had only agreed to exclude her name from the Litany provided the divorce was dropped. But her return forced their hand and played into the King's. They did their best to negotiate an honourable compromise that would enable her to withdraw with profit and honour. But heartened by the mob, who stoned every Government emissary who visited her, she refused to yield a point and insisted on the inclusion of her name in the Prayer Book. As the only alternatives were an abdication or their own resignation—a step which they believed would be followed by immediate revolution—Ministers proceeded, though with the utmost misgiving, to introduce a Bill of Pains and Penalties to deprive her of her title and dissolve her marriage. The coronation was put off, and the green bag containing the explosive evidence from Italy sent to the House of Lords.
²

The Government's misgivings were justified. For three months, while the Upper House debated the measure and one scandalous indecorum
³
after another was retailed by gesticulating Italian witnesses, the people of England,
including the
Ministers' own wives and daughters, talked almost incessant bawdy. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the-general infection of the time, took to making
risque
remarks in mixed company. The educated and propertied,

¹
Guedalla,
322.
See
Ann. Reg.
1820.
Chron.,
202-5, 206-8, 216-17;
Berry, III,
238-9;
Colchester, IU,
87, 116-17, 131, 135, 137, 163;
Croker, I,
160, 174;
D'Arblay, III,
440;
Farington,
Vm,
247, 251-2;
George IV,
Letters,
II,
339-43;
Greville (Suppl.), I,
127;
Halevy, II,
90-2;
Hobhouse.
23-4.

²
Mrs.
Airbuthnot,
Journal,
15th
Feb.,
22nd, 24th
June,
1820;
Colchester, HI,
115-17, 146-7;
Coupland,
Wilberforce,-4&-9\
George IV,
Letters,
II,
345;
Greville (Suppl.), I,
124-5,-128-30;
Hatevy, II,
86-7, 92-4, 100-1;
Hobhouse,
9, 29;
Neumann,
28.

³
Lord Sidmouth was forced to forbid his daughters to read the newspapers. Colchester, III,
161-2.
See* Mem,
163-4;
Ann. Reg. 1S16.
Chron.,
961-1152;
Harriet Granville, I,
184;
Mitford,
I,
102.

who heard the evidence at first or second-hand, were left in small doubt as to the lady's guilt. The populace chose to believe she was innocent, for her oppressors were their own. Almost every day a procession, as large as that which had provoked the Peterloo massacre, marched through the London streets, flaunting banners, carrying^ derisory green bags on poles and hooting, stoning and molesting every well-dressed person who would not join in the hallooing for their disreputable heroine. On one day the initiative would be taken by thousands of seamen, every man with a white silk cockade in his
hat
—
the emblem of royal innocence. On another it would be the braziers, dressed in armour and carrying the glittering products of their trade, who waited on her with a loyal address.
¹
The Queen, inspired, it was rumoured, by heavy nightly potations, entered wholeheartedly into the fun and uproar, publishing letters, said to be written by Cobbett, of defiance to her husband, continually bowing to her raggle-taggle adherents, and popping up and down in the Lords until she reminded her sympathiser, Creevey, of a Dutch toy with a lead bottom. Every day, dressed in a black wig with voluminous curls, an episcopal gown with a ruff, and a hat crowned by ostrich plumes, she drove to Westminster Hall in a coach and six, attended by scarlet and gold footmen and a pantomime rabble of pickpockets and prostitutes. Walter Scott wrote that he expected any day to see her fat bottom in a pair of buckskins at the head of an army.
²

Revolution now seemed certain. Night and day the streets resounded with shouts of "No Queen, No King!"; the Duke of Bedford told his son that the monarchy was at an end. The peers had to run the gauntlet of an insulting crowd every time they entered or left the precincts of Parliament. The King's Ministers, especially Castlereagh, were greeted with groans and hisses, and the Waterloo heroes, Wellington and Anglesey, had positively to fight their way in and out. There was one awful moment when a battalion of the Guards, stationed in the Royal Mews at Charing Cross, mutinied; the extinguisher, said Luttrell the wit, was taking fire. Prompt action

¹
Byron, ribald as ever, celebrated the event in an epitaph: "The braziers, it seems, are preparing to pass An address and present it themselves all in brass: A superfluous pageant—for, by the Lord Harry!— They'll find where they're going more brass than they carry."

²
Lockhart, IV,
383.
See Byron,
Poems;
Creevey, I,
306-11, 320-1, 332, 334;
D'Arblay, III,
442-3;
Harriet Granville,
160-1, 188;
Halevy, II,
97;
Hobhouse,
33-5;
Lieven,
Private Letters,
56, 61-62;
Neumann,
32;
Toynbee,
48-50.

by the Duke of York—the Commander-in-Chief and the one popular member of the Royal Family—alone saved the situation, and the offending battalion was marched off to Portsmouth where it could be kept under the guns of the Fleet. But in London the troops off duty continued to drink the Queen's health and to display their contempt for the King. They spoke of him, as did even his Ministers, as a coward who dared not show himself in the streets. A few days after the beginning of the trial he left for Cowes, where his yacht passed the ship which was carrying the dying Keats out of England. Thence he withdrew with his stout inamorata to Windsor, had new locks fitted on the park gates and spoke of retiring to Hanover.
¹

Once again the Government made up for the deficiencies that had led to its dilemma by the courage with which it faced it. The streets round the House of Lords were barricaded under the Duke of Wellington's supervision, constables were enrolled and troops drafted into Westminster. The Duke treated the mob with contempt. More than once he wheeled his horse on the corner boys who followed him, putting them to flight with a flick of his switch. Outside London, except for a skirmish in July between strikers and yeomanry in western Scotland, the revolutionary fervour of the previous year seemed to have died away. Trade was reviving, the factories filling and the price of labour rising. A radical attempt at Manchester to organise a Peterloo anniversary was a fiasco, for the potential marchers were back in the mills.

Even in London what had begun as a demonstration against the monarchy and ruling class was changing imperceptibly into a faction fight between the supporters of rival royalties and parliamentary Parties. The Queen's counsel being Whig, and the Opposition peers, including Lord Grey, making speeches on her behalf—not because they thought her innocent but because they thought the King guilty —the Whigs found themselves, not for the first time in history, the heroes of the populace. The good-natured Duke of Devonshire enjoyed an ovation twice a day as lie rode in and out from Chiswick. "Nothing can be more peaceable than the mob," wrote Harriet Granville after seeing her Whig
husband cheered through the bar
ricades; "darlings they are!"

¹
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
18th, 28th
June,
5th, 16th
August,
14th
November,
1820.
See Berry, III,
242;
Brougham, II,
403-5;
Broughton, II,
129;
Colchester, III,
142, 164;
Creevey Papers,
I,
306-11;
Croker, I,
175-6;
Coupland,
Wilberforce,
438;
Farington, VIII,
252;
Greville (Suppl.), I,
127, 130;
Halevy, II,
100;
Harriet Granville, I,
155-6, 158, 165-6, 168, 172, 191;
Hobhouse,
24-8, 33-5;
Holland,
Journal,
I,
36-8, 42;
Lieven,
Private Letters,
43;
Neumann,
25.