The Age of Elegance (60 page)

As anger went out of the proceedings, levity and boredom took their place, the long sultry days of August and September leaving both populace and judges a little limp. One blackguard, found asleep under a lamp-post, declared that he was tired, "tired as a peer!" Even the Queen dozed during the long formal sessions, giving rise to Lord Holland's jest that, while formerly she slept with couriers, now she slept with the Lords. Outside in the hot dusty streets the costers sold Bergami apples and Caroline pears. Only the Italian witnesses continued to arouse excitement, making the peers laugh by the way in which they acted the evidence and provoking the mob, whenever they showed their swarthy faces, to paroxysms of anger; John Bull, someone wrote, looked on them as so many bugs and frogs. The poor men went in terror of their lives; when, after Denman's speech for the defence, the usher in charge, who was a dandy, entered their room running his fingers, according to dandy usage, along the top of his cravat, they assumed that their throats were to be cut and, plumping down on their knees, set up a yell of "Misericordia!"
¹

The trial ended in a characteristic British anticlimax. On November 6th the bill affirming the Queen's guilt was given a second reading by a majority of twenty-eight. But the third reading on the 10th passed the Lords by only nine votes. The Prime Minister thereupon announced that it would be impossible with so small a majority to take the bill to the Commons. Later in the day Parliament was prorogued. The
mot
of the town was that the Queen and the Bill of Pains and Penalties were both
abandoned.
It amounted, as a Whig M.P. pointed out, to a decision that the lady was immoral and her husband a fit associate for her. The latter was so indignant that he lost all interest in the affair, asked for the Queen's allowance to be settled without further ado and even expressed his indifference to the insertion of her name in the Litany. In the angry recriminations between him and his Ministers, the latter almost resigned and the King almost sent for the Whigs. But in the end, much as they disliked one another, they stayed together. For neither could see any alternative.
²

And though the mob in a three days' illumination celebrated what they chose to regard as the Queen's acquittal but was in reality their

¹
Harriet Granville, I,
158-9.
See
idem,
155-6, 160-1, 164-6, 172, 179;
Broughton, II,
134-5;
Colchester, III,
164;
Halevy, II,
99, 102.

²
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
18th
Oct.,
1820, 24th, 28th
Feb.,
1821;
Creevey, I,
319;
Croker, 1,
174-5,179;
George IV,
Letters,
II,
378, 386;
Harriet Granville, 1,
196;
Halevy, II,
98;
Hobhouse,
36-41.

own triumph, and though even in the quiet Berkshire woodlands Mary Mitford and her family were forced by riotous villagers to light candles in the windows, the poor woman's cause was finished. She had ceased to be a pretext or even a joke, and had become a nuisance. "Most gracious Queen," wrote a pamphleteer:

"we thee implore

To go away and sin no more;

But if that effort be too great,

To go away at any rate!"

The Queen fever was over. When Parliament met in January, 1821, a large majority voted against the inclusion of her name in the Prayer Book. Her prestige slumped still more heavily when, having proclaimed that she would never touch a penny while the insult continued, she accepted an annuity of ^50,000 per annum.

As the Queen sank, the King rose. That February, feeling perhaps that he had drained the last dregs of humiUation, he went, for the first time for years, to the theatre. He was very pale when he entered, but the whole house, including the pit, stood up and cheered him, singing the National Anthem a
gain and again. There were only a
few shouts of
^‘
Queen!" and "George, where's your wife!", and these were quickly drowned. He was so delighted that he repeated his success next night by going to Covent Garden where the same tiling happened and where he laughed so uproariously at the jokes of Grimaldi, the clown, that he burst his stays.
¹

In its unaccountable way, the country had gone about. It had had a debauch and was now sober. Even Byron wrote from Italy repudiating the reformers and telling his friend, Hobhouse, not to be so violent.
²
The more dangerous radicals were safe under lock and key; the harmless ones like Bamford were released and allowed to return to their employment. Trade was doing well, food prices were low, the North was back at its looms and spindles. Everything was returning to normal; everything was apparently as it had been. A prime sporting dinner was held at the Castle Tavern, Holborn, where, after harmony, the stakes were laid for a match between

2
"It is not. against the pure principles of reform that I
protest," he wrote, "but against low, designing, dirty levellers who would pioneer their way to
a
democratic tyranny."—Byron,
Corr.,
II,
147.
See
idem,
115-16, 134, 137-8, 142-3, 147-8.

Tom Cribb, the Champion of England, and a challenger; a new-ballet dancer appeared at the opera—her price, the old lechers told one another, was £5000—Constable exhibited four more pictures at the spring exhibition at Somerset House, including "Hampstead Heath" and "The Hay Wain." Far away in a Roman lodging young Severn, the painter, bent over the bed of the dying Keats and heard the phlegm boiling in his throat.

That summer—the summer of Napoleon's death and Shelley's
Adonais
—they crowned the King. It cost a quarter of a million and was attended by every romantic excess of pageantry of which he and his age were capable. The Duke of Wellington, the Champion and the Earl Marshal backed wonderful horses down the feasting defile of Westminster Hall, girls in white dresses strewed flowers amid forests of plumes and gleaming trumpets, "the nobles and sages of the land decked out in velvet and satin, gold and jewellery, passed in procession through -countless thousands, the sun shining without a cloud, and all uniting to do homage to the Constitution."
¹
It was a lovely day and the populace was in the best of humours, cheering everyone, even Castlereagh, who, in his Garter robes and diamonds, was voted the handsomest man there. The King, looking a little pale after an operation, appeared
like some gorgeous bird of the
East. Much of the time he. spent sighing and kissing his brooch to Lady Conyngham; "anyone who could have seen his disgusting figure," wrote a spectator, "with a wig the curls of which hung down his back, and quite bending beneath the weight of his sixty years, would have been quite sick." The poor Queen, attended only 'by a shadow of her former rabble, tried to get into the Abbey by a side door, but was driven away with shouts of "Shame!" and "Off, Off!"

A fortnight later she died, her supporters said of a broken heart, the doctors of an overdose of magnesia. The King, who was on his way.to Ireland, with the tact of a perfect gentleman, added a mourning band to his costume. Though the event produced one last glorious riot as the Home Office tried to stop the coffin from passing through the City, it was not allowed to interfere with the celebrations in Dublin. Here the King enjoyed the apotheosis of his career—

¹
Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
19th
July,
1B21.
See
Ann.
^r
Aeg..i82i.
Chron.,
324-90;
Colchester,
m,
233;
Creevey,
Life and Times,
141;
Farington,
VIII,
291-2;
Hamilton 6fDalzell
MS.,
163-4;
Haydon,
II,
24-5.

coloured rags and streamers hanging from every window, whisky punch flowing in the filthy gutters, thousands of drunken Paddys shouting themselves delirious with joy. "They clawed and pawed him all over," wrote an onlooker, "and called him
Ethereal
Majesty. . . . They absolutely kissed his hands and feet. Alas! poor degraded country!" The only drawback—for the Vice-Queen, as Lady Conyngham was called, accompanied him—was what a correspondent of Creevey's described as an attack of the wherry-go-nimbles in the royal stomach and the failure of the stewards at the Curragh races to prepare a convenience with a large enough seat. Byron from Italy commemorated the occasion in verse:

"Lo! he comes! the Messiah of royalty comes!

Like a goodly Leviathan roll'd from the waves;

Then receive him as best such an advent becomes

With a legion of cooks and an army of slaves!

"Spread—spread for Vitcllius, the royal repast,

Till the gluttonous despot be stuff'd to the gorge!

And the roar of his drunkards proclaim him at last

The fourth of the fools
and oppressors called 'George!’
"

Events could not be expected to remain on so lofty a plane for long. If the first year of the reign had been a nightmare and the second culminated in a fairy-tale triumph, the third posed a question mark. The seventh anniversary of Waterloo saw English industry precariously ascending the crest of another wave of short-lived, hectic demand and English agriculture descending deeper into a trough of inexplicable depression. The accursed system, wrote Cobbett, as he rode across the green, anxious shires, was staggering about like a sheep with water in its head, "turning its pate upon one side, seeming to listen but has no hearing, seeming to look but has no sight; one day it capers and dances, the next it mopes and seems ready to die."
¹
Abroad, with the Holy Alliance Sovereigns marching and counter-marcliing their armies like fire-brigades across their neighbours' territories to extinguish one national and liberal revolt after another, the Vienna settlement of Europe achieved after so much blood seemed on the verge of collapsing. The people of

¹
Rural Rides,
I,
7-8.

England, particularly its younger generation, were growing increasingly hostile to such authoritarian interference by its allies and increasingly critical of Castlereagh, who, as Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Commons, was at once the champion of the collective system abroad and the pillar of repressive administration at home. This stately, honourable aristocrat, now Marquis of Londonderry, with his handsome face and impassive courtesy, had come to symbolise for them, not only the jack-booted Austrians and Cossacks who shot and gaoled Italian and Polish liberals in the name of dynastic autocrats, but the slashing yeomanry of Peterloo and the spies and informers who dogged the footsteps of English reformers. The whole chilling array of luxury, display, indifference and disdain which Britain's aristocracy presented to the victims of her industrial and agrarian revolutions seemed embodied by one man.

Yet that mask of cold indifference—a facet of the stoic courage with which the nation's rulers had faced Napoleon—concealed a deeply sensitive nature. Like his colleagues Castlereagh had borne without flinching the toil and peril of office in a revolutionary age too long, and, under that "splendid summit of bright polished frost," unguessed at even by his dearest intimates, the strain of overwork and public opprobrium had begun to tell. That summer he spoke of living amidst the ruin of empires and, riding one day in the Row, he told a friend that the business of carrying on the Government had become intolerable and that, once out of it, no power on earth would bring him back.
¹

In the August after his Irish triumph the King set out on another progress. Before embarking for Edinburgh he gave an audience to the Foreign Secretary who was about to attend a Congress of European Sovereigns at Verona. The King was so struck by his Minister's distraught state that he spoke of it to Lord Liverpool. So did Wellington who had an equally disturbing interview with his colleague. Some mysterious fear seemed to be haunting that strong, calm mind; some obsession about a conspiracy to accuse him of a nameless crime.
²
During his conversation with Wellington he broke down and cried.

¹
Broughton, II,
187;
Creevey Papers,
II,
38.

²
He had been much shocked by the disgrace of a wealthy Irish Bishop who had been caught with a guardsman in a London tavern, and believed that there was a plot to accuse him falsely of the same crime. Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
5th, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th
August,
1820:
Brownlow,
198;
Croker, I,
224-5;
Greville (Suppl.), I,
155-6,
Hobhouse,
12th
Aug.,
1820;
Lieven,
Private Letters,
189-94;
Stanhope,
272-3;
Toynbee,
129-31.

Two days later it was learnt that the Foreign Secretary, rising' suddenly from a bed of fever, had cut his throat. To those who knew him intimately his passing seemed an inconceivable loss: that of the
¹
noblest and kindest of men and the wisest, most steadfast statesman of his time. Yet when the body of "carotid-artery-cutting Castlereagh," as the radicals called him, was borne to the Abbey door, a knot of rough-looking men in the roadway gave a fierce, exultant hurray.
¹
"Posterity
' wrote Byron,

"will ne'er survey

A nobler grave than this:

Here he the bones of Castlereagh:

Stop, traveller, and . . .!"

Tidings of another death reached London about the same time. "Shelley, the great atheist," wrote Charles Lamb, "has gone down by water to eternal fire!" A few weeks earlier the poet had sailed-from Spezzia in a small yacht and was never seen alive again. His remains were burnt on the shore near Via Reggio to conform with the Tuscan quarantine laws: "Marble mountains touched the air with' coolness and the flame of the fire bore away towards heaven quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty." A Tory newspaper's comment was that the poet would now discover whether there was a hell or not.

Such eroding bitterness and division was symbolic. It sprang from the inability of those who ruled to cope with change. Being able to think only in patterns of thought which they had defended so long against foreign violence, they regarded with abhorrence all who found those patterns outworn, and were in turn anathema to them. Those who, suffering or perceiving injustice, demanded a reform of the country's laws and institutions, they denounced as Jacobins and potential assassins, and were themselves denounced by them as tyrants. By their defiant, but pathetic conservatism, they made Crown, Church and Constitution suspect to millions. They not only failed to find a common denominator for readjusting British society after the war; they failed even to realise one was needed. They could

¹
Cooper,
329-30.
See
Creevey Papers,
II,
47;
Croker, I,
226;
Hobhouse,
20th
August,
1822;
Peel, I,
321.
For a tribute of deep. affecdon to Castlereagh see Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
25th
August,
1822,
et seq.
and Brownlow,
passim.