The Reckoning (91 page)

After the brief upsurge in trade between 1817 and 1818,
the market had become glutted, trade had fallen off, and the
factories were idle again. In addition, since the harvest of
1818 had been a poor one, the price of bread had soared, and
everything seemed to be back where it had been in 1816. At the beginning of the year the Government had eased its laws
on public assemblies, in response to the long period of calm,
and the reformist clubs had started up again, like weeds the
more vigorous for having been cut back.

‘
We shall have trouble again soon, you mark my words, said Mr Percy Droylsden, helping himself liberally to roast
duck with cherries. 'The mill-workers are hungry, and
Bamford and Cartwright and all these reformists will play on them for their own ends, just like before. Calling themselves
Radicals now, whatever that's supposed to mean! You'll see
all their claptrap appeals to sentiment coming out of the
cupboard again. Out will come the Tricolor Flags and the
Caps of Liberty –'

‘
And Orator Hunt's white top-hat,' Harry put in. 'Lord,
how I longed to throw a stone at it when he held that meeting
at St Peter's Field in January! What lad of spirit with a catapult could resist? I wonder what's happening to the youth of
today.' He shook his head sadly.

‘
I think he's rather handsome,' said Agnes. 'I don't suppose
he really means any harm. I expect he just likes to hear
himself talk, like other men.'

‘
He's dangerous,' Percy said firmly, ignoring the barb. 'If I
were Sidmouth I'd have gaoled him long ago.'

‘
No, no, he can't do that – it would be taking him far too
seriously,' Farraline said. 'Hunt is a joke.'

‘
Wolseley got gaoled all right,' Percy pointed out, 'and he's
one of us — a gentleman, I mean.'

‘
Ah, that's what happens when you take a joke too far —
particularly when it isn't a very good joke to begin with.
Don't you think so, Lady Chelmsford? May I help you to
some of this galantine?'

‘
I know nothing about Wolseley,' Rosamund said, nodding
consent to the galantine.

And care less, as the saying is,' said Farraline.

‘
Sir Charles Wolseley is one of the new breed of gentleman-radicals,' Prudence explained.

‘
If that's not a contradiction in terms,' murmured Harry.

‘
He presided over a reformist meeting in Stockport last
month,' Jasper took up the explanation. 'They held mock
parliamentary elections, and elected him Representative for
Birmingham. He was arrested afterwards and sentenced to
eighteen months in prison for sedition.'

‘
I still think that seems awfully harsh,' Sophie said doubt
fully. 'It doesn't sound as though they were doing any harm.'

‘
It isn't the harm it does, it's the harm it leads to,' Jasper
said.

‘
Quite right. We've got to stamp these things out before
they go too far,' said Percy. 'These people play on the feelings
of the lower orders, whip them up into sedition, and before
you know where you are, you've got revolution on your
hands. The poor would never think of it for themselves —
perfectly decent creatures, most of 'em, only just now there's
not much work about, and bread is dear.'

‘
Quite. It's bread they want, not the vote,' said Farraline.
‘I thought you were all for Parliamentary reform, Mr
Farraline,' said Rosamund sweetly.

He lowered his eyelids to conceal a wicked gleam from all
but her. 'I was not aware that I had ever disclosed my poli
tical opinions to you, Lady Chelmsford.'

‘
Whatever anyone's opinion about the question of reform,'
Jasper said, 'none of us can have two views about the danger
of a large public meeting here in Manchester. There are too
many unemployed weavers already banding together and
making demands, and the situation —'

‘
Don't you have a power-loom factory, Hobsbawn?' Farra
line asked innocently. Rosamund kicked him reprovingly
under the table.

‘
Yes, we have a weaving-shed, but we've never yet been
able to bring it into full production, and now it's idle again.’

‘
Why is that?'

‘
Because just as we were starting to bring it into use, the orders began to fall off again, and there wouldn't have been enough work for the hand-weavers as well as my machines.
Though now, of course, there isn't enough for the hand-
weavers anyway.'

‘
You mean — you had orders, but you gave them to hand-loom weavers?' Farraline said, serious now. Tor God's sake,
man, why? Why let expensive machinery stand idle —
machinery that can do the job better, what's more?'

‘
I won't run machines while men starve,' Jasper said tautly.
‘If they can't be complementary to each other —'

‘
That's madness,' Farraline said. 'Don't you see, the days
of the hand-loom weaver are over, finished! Oh yes, I know there aren't enough power looms in the whole country at the
moment when production is at peak, but there will be. The
writing is on the wall for anyone to see. The future is with the
machine. One day all the manufacturing processes will be
done by machine. It's simply flying in the face of history to
keep on employing hand-weavers at the expense of the
machines. It's no kindness, believe me, to encourage them in
their delusions. The time will come when they will have to
find something else to do.'

‘
Well that time is not yet,' said Jasper stubbornly, 'and
frankly, I don't believe that it will happen in your lifetime or
mine, if it ever happens at all. There's no reason why we can't
go on as we do —'

‘
It's as I said to you before,' Farraline said resignedly.
‘You're a romantic, not a visionary. You see only what's
under your nose.'

‘
Mr Farraline, won't you help Mrs Droylsden to some of
the galantine,' Sophie said desperately, feeling her dinner
party sliding towards disaster. Neither man heard her.

‘
I see no reason why progress can't go hand in hand with
compassion,' Jasper said.

‘
Ah, as in Mr Owen's little kingdom, eh?'

‘
Never mind about Owen and your damned philanthropy,'
said Percy Droylsden good-naturedly from the other end of
the table, where he had missed a large part of the point, 'what
about this radical meeting they're going to call? That's what
worries me.'

‘
What radical meeting?' Sophie asked, glad to have any
diversion from the near-quarrel.

‘
Advertised in the
Observer –
what? – ten days ago. To be
held on August the 9th, St Peter's Fields, the same sort of
thing as that Stockport meeting, with the purpose of adopting
Major Cartwright's plan of Parliamentary reform, and
electing Henry Hunt as "representative" for Manchester.'

‘
No, no, that won't come off,' Farraline said. 'Since
Wolseley's been imprisoned, they'll know it would be
regarded as treasonable. Hunt won't risk it, not when he
thinks things are going his way at last. That August the 9th
meeting will be cancelled, I promise you.'

‘
I certainly hope you're right,' said Droylsden. 'This hot
weather makes the lower orders fidgety, especially when they
haven't enough to do to keep 'em out of mischief. A public
meeting of any sort would be bound to lead to trouble.’

Agnes concealed a yawn behind her hand, and said, 'Have
you been to our theatre yet, Lady Chelmsford? We saw a very
good play last week, didn't we, Percy? What was it called?'

‘
Much Ado About Nothing, wasn't it?' Harry answered for his brother, and dropped the ghost of a wink across the table
at Farraline.

 
The proposed reformist meeting for the 9th of August did not take place, but it was not cancelled. Instead it was postponed
to the 16th of August, and a new notice in the
Manchester
Observer
announced that its purpose would be ‘to consider
the propriety of adopting the most legal and effectual means
of obtaining Reform of the Commons House of Parliament'.

‘
Mildness itself, you see. A most modest declaration of poli
tical intent. These people have learned something in the last four years,' Jesmond Farraline said to Rosamund as they lay
on the bed together on a Thursday afternoon.

‘
I can't think why it interests you so much,' Rosamund said
sleepily. It was another hot day outside, and love had made
her drowsy.

‘
It's like a process of manufacturing,' he said. 'In goes the
raw cotton, thump thump thump go the machines, and out at
the other end comes the yarn. In this case, the raw material is
the labouring poor, and the radical machine has processed it
into a single political animal.'

‘
Oh gammon,' said Rosamund. 'You don't suppose any of
those simpletons really knows what it's all about, do you?
Political animal, nonsense! The lower orders are like sheep:
you set one of them running in a certain direction, and they'll
all follow – straight over a cliff, if that's what happens to be
in the way.’

Farraline laughed. 'I won't argue with you – I'll just invite
you to come with me tomorrow and see for yourself.’

‘
See what for myself?’

The reformist meeting, of course. Listen, I didn't tell you,
did I, that I rode out to Grasscroft yesterday?'

‘
Did you?'

‘
I had to see Kit on some business. I was quite late by the
time I left to come home, but of course the evenings are light,
and it was only just growing dusk when I got to Miles
Platting. There's a big, level piece of heath there where the
road turns off towards Cheetham Hill – do you know it?’

*

He continued in the face of her determined indifference.
‘There was quite a crowd assembled there – a group of some
thing like thirty or forty men of the labouring sort, and an
even larger number of women and assorted children. The
women and children were watching, and the men were – can
you guess? – drilling.'

‘Drilling?'

‘
Marching in step, turning, wheeling and halting – and
doing it pretty well, too, considering what a motley bunch
they were!'

‘But – what on earth for?'

‘
I naturally wondered that myself. It occurred to me that a
group of labouring men going through military manoeuvres,
with no gentleman in sight to command them, was a pretty
alarming sight, especially to a man who's spent his best years
fighting the French. Puts one in mind of Paris and the
Bastille.'