The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (62 page)

It now appears likely that what looked like mental illness was actually a manifestation of a disease called porphyria, nevertheless there was absolute consternation in the higher echelons of government, for the way was open to a regency in the person of the wild and extravagant Prince of Wales, or Prinny as he was known. Campaigned for in Parliament by Fox who at last saw his chance to become prime minister, the post fondly predicted for him since his earliest and very precocious youth, it seemed as if England would be turned over to the irresponsible rule of the twenty-six-year-old heir to the throne. Like his champion Fox, the Prince of Wales was not only a gambler, but he was a declared bankrupt. He had also contracted a secret marriage, to a Roman Catholic no less, a Mrs Fitzherbert, in defiance of George III’s 1772 Royal Marriages Act which still prevents his descendants marrying without the monarch’s permission. While Prinny and his brothers amused their friends and scandalized their acquaintances performing imitations of George III’s nightly doings, in the House of Commons Pitt duelled with Fox to prevent an automatic regency passing immediately to the Prince of Wales.

Pitt insisted that only Parliament could appoint a regent and that Parliament must investigate how to proceed. In a great scene in the House of Commons, Pitt won the debate. Behaving outrageously as usual, Fox announced to his stunned audience that since the king was ‘legally dead’ there was no need of precedents. What mattered was not what a Parliamentary committee thought but that there was in the kingdom a person different from everyone else in the kingdom–an heir apparent of full age and capacity to exercise the royal power with an automatic right to the throne. At this Pitt was heard to laugh and say, ‘By God, I’ll un Whig that gentleman for the rest of his life.’

Fox had entirely contradicted the great founding principle of the Whig revolution. The Whigs by offering the crown to William III had ended the hereditary succession by Divine Right and changed it into an institution dependent on the will of Parliament, Pitt said. Fox’s argument was destroyed and George III remained king. While Parliament was setting up the regency the king recovered, greatly to the nation’s relief. The fact that he was spending hours of the day trussed up in a straitjacket to stop him damaging himself and others was kept from the country, though there had been alarming and widespread rumours. Hale and hearty once again, though more than a little shaken, the king returned from Kew where he had been kept under the not very tender ministrations of Dr Willis. This episode, when Pitt’s loyalty and quick wits had saved the day, deepened the relationship between prime minister and sovereign. It was another king however, just across the Channel in France, whose fate began to influence Britain’s future when in 1789 the French Revolution began.

The French Revolution was one of the seminal occurrences of the last 200-odd years, and its reverberations continue to make themselves felt. Most of the governments of the world at the outset of the twenty-first century reflect in some form a belief in mass democracy. The French Revolution was the first experiment in that form of government. It began with an attempt by the French king Louis XVI to raise money by calling a meeting of his Parliament, the Estates-General, which had not met since the early seventeenth century. That was the fuse which set off the long-delayed explosion. By 1789 the French state was bankrupt, because of the wars it had waged unceasingly for a hundred years. The only way to tap new resources on the level required, economists realized, was to change the bizarre tax system in France. Almost unreformed since the middle ages, the fiscal structure contained privileged exemptions for the wealthy, the nobility and the Church, who paid almost no taxes at all. The greatest impositions, such as the notorious salt tax, fell on the poorest, as did the main levy, the land tax.

Tax exemptions tied in with other gross inequalities. Unlike the English, who for many centuries had been equal before the law, the French nobility had legal privileges. Their monarch, even so, was an absolute one. His word literally was the law since a letter from the king, the
lettre de cachet
, was enough to send anyone to jail for the rest of their life without trial or explanation. The French people had no recourse to Parliament to withhold monies from the king to combat this absolute style of monarchy. Though French philosophers had a tremendous effect on the rest of Europe, none of their ideas were practised in their own country. Frenchmen and women now passionately wanted to order their society along more sensible, rational lines.

At long last the first meeting of the Estates-General since 1614 was called at Versailles in order to raise taxes. What the king had not appreciated was how widespread and urgent was the French people’s desire for reform. With the force of a dam breaking, they created a new body called the National Assembly, the French nobility themselves voted to jettison their ancient privileges and together they proclaimed a brand new constitution based on the Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man on 26 August 1789. This was influenced by the American Declaration of Independence, with its insistence on liberty, equality and man’s natural rights, which had enthused the Marquis de Lafayette, one of the revolution’s early leaders. But above all it was coloured by that classic Enlightenment document, the
Social Contract
of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Like Locke, Rousseau held that government was a contract between the people and their rulers, though most crucial to the course of the Revolution was his belief in what he called the General Will of the People.

But who was to identify this was precisely the problem. From the first, the French Revolution was accompanied by mob violence. So strong were English feelings about ending tyranny that the storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789, notorious as a symbol of the
ancien régime
and the
lettres de cachet
, that Fox spoke for many when he hailed it as the greatest event ‘that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ The young poet William Wordsworth would reflect the feelings of a host of other young Romantics when he exclaimed that it was ‘bliss’ to be alive at such a time in the history of the world. Most English people felt a natural sympathy for the cause of individual freedom; they rejoiced that liberty was flourishing in a land which since the days of Louis XIV had been a byword for repression.

But the Declaration of the Rights of Man was followed by more extreme behaviour when a mob forced the king and queen out of the Palace of Versailles and took them back to Paris and to what was captivity in all but name. Lafayette had to raise a regiment of middle-class national guards to restore order to a Paris where the army had looked on as the mob rampaged. When the new Constituent Assembly made Louis XVI a constitutional monarch, Pitt and the English government remained sympathetic to this curtailment of the tyranny of the absolutist Bourbon dynasty. A French constitutional monarchy would give the two nations facing one another across the Channel more in common. But what began with noble speeches about universal rights soon degenerated into terror and mob rule.

In October 1790 by every boat refugees of the wealthier sort began to flee France with only the clothes they stood up in, warning that there was no making terms with the revolutionaries. They revealed how the furious peasants were paying no heed to what lawyers were doing in Paris–whether it was separating powers or establishing the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Centuries of being treated like beasts had at last provoked them and their Parisian counterparts, the Sansculottes, into behaving like beasts. The starving peasantry had started to go berserk: they were burning the châteaux where their forefathers had worked since time immemorial. They were looting castles, seizing gold, killing their masters indiscriminately, regardless of how well they had been treated.

In Paris the constitutional monarchy with an Assembly became a revolutionary government which was continuously reinventing itself, but which ultimately depended on violence. Though Louis XVI remained king in name, by 1792 he, the queen and their two children had been made prisoners, and their friends feared the worst. As one observer related there soon became ‘reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, might devour in turn each of her children’.

As the Revolution raged on, idealistically attempting to put right centuries of wrongs, disestablishing the Church, then getting rid of God and putting the more logical Cult of the Supreme Being in His place, renaming the months in a more descriptive way, no leader of the Assembly ever lasted for very long. After a few months he was always arrested for undefined crimes against ‘the People’. The real power in Paris was in the radical political association called the Jacobin Club. There the most advanced revolutionary thinkers, such as Danton, Marat and Robespierre, hammered out a Republic of Virtue which aimed to destroy all human traditions which got in the way of logic and their interpretation of the Will of the People. These leaders were fast becoming dictators under the cloak of the great revolutionary slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’.

Of all the English contemporaries the reaction of Edmund Burke, mentor of the Rockingham Whigs, was both the most pessimistic and the most accurate. He who had been such a supporter of liberty in the past turned into a Conservative overnight. His famous book
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, written only a year after the storming of the Bastille, presciently foretold chaos. Then, he wrote, ‘Some popular general will establish a military dictatorship in place of anarchy.’ The appalled Burke now believed that it was not possible for mankind to tear up the past: human institutions needed to develop slowly. So strong were his views that, to Fox’s anguish, he publicly repudiated his old friend in the House of Commons.

The French revolutionaries’ treatment of the royal family plunged Europe into war. Queen Marie Antoinette was the aunt of the Habsburg emperor and when the news got abroad that the king and queen were prisoners Austrian and Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Brunswick were moved across the frontier to save them. But the mob responded to this threat to the Revolution with the September Massacres, a mindless slaughter of prisoners. In three days the people of Paris killed 6,000 royalist prisoners, bursting into the jails and murdering them where they stood. The heads of ordinary criminals joined those of friends of the royal family on pikes, to be paraded through the streets. All that autumn of 1792 the sound of the tocsin called the city and the citizens to arms. To shouts of ‘À la lanterne!’, which meant string them up on the streetlamps, the citizens of Paris complied.

And then, to the horror of Europe, when the revolutionary committees summoned every French citizen to join the army in a
levée en masse
, this revolutionary army managed to defeat the Prussians. This news had an effect similar to the British defeat at Saratoga. It had never been imagined that raw recruits, untrained and untried in battle, though 50,000 strong and burning with desire to protect their homeland, would defeat the renowned Prussian troops at the Battle of Valmy. But they had, and they had driven them back across the French frontier.

In response to the foreigners’ invasion, the revolutionaries announced that the monarchy no longer existed. In its place a republic was declared. Then, in October, the Revolution which Mirabeau and Robespierre had vowed would not be exported, crossed the frontier. Fighting battle after battle the
levée en masse
streamed across the continent, seizing several German towns, then Basel in Switzerland where they proclaimed another republic. Finally, having inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Austrians at the Battle of Jemappes, the French took Brussels and Antwerp. If the ragged masses who died in droves for their country were alarming–when one lay down another twenty patriots sprang up behind him–still more frightening to the governments of Europe were the Decrees of November 1792, which announced that the French armies would help all people wanting to recover their liberty. The thirty-one-year-old Madame Roland, the wife of one of the Assembly’s deputies, executed for no apparent reason, summed up the bewilderment of her contemporaries at what was happening to them with the words she uttered on the scaffold: ‘Oh Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!’

Only a year before, Pitt had cut taxes and reduced British expenditure on arms because he was optimistic about the new constitutional French monarchy. He still thought Europe had never had more reason to expect peace. But events now followed one another so rapidly that even he was unprepared. In January 1793 the French king had received a hasty trial by committee, which bore no relation to a proper legal process. He was executed by that perfect eighteenth-century invention, the logical and efficient guillotine, which made executions faster and more humane.

News of Louis XVI’s execution was greeted with widespread revulsion in Britain. The British government’s reaction was immediate. To their surprise, the suave French ambassador Chauvelin and the special envoy, the elegant Bishop Talleyrand, the future prince, were told in no uncertain terms to leave the country within the week. In the House of Commons Pitt publicly deplored the fate of the king as an outrage against religion, justice and humanity. Unlike Britain, he said, where no man was too rich or too grand to be above the reach of the laws, and no man was so poor or unimportant as to escape their protection, the death of Louis XVI showed that in France neither applied.

Pitt still refused to go to war immediately, as Burke urged him to. He could not see it as part of the British government’s job to launch a moral crusade purely on the ground that the French were ‘the enemies of God and man’, even though he felt it to be true. But he gave the French a stern warning. If France wanted to remain at peace with England, he told the Commons, she must show that she had renounced aggression and was going to stay within her borders, ‘without insulting other governments, without disturbing their tranquillity, without violating their rights. And unless she consent to these terms, whatever may be our wishes for peace, the final issue must be war.’ Unlike his father Chatham, Pitt the Younger believed in peace. But it had to be a peace that was real and solid, consistent with the interests of Britain and the general security of Europe.