The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (69 page)

The government panicked. Laws were passed which punished machine-breaking with the death sentence. As the Romantic poet Lord Byron said in an angry speech to his fellow peers in the House of Lords, a life was now valued at less than a stocking frame. Since no police force existed, Sidmouth used spies to try and round up the ringleaders. Instead these spies acted as
agents provocateurs
, deliberately inciting isolated pockets of the most disaffected workers to overthrow the government and encourage mob violence when what most of the protesters actually wanted was specific reforms within the system. For the miracle was that despite the widespread misery there was no real uprising by the British people. Most people believed in the ability of Parliament to right their wrongs. They marched and attended meetings to discuss Parliamentary reform addressed by Radicals like the most famous journalist of his generation, William Cobbett, and by speakers like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. Though the government might see Hunt as a dangerous agitator, like Cobbett he agitated for reforms through Parliament.

Unfortunately in December 1816 at a vast Parliamentary-reform gathering at Spa Fields in Clerkenwell organized by the Radicals, the machinations of Sidmouth’s agents and extremist elements ensured that all the worse suspicions of the government were confirmed. The meeting was taken over by the Spenceans, the revolutionary followers of Thomas Spence who believed all land should be nationalized. What had been intended as a peaceful demonstration turned into a riot. Some of the demonstrators were flying the
tricolore
and wearing the Caps of Liberty which had been so prominent during the massacres in Revolutionary France. Calling for a Committee of Public Safety they began to march east to seize the Tower of London, but were broken up at the Royal Exchange in the City.

Similar disturbances, none of them serious, continued throughout 1817. Then, for a year, good harvests and cheaper bread calmed the country. But in 1819 the combination of bad harvests, which once again meant that people couldn’t feed themselves, and the failure of the Radical Sir Francis Burdett’s bill in favour of universal manhood suffrage, caused violent episodes to start up again. Still the government refused to see the agitation for Parliamentary reform for what it was. Tragically when an enormous and peaceful demonstration in favour of reform took place on the outskirts of Manchester at St Peter’s Fields, in August 1819, it was treated as the beginning of the uprising.

Because the Radicals abhorred violence and wanted to distance themselves from people like the Spenceans, no one was allowed to carry anything which might possibly be interpreted as a weapon. The authorities were to have no excuse to claim provocation. The presence of women, children and indeed babies in the crowd was intended to show once and for all that these were demonstrators who believed in peaceful ways. As they came on with hand-painted banners waving above them to ask for the reform of the Corn Laws, votes for everyone and the representation of their areas in Parliament the only danger they posed was in their numbers. They were 40,000 strong. Nevertheless the atmosphere was friendly and orderly; the mothers had provisions for their families in their covered baskets.

The meeting had been approved by local magistrates, but they had since lost their nerve. At St Peter’s Fields, therefore, were drawn up large numbers of yeomen cavalry, some of whom had been at Waterloo. Their behaviour now was far from distinguished. When the Radical speaker Henry Hunt got to the platform, he saw that magistrates were there waiting for him. In order to prevent any trouble he said that he was quite willing to be arrested. But the magistrates insisted that he speak. Halfway through his address, however, they sent soldiers in to arrest him. Not unnaturally the crowd disliked this. As with indignant cries they tried to stop Hunt being dragged off, the magistrates told the waiting cavalry to charge into the crowd.

Into the mass of wives and babies and banners rode the soldiers. Hewing and hacking with their sabres, their horses’ enormous hooves tossing children into the air, they killed eleven people, including a child, and badly injured 400 more. The disgusted nation gave the event the sarcastic nickname ‘Peterloo’. From every section of society a torrent of indignation poured out against the oppressive Tory government. The son of the MP for Horsham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a powerful poem
The Mask of
Anarchy
, advising the victims of the government to shake off their chains. ‘You are many, they are few,’ he told them.

The Tory government followed Peterloo with the repressive Six Acts. These made it almost impossible to hold outdoor meetings, tried to destroy the Radical press by extending stamp duties to all kinds of journals which put most of them beyond the reach of the working man, widened magistrates’ powers to search private property for seditious literature and got rid of jury trials in certain cases. Thwarted by such methods Radical agitation died down. Only the discovery of the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820, a plot to assassinate the Cabinet organized by a Spencean named Thistlewood who intended to set up a provisional government, did a little to convince public opinion that perhaps behind the reformers a hideous revolutionary conspiracy really had been lurking.

The Radical movement’s imagination was soon caught by the plight of the prince regent’s wife, Caroline of Brunswick. For in 1820 George III died. The virtuous young king of golden hair and iron will had long ago declined into a hopeless lunatic at Windsor, his hair long and white. Despite his condition the nation genuinely mourned a man who had been such a familiar figure for so long–he had reigned for fifty-nine years–and was known for his unassuming and simple ways and his exemplarily uxorious relationship with Queen Charlotte. The sybaritic and sophisticated prince regent at last became king as George IV after a regency of nine years.

George IV was renowned for his exquisite and exotic taste, his knowledge of the arts and a set which was as fast-living and grand as his father’s court had been homely. On his accession to the throne in 1820 he toured his dominions, winning huge acclaim in Scotland. The visit was masterminded by the highly influential novelist Sir Walter Scott, whose popular historical works like
Rob Roy
had completely rehabilitated the treacherous Scots as noble and magnificent savages. George IV was cast into ecstasies by tartan. Tartan everything–trews, curtain material and little boxes–became all the rage, with the wild romantic Highlands replacing the Lake District as a popular destination for the feeling and artistic. As prince regent, George and his architect John Nash had made the little seaside village of Brighthelmstone in East Sussex into the smart resort of Brighton. Even today Nash’s rich neo-classical style determines much of London’s character–he designed Regent Street, Carlton House Terrace, Trafalgar Square, Marble Arch, St James’s Park, and, by doubling Buckingham House in size, Buckingham Palace. But Nash abandoned that style to build Prinny a fabulous palace, the fairytale Brighton Pavilion whose onion domes seem stolen from the shores of the Bosphorus.

The prince recent had lived at Brighton until his father’s death with his highly respectable Roman Catholic mistress Mrs Fitzherbert. As we have seen, to assuage her principles when he was Prince of Wales he had taken part in a marriage ceremony with her, though as he had not asked his father’s permission it was invalidated by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, and there was therefore no danger of a Catholic heir succeeding to the throne.

In 1795 the extravagant prince was forced to marry his first cousin Caroline of Brunswick on the understanding that Parliament would exonerate his colossal debts and increase his Civil List income. But he found her so unattractive that he left her three days after his only child Princess Charlotte was born. He took mistresses, and even for a period resumed living with Mrs Fitzherbert, all the while showing great hostility to his wife. As a result the Princess of Wales indulged her taste for louche company, a taste which eventually led to rumours that she had had a child out of wedlock. By 1806 the prince had forced the government of the day to launch an investigation into her behaviour in order to get rid of her. This was called the Delicate Investigation. Her husband said that her house at Blackheath had become the centre of much scurrilous rumour, though no more scurrilous than that surrounding the Prince of Wales himself. But nothing much could be found to justify divorce proceedings, and the princess eventually went abroad, wandering from watering hole to watering hole with a further series of not very distinguished admirers.

The death of his father persuaded George IV, who had quite lost his handsome looks and had become extremely obese despite miracles of corseting, that it was the moment to rid himself of Queen Caroline once and for all. But his wife had other plans. As soon as her father-in-law died, she came rushing back to England to demand that she be crowned beside her husband and that her name be reinstated in the list of members of the royal family who were prayed for in church every Sunday (the king had had it removed). But George would not be dissuaded from a divorce. To achieve this there had to be a trial of the queen before Parliament. The feeble behaviour of the government, which did nothing to stop the trial for fear of the king replacing it with a Whig administration, added to the people’s contempt for the Tories. The ill-treated queen, who seemed a symbol of their own repression, became immensely popular.

A Bill of Pains and Penalties, which was in effect a divorce bill, was brought before the House of Lords. The queen’s alleged lovers and members of her retinue, who were mainly Italian, were cross-examined in public about her private life. Caroline was defended by the most brilliant lawyer of his time, Henry Brougham, the Radical MP who was a fervent supporter of all the great causes of the day–legal and parliamentary reform and religious emancipation. Thanks to his advocacy the trial of Queen Caroline ended in fiasco for the government, making them more loathed than ever. The divorce bill was only just carried through the Lords, but was passed by so few votes (nine) that it was never introduced into the House of Commons.

Though she had been informed that she was to play no part in the ceremony, the poor queen insisted on attending George IV’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in July 1821. After being refused admittance to the Abbey, she moved on to Westminster Hall, where the royal party was gathered, and beat her fists on the doors until she had to be removed. It was no way to treat anyone, let alone a granddaughter of George II and the estranged wife of a king. Less than three weeks later Queen Caroline died at Hammersmith, perhaps of a stomach disorder, her condition probably aggravated by the humiliating way she had been treated.

Although the government under Lord Liverpool was afterwards notorious for being the most repressive for a century, within it were the seeds of change. The Cato Street Conspiracy proved to be the point when fear of revolution in Britain reached its climax. After it, a new more progressive era in Britain began, heralded by the death in 1822 of Viscount Castlereagh, the inspiration of the more conservative section of the party. Without Castlereagh, the only way Lord Liverpool could survive as leader was by giving office to the more liberal section of the Tory party, who were more influenced by manufacturers than by landowners. Indeed one of them, the new home secretary Robert Peel, sprang from the recently established manufacturing aristocracy. He was the grandson of a Lancashire weaver who had made a fortune.

The leader of the liberal Tories, George Canning, who was in favour of Catholic Emancipation, became foreign secretary, while at the Board of Trade was William Huskisson, another disciple of Pitt who was convinced that free trade was the answer to the world’s ills. A more humane influence could now be felt at the heart of government, though Parliamentary reform continued to be evaded. Canning believed that prosperity would be the salvation of Britain and would do away with the need for it. And prosperity he, Huskisson and Frederick Robinson, the chancellor of the Exchequer, believed would come if Britain could be freed from as much protectionism as the country would bear.

The energetic voices of the manufacturers of Birmingham and Manchester, with whom the Canningite Tories were in close touch, convinced Huskisson to reduce the duty on a great number of raw materials, making it much cheaper to manufacture goods, while the duty on manufactured goods themselves was also reduced. Huskisson ended the mercantile system and the disputes over the carrying trade which had been the cause of such trouble between Britain and other countries, most recently the United States (the Anglo-American War of 1812–15 had ended in compromise, though not before British forces had captured Washington DC and set fire to the White House). Britain was now such a successful trading nation that she could do away with these remnants of a bygone age. Under the new system of ‘reciprocity’ Huskisson’s legislation permitted treaties with foreign countries in the carrying trade which would allow their ships to use British harbours and vice versa.

But perhaps the most important figure in Liverpool’s government was the home secretary Robert Peel, the shy, stiff redhead who had taken over from Sidmouth in 1822. Britain’s social fabric was damaged almost to the point of no return, and many abuses needed radical redress. Peel was a man of conservative views, but an active conscience allied to a strong sense of justice meant that under his leadership the Home Office became an agency for social reform. Like most reformers of the first half of the nineteenth century, Peel was heavily influenced by the Utilitarian ideas of the English Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Encapsulated in the proposition that the aim of government should be to achieve ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, Bentham’s thinking had a revolutionary effect on the British.

The very fact that the hours worked in the new mills had been questioned since the first Factory Act in 1802 was a sign of a more humanitarian mood–no one had previously tried to limit the hours men worked. A new Factory Act in 1819 which prevented children under nine years old working in cotton mills showed that there continued to be widespread support for state intervention in certain social issues. Then, from 1822, within Britain that spirit of progressive reform knocked off course by the French Revolution reasserted itself at government level. Advised by the pioneers of criminal law and prison reform Sir James Mackintosh, the Quaker Elizabeth Fry and John Howard, Peel did much to improve prison conditions. With the employment of trained staff, prisoners were treated better and the idea of rehabilitating them to fit them for a new life outside jail began to take hold. The use of iron fetters, so much in evidence even today in twenty-first-century American prisons, was forbidden unless it had the consent of a judge.

A harsh penal code had been the eighteenth century’s legacy to the nineteenth. Above all there were 200 felonies for which the penalty was death. Although execution for pickpocketing had been abolished in 1808, shoplifting continued to be a capital offence. But since so many unimportant crimes received the death penalty most London juries on principle refused ever to convict. In 1823, hoping that juries would enforce the law if the sentences were more appropriate, Peel halved the number of such crimes and reduced legal material which had been accumulating since the thirteenth century to a few comprehensible statutes.

Next it was the turn of the working man to be treated as a human being. In 1824, after pressure from the Radicals, Peel took the great step forward of repealing the Combination Acts and restoring trade unions. Now employees could act collectively to raise their wages or to petition for shorter hours. Peel had none of the Tory Ultras’ fear of the workers because he knew them from his father’s textile mills. He believed that they had rights. ‘Men who have no property except their manual skill and strength’, he said, ‘ought to be allowed to confer together, if they think fit, for the purpose of determining at what rate they will sell their property.’

Behind the figures and research which convinced Peel and Huskisson that trade unions would not wreck trade was a tailor with a shop in the Charing Cross Road named Francis Place. But Place was no ordinary tailor. He was a Parliamentary lobbyist who was passionate about the extension of the franchise and whose shop became a research library and meeting place for the Radical movement. Like William Cobbett, he was convinced that the way to salvation for the working classes was through Parliament rather than revolution.

In 1826 when a new trade depression swept across England, Peel–against the wishes of many Tories–passed an emergency law allowing some cheap foreign wheat to come on to the market. He was accused of bowing to the mob, but he believed it was more important to assuage distress temporarily, so that the poor were not also starving as they contended with unemployment. His forethought prevented a famine as there was a bad harvest that autumn to add to everyone’s problems. Peel refused to view outbreaks of violence as an attempt to overthrow government. He was sympathetic to what he saw as a problem which was ‘fundamentally one of human suffering’.

In 1829 Peel established the first Metropolitan Police Force, set up by Parliament with a commissioner at Scotland Yard directly responsible to the Home Office. He had been convinced by James Mackintosh, and by his own experience with a policing experiment as a young chief secretary in Ireland, that punishment was not a deterrent. A proper organization dedicated to preventing crime was the way forward. The success of the Metropolitan Police Force soon encouraged its imitation across the country, for crime figures were rising in the new industrial towns. Previously maintaining law and order in England had depended on the amateur talents of nightwatchmen, parish constables and the threat of coming up against the magistrate. But what worked in small villages where everybody knew one another was no longer feasible in crowded conurbations with shifting populations. By not arming the police, Peel silenced the old objections to a professional police force becoming the instruments of tyranny they were held to be abroad. The police were forbidden to act as spies like Sidmouth’s old network of
agents provocateurs
who had caused so much misery in the past. The new constables became so popular that they got the nickname they retained until very recently of Peelers and Bobbies, after their creator Robert Peel.

And abroad George Canning, the new foreign secretary, reclaimed Britain’s old role as the foe of absolutism among the nations striving to be free. The son of an actress, Canning had a gift for the dramatic gesture which had been lacking in the austere Castlereagh. Britain stopped sending even observers to Congress meetings because, Canning said, the British people did not like ‘their representative communing in secret with despotic powers’. In 1826, the British fleet frightened off the Congress powers in the shape of Spain and France as they set about invading Portugal to stop King John granting his country a liberal constitution. Ever since the Peninsular War, Spain had been in awe of British military power, and as soon as Canning showed he meant business by sending 4,500 troops to Lisbon conveyed by a large British fleet the Spanish retreated. Portugal was allowed to have her constitution.

In 1823 in defiance of the rest of the powers Canning recognized the independence of the South American colonies which had revolted against Spain. Not only did he threaten to use the Royal Navy, which was undefeated since Trafalgar, against any power that tried to recapture them for Spain, he enlisted the aid of the youthful United States of America, prodding President Monroe into declaring that South America was a sphere of interest to be treated as her own backyard. The so-called Monroe Doctrine stated that the United States would treat any European attempt to colonize the American continent or interfere with any of its countries or regimes as an act of war. In a memorable phrase Canning proclaimed, ‘I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’ Recognizing the independence of the new republics of Buenos Aires, Colombia and Mexico made George IV so angry that he refused to read out the news to Parliament, pretending that he had lost his false teeth. Underlying Canning’s heroics was trade. For 300 years British merchants had tried to penetrate the old Spanish stamping ground of South America. Now they had independence the ex-Spanish colonies were enjoying a lucrative trade with British merchants which Canning was determined to preserve.