The Age of Elegance (40 page)

game to the backbone?" asked Walter Scott, when he heard how a boy, punished by three months in a garret on bread and water for shooting a cat, had spent his imprisonment hunting rats on a new principle.

The religion of a people so libertarian was instinctively Protestant. An Englishman's home was his castle; he wanted no priest, least of all a foreign one, to share it. Popery to him was a symbol of tyranny, absurdity and inefficiency for, since despotism corrupted, it followed, in his eyes, that those who exercised it in religious matters must govern badly. An English lady travelling in Switzerland declared she could always tell when she was in a Protestant canton because the roads were passable, the lands well farmed and the cottages tidy. Jane Austen wrote that she had "a great respect for Sweden because it had been so zealous for Protestantism." For cardinals, priests, processions, fastings, penances, "not forgetting anchorites and vermin," the English had an inexpressible contempt; the Reverend Edward Stanley at Aix-la-Chapelle was nauseated by "virgins and dolls in beads, and muslins and pomatum and relics of saints' beards, and napkins from our Saviour's tomb and mummeries quite disgraceful." The average Englishman thought there was nothing, however false and horrible, a priest-ridden nation might not do.
¹

The font of English Protestantism was the authorised translation of the Bible. This great book was the daily mentor of millions. Sir William Pepys told Hannah More that, with the exception of Revelation, he read through the entire New Testament three times a year. Every Sunday Mrs. Cooper, the dyer's widow, took down her husband's Baskerville edition of the Scriptures and, turning the pictured pages, recalled for her little son what he had said of each. The Bible story lay at the roots of the national consciousness. In country districts its words, heard week by week in church or chapel, formed the mould of men's minds. Its phrases strayed into their

¹
In militant Ulster, where English and Scottish Protestantism reached its apogee, the fanatics of the Orange Lodges on the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne gave expression to this sentiment in a toast:

"To the glorious, pious and Immortal Memory of King William III, who saved us from Rogues and Roguery, Slaves and Slavery, Knaves and Knavery, Popes and Popery, from brass money and wooden shoes; and who ever denies this Toast may he be slammed, crammed and jammed into the muzrle of the great gun of Athlone, and the gun fired into the Pope's Belly, and the Pope into the Devil's Belly, and the Devil into HelL and the door locked and the key in an Orangeman's pocket; and may we never lack a Brisk Protestant Boy to kick the

arse of a papist; and here's a fart for the Bishop of Cork!"

1
See also
Romany Rye,
16-17, 400;
Austen,
238;
Bamford,
1,
102;
Castlereagh, X,
378;
De Selincourt, II,
578;
Lady Shelley, I,
252-3,287, 351-2;
Stanley,
191;
Wilberforce, II,
322.

every-day speech; a gate-keeper's application for a post on one of the first railways mentioned that he and his sons could not only keep but carry the gates, "yea, even the gates of Gaza." When Samuel Bamford returned from sea, his father, the weaver, greeted him with the words, "My son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found."

It was the last age in which a majority of educated men grew up without doubt. Walter Scott, in a dangerous illness, wrote that he could look on death's approach without fear, relying on the merits and intercession of his Redeemer; Wordsworth trusted that God had received his child amongst the blessed. Often this conviction took a somewhat literal form; a Judge told a condemned prisoner that he would shortly appear before another and abler Judge. Fine speeches about religion were dragged into crude melodramas; a guide book on sea-bathing places broke off a disquisition on the scenery of Sussex rivers to compare them with the stream of time.
¹
Such reflections were occasioned, not by a wish to increase the book's sales, which they could scarcely affect, but because they were natural to both reader and writer.

This sense of the validity of Divine law and of the judgments that accompanied its breach by man or nation, helped to give ordinary Britons a sense of proportion. It saved them from the pride which is the nemesis of success. They saw their transient present in a perspective of history. They did not, like their late enemies, believe in the perfectibility of man; they believed in his frailty and folly and the power of God to punish and redeem. Under their robust and often irritating self-assurance was a fund of deep personal humility; "ours," said Broke of the
Shannon,
"is an unpretending ship." A traveller from the United States at the climax of the war was astonished to find so little pride in the people who ruled the seas and held the East in fee. The most consistently successful of nations in battle, with conquered territories in every corner of the world, the British paradoxically were always in theory renouncing force. Believing they owed their being to something higher than themselves, they thought it wrong to use force except in d
efence of law and right. Castle
reagh's

¹
"And from this serious contemplation of the past the soul anxiously springs forward and anticipates that awful period when in an hour, in which it shall be least expected, while the labours of agriculture are going on as now before us, while the busy hum of men shall be ascending as now from the fields below, while all shall appear peace and security, a mightier destruction shall be ordained to nature, when the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth also.

Sea-Bathing Places,
137.
See also Bewick,
34;
Gaussen, II,
344-5;
Lauengro,
4.

Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office informed a colonial Governor that nothing was so repugnant to His Majesty's Government as a system of terror; Sergeant Broughton, the ex-champion of England, made a pupil promise never to fight unless compelled.
¹

It was this that made many foreigners think the English hypocrites and many Englishmen so critical of their country's policy. Almost any exercise by her rulers of her rights or interest was sure to be assailed on moral grounds by some other Briton. Cobbett thought it a duty to God and Man to put the Nabobs, those, that is, who were creating Britain's commercial empire in Asia, upon the coals without delay; they had long, he wrote, been "cooking and devouring the wretched people both of England and India." It was considered almost dishonourable for a member of the Opposition to stand up for his country. "If it were not physically as well as morally impossible for Sheridan to blush," wrote Mary Mitford when he supported the Government over the Peninsular War, "his face should glow with shame for a month for his slavish speech on Friday: the vile, degenerate Whig!" The same instinct made poets like Campbell and Byron denounce the seizure of the Danish fleet as atrocious aggression and the dethronement of Napoleon as petty and reactionary spite.

Looking back over his experience of the politics of anarchical India and revolutionary Europe, Wellington declared that it was England's religion that had made her what she was: a nation of honest men.
By
this he meant one in which a majority of men could trust one another and which others could trust. For truth and straightforward dealing—except, perhaps, in the sale of horses—the English had an unusual respect. A liar or one afraid to avow his beliefs was despised; there was no place in their public life for a coward. Attempts to introduce a secret ballot into the electoral system were resisted as un-English on the ground that the franchise was a trust which an elector was bound to exercise publicly. "Whatever he did," Bewick wrote of a neighbour, "was done in open day, for, as he feared no man, he scorned to sulk or to do anything by stealth."

¹
Castlereagh, X.
217;
Romany Rye,
108.
See also Bamford, I,
185.
The Peterloo leader tells us how he applied the principle himself. *
^r
It was about this time that I saw a young fellow beating a girl in the street.

'Hallo, you fellow,’
I said. 'What are you abusing that girl for?'

'What's that to you?' said the blackguard.

'I'll let you see what it is to me if you lay a finger on her again.*

'Oh, you will, will you,' said he. 'Come on then!' So we set to, and in five minutes I beat him till he was dizzy and had enough."

This insistence on frank dealing had a profound influence on Britain's overseas empire and trade. It caused peoples on whom the expansion of the English impinged, if not to like, to trust them. "I would rather sacrifice Gwalior and every other portion of India ten times over," Wellington wrote, "to preserve our credit for scrupulous good faith."
¹
A Bordeaux merchant, on whom a penniless British officer was billeted, offered, unasked, to lend him any sum without security; he had complete faith, he said, in the word of an Englishman. "Well, you are English," said a Belgian peasant to a tourist who had offered her an unfamiliar coin, "and the English never deceive." Richard Hotham, the great hatter, made it a rule only to sell the best so that every new customer became an old; Samuel Archer, the inventor of imitation pearls, went to extraordinary lengths to prevent his products from being mistaken for the genuine article. Though cheats and knaves abounded as in every society, a bright skein of honesty ran through the nation; a poor Lancashire weaver almost starved on the road from Manchester to London sooner than risk not being in court when his bail was called. Among the Dorset quarrymen the saying "on the word of a Portland man" was as good as a contract.
²

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the national Church was suffering, like other English institutions, from a surfeit of material prosperity. With their genius for politics—for evolving, that is, institutions capable of withstanding the erosion of human nature —the English had rejected both the Catholic and Calvinist conceptions of religious society. In place of a priesthood uncontaminated by the ties of marriage but in danger of undermining the mutual trust of the home, they had licensed a sober-married clergy with the same family responsibilities as other men. In place of a theocratic caste untrammelled by secular obligations and therefore a source of political intrigue, they had established a Church subordinate and allied to the State. But in their desire to give its ministers independence and social status, they had endowed them—and their wives and families —with opportunities for a larger share of this world's goods than

¹
"Take care what you are about," he observed of a scheme for national education, "for, unless you base all this on religion, you are only making so many clever devils." Stanhope,
261.

²
Sea-Bathing Places,
500.
See also Bamford, II,
254;
Bell, I,
184;
Bewick,
33, 35-7, 46-7;
Daniell, I,
51;
Dixon,
66;
Moorsom,
272-3;
Simpson,
77;
Woodward,
86.

was readily compatible with spiritual humility and inspiration. Tithes and a monopoly of ecclesiastical preferments, enhanced in value by rising agricultural prices, had blunted the edge of the spiritual sword. To men cast in a Puritan mould—and many Englishmen were—the Anglican Church, with its decorous but uninspired services, had become an affair of "hassocks, foot-boards and lolling cushions." Its bishops and higher clergy, though mostly kindly and cultured men living decent lives, were far too well endowed, dressed and connected.
¹
Those "rosy-cheeked, homes tailed divines," whose faces Charles Lamb thought fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, with their sporting, literary and farming tastes, had lost the common touch. Zeal to them was the hallmark of the underbred; when in
1814
the first Anglican Bishop was sent to England's new empire in the East, the Archbishop of Canterbury warned him to avoid enthusiasm.

Yet the tolerance of England, as always, afforded a corrective for its conservatism. The vacuum was filled by the Nonconforming congregations. Of these there were many: almost as many, one visitor concluded, as there were Englishmen. Their denominations were a commentary on the national capacity for individual eccentricity. There were Quakers—a most respected sect—whose founders, not content with more normal forms, quaked in their devotions, Jumpers who jumped up and down, Shakers who shook. Some believed in total immersion in baptism; others that divine truth had been revealed exclusively to some obscure, long-dead Englishman. During the past half-century a new band of enthusiasts called Methodists, reacting against the easy-going latitudinarianism of the Anglican Church, had charted stricter roads to salvation which, offering no concessions to worldly rank, made small appeal to the rich and powerful but a great deal to the poor and humble. Preaching a crusade among the neglected, Wesley's disciples had carried the gospel into the dark corners of what, but for them, might have ceased to be a Christian land. In its remoter parts there had sprung up a new religion of passion and poetry attuned to the simplicities and superstitions of the poor. Borrow has left a picture of a great multitude of rough men and women on a northern heath— "labourers and mechanics and their wives and children, dusty people,

¹
Simond was amazed by "the smart appearance of the English clergy." Simond, II,
134;
Austen, II,
430.
See Bamford, II,
211;
Cooper,
15-16. 78;
Lamb, VI,
480.

unwashed people, people of no account"—listening with strained, tense faces to a Methodist evangelist preaching from a wagon. On the wild Lancashire moors, whose valleys sheltered the chimneys of the new cotton factories, parties of pious weavers could be seen every Sunday making their way with sticks and lanthorns to tiny Bethels, where, amid groans and agonised confessions, they wrestled with the "Powers of the Prince of the Air" and, crying for "light" and "grace," "stormed the strongholds of Satan."
¹
Like the broadsides of the Nile and the raped breaches of Badajoz, they were a portent of the race's hidden fires.

Between these dissentient congregations and the old Church there existed a bitter enmity, theological, political and social. Though the loaves and fishes, the power and the glory, belonged to the Establishment, the rival forces were closely balanced; of London's four hundred places of worship, nearly half belonged to the Nonconformists. Yet though scornful squires might forbid their tenantry to enter Methodist chapels, and Wesleyan missionaries—"long-eared 'uns" to the profane—were sometimes thrown by village roughs into horse-ponds, nothing did more than Methodism to unite Britain in face of the Revolutionary peril. By convincing the more serious-minded workers of the validity of the Christian ethic, the great eighteenth-century rebel evangelists inoculated the English poor against the Jacobin fever that was sweeping the Continent. Only where there was hunger and intolerable injustice did the infidel virus triumph, and then only for so long as the more extreme hardships remained unalleviated.

The Terror temporarily opened the eyes of the British upper and middle classes. An age of comfortable rationalism was confronted with the depths of wickedness latent in human nature; there was a Devil after all.
²
The Evangelical revival within the established Church was its reply to the apathy of an over-indulged clergy and the heathen indifference of the neglected poor. It was a spontaneous movement to arouse sluggish consciences and alleviate popular sufferings by personal charity. While England's rulers struck back at the Revolution militant with the sword of Nelson and Wellington,

¹
Bamford, I,
115.
See Clapham, I,
216-17;
Cooper,
36-9, 79-86, 89-93;
Laven
gro,
161-3;
Leigh,
319;
Simond, II,
133.

2
"The awakening of the labouringclasses after the French Revolution," wrote Lady Shelley, "made the upper classes tremble... .The parson no longer hunted or shot five days in the week, cleaning his fowling-piece on the sixth prior to the preparation of
a
drowsy sermon, delivered on the seventh day to a sleeping congregation".