The Age of Elegance (55 page)

²
More than
£20,000,000
passed through his hands on this score alone. Herries,
108;
Corti,
189.

was able to help his brothers establish themselves in similar positions at the Courts of Austria, Prussia and Bourbon France. In keeping with the family tradition, he made it his business to offer private accommodation on easy terms to all in high place who needed it, including, it was believed, both the Regent and the principal permanent Secretary of the Treasury. It was Nathan's courier, outdistancing Wellington's dispatches, who brought the first news of Waterloo to London. Within a few years of the battle he was said to control the national rate of exchange.

What this great man achieved on an international stage, others did on a humbler. They did not succeed without arousing resentment and envy. Cobbett in his blind rage at the debt system—
It
, as he called it—which he believed was changing the values of the England he loved, wrote of "dark, dirty-faced, half-whiskered vermin" to whose expenditure he attributed the alarming expansion of London, Brighton, Cheltenham and other "odious wens." "You may always know them," he wrote, "by their lank jaws, the stiffness round their necks . . . their stays, their false shoulders, hips and haunches, their half-whiskers, and by their skins, colour of veal kidney-suet, warmed a little, and then powdered with dirty dust."
¹
He did not confine his venom to Jews; Scotsmen in his view were as bad or worse. Instead, he complained, of a resident, native gentry attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from childhood, practising hospitality without ceremony, a tribe of fund-lords, contractors, loan-jobbers, brokers and bankers were buying up the entire countryside near the capital—"a gentry only now-and-then residing, having no relish for country delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, and relying for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage but the dread of their power."
²
It was from this class that the great economist, Ricardo, came—a most kindly, amiable man, inheriting a younger son's portion from his Dutch-Jewish father, starting hfe in a stock-jobber's office at fourteen and making a fortune before he was forty, when he purchased the estate of Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. Later, buying an Irish rotten borough, he entered

¹
Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I,
68-9.
See
idem,
I,
30,
38-
9, 65.
Ibid.,
IT33-4.

Parliament where, despite his painful lack of oratory, he became immensely respected, his economic views being treated by all Parties almost as holy writ.

"According to th
e best information I can obtain
' wrote a correspondent in the October after Waterloo, "the landlords will fall short of their Michaelmas receipts upon an average one half." All over the country banks were calling in their money; some, like that in which Jane Austen's brother was a partner, had already closed their doors and stopped payment. The
Gazette
was crowded with bankruptcy notices and tradesmen's books with bad debts, and the table of the House of Commons piled with petitions from farmers and manufacturers. Cotton spinners in Lancashire and on the Clyde, hardware workers in Birmingham and iron-moulders at Merthyr Tydfil, Spitalfields silk-weavers, Leicestershire stockingers and Nottinghamshire hosiers, all were hungry, angry and clamorous.

As 1815 gave place to 1816 the situation grew worse. With bankers unwilling to advance or discount, no one, not even the rich, seemed to have any money to spare; by the spring ten thousand livery servants were said to be out of place. Among those who went down in the general ruin was Beau Brummell, the great dandy, who decamped for Calais with a few pounds. Another was Sheridan—"the last of the giants." Art prices fell to a level unknown in the his
tory of the sale rooms; at Philli
ps's a Claude which had fetched a thousand guineas in 181
3
went for £
70. Even Sir William Beechey was forced to beg for a settlement of his account with the royal household, "the unexpected alteration of the times making a shocking impression on the arts." The only thing which seemed to sell in the universal ruin were Scott's novels.
¹

The summer of 1816 proved the worst in memory, though in a brief spell of fine weather at the end of May young Keats, after a day in the Hampstead meadows, wrote his sonnet, "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill." Six weeks later, in a torrential July, Jane Austen among the sodden Hampshire fields finished her last and greatest book. "Oh! it rains again! it beats against the window," she told a friend, "we were obliged to turn back before we got there, but not soon

¹
Alison, I,
81;
Ann. Reg.,
1816, 54;
Colchester, IL
558, 560,
562,
584-5;
Creevey
Life and Times,
102;
GeorgeIV,
Letters, II
,
167-8;
Hill,
Austen,
II,
244-5;
Lockhart, III,
296, 333;
IV,
2,
ii;
Lady Shelley, I,
186;
Smart,
462, 512-13.

enough to avoid a pelter all the way home. We met Mr. Woolls.... I talked of its being bad weather for the hay, and he returned me the comfort of its being much worse for the wheat." Such a summer, her fellow writer, Mary Mitford, thought, was enough to make one wish for winter all the year round.
¹

It was the same all over western Europe. The English visitors who flocked to the Continent that summer—the first without war in fourteen years—found sullen, pitiless clouds, and the crops destroyed by snow and hailstones. Such stupid mists, fogs and perpetual density suggested to Byron that Castlereagh must have taken over the Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Heaven. Meanwhile, in every port British goods were piling up or selling below cost. During one week that year not a single entry for export or import was made at the London Custom-House—an event without parallel in its history.
²
The whole of the manufacturing districts seemed to be out of work. The unemployed colliers of Bilston Moor, with fifty men yoked to a wagon, set off with their coal for the capital to petition the Prince Regent; other teams of miners followed their example, and magistrates were kept busy intercepting them. A poor Lincolnshire widow, trudging from door to door trying to sell pasteboard boxes with her hungry boy trailing behind her, was followed by a blasphemous chimney-sweep who told her, with what seemed unanswerable logic, that if she did not sell the child for the two guineas which he flourished in his grimy hand she would soon be in the workhouse. In vain did Wilberforce and his friends revive the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, founded in the slump of 1
8
12, and assemble the Archbishop of Canterbury and three royal dukes at a public meeting at the London Tavern. In such a deluge of ruin, private alms availed nothing; they could not distribute incomes.

In their tribulation the people turned to Throne and Parliament. They found small comfort in either. The old, blind king was irrevocably mad—immured with his medical attendants in a wing of Windsor Castle, "with long, unkempt, milk-white beard," talking

¹
"It is snowing and hailing eternally and will kill all the lambs to a certainty unless it changes in a few hours. At any rate, it will cure us of the embarrassments arising from plenty and low markets."—Walter Scott, i8th April,
1816.
Lockhart, IV,
4-5.
See
idem,
9-10;
Austen, II,
457-9;
Colchester, II,
586;
Colvin,
Keats,
36;
Hill,
Austen,
249-57;
Mitford, I,
333-45
Newton,
17, 27;
Paget Brothers,
290;
Smart,
490.

²
Morning Chronicle,
3rd
July,
1816.
See Creevey,
Life and Times,
103-4;
Farington, VIII,
83, 95,
100.

incessantly, of the dead. The royal family was represented by his martinet queen and his seven stout, bald sons. The big man of all, Prinny, wrote Creevey, was ill in the bladder and afraid to show himself in the streets;
¹
his brothers deep in debt and involved in ludicrous controversies and scandals; his wife—a pantomime source of ribaldry and indecorum—gallivanting round the Mediterranean with an amorous Italian courier and a court of rogues and buffoons. The Regent's girth was said by malicious gossip to have grown so vast that his doctors had advised him to give up stays and let his belly drop; the cartoonists portrayed him with dewlaps hanging like bags over h
is tight dandy's collar. To milli
ons of decent folk his life seemed a perpetual scandal and his squanderous profusion, as a member of Parliament put it, more suggestive of the splendour of an oriental despot than "the sober dignity of a British prince seated in the bosom of his subjects." At the moment he was engaged on his most costly project—the rebuilding of the west end of his capital; a fashionable new park to bear his name and a sweeping avenue designed by his favourite Nash to give western London a north-south axis. That spring, while the sheep perished in the snows and an ailing Jane Austen, propped on two chairs, wrote and rewrote the closing chapters of
Persuasion,
he married his daughter, the heiress of England, to an obscure German prince; the bride could not help laughing at the words "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," for the bridegroom was so poor. A week earlier Lord Byron, publicly reviling his wife, attacked in a sensational novel by his mistress and believed to be guilty of incest with his sister, left England in a blaze of notoriety.

If the Crown could not rally a distressed nation, Parliament provided an ineffective sounding-board for its grievances. Representing neither the small manufacturing middle class nor the hungry workers, its members had little understanding of the suffering caused by the crisis. Nor had the King's Ministers. "Mouldy & Co.," as the young Whigs called them after the worthy, melancholy man who had stepped into the murdered Perceval's shoes, were still young in

¹
"Not even the intoxication of that greatest of all victories, Waterloo, could extract from the Mob a single indication of applause for him on the day he closed Parliament. They seem'd to think they did a great deal by maintaining a
dead silence
and no hissing, but they made loud and repeated applauses when the Duke of York's carriage appeared."—Festing,
176-7.
See Bury, I,
262;
II,
6-8, 20-4, 41, 50-3. 88-9, 92-3;
Creevey Papers,
I,
206-9;
Creevey,
Life and Times,
82;
George IV,
Letters,
II,
97-8, 110-11,120-1, 349;
Gronow, II,
255-6;
Dudley,
292;
Stanhope,
174.

years—their leader was not yet forty-five—but the cares of war and revolution, continued throughout their adult lives, had robbed them of all spring. Lord Liverpool, like most of his lieutenants, was of gentle rather than aristocratic o
rigin—the son of Charles Jenkin
son, Lord Bute's political factotum. As Lord Hawkesbury he had been Foreign Secretary in the well-meaning Addington Administration that had tried to appease Napoleon, and he had never recovered his spirits after that early blight. His high, stiff look, bold nose, strained mouth, the sorrowful, blinking, rather defiant eyes, the long, awkward, slouching neck bespoke the character, not infrequent in the second generation of
arrivistes,
of a stubborn bewilderment. Like most appeasers who have been humiliated by the object of their appeasement, he had become, in his quiet, un-emphatic way, an unshakable believer in the folly of compromise. He was thus the ideal leader of a party based on resistance to change, and the worst for guiding a country through a revolution.

He was by nature a kindly and not illiberal man. But the horrors of Revolution—he had personally witnessed the storming of the Bastille—and of long battling with Napoleon had frozen his sympathies. He had the virtue, desirable
in the leader of an Administra
tion, of being a disinterested, honourable colleague, and of knowing how to keep his mouth shut; Madame de Stael remarked that he had a talent for silence. In his uninspiring way he held the reins of party firmly and fairly. Though often testy and sometimes, when his royal master was unendurable, querulous, he seldom lost his head and never snubbed slower or stupider men into resentment, or aroused jealousy.

His colleagues were of a piece. They made no pretence to genius, though one of them, Castlereagh—as trusted in the Commons as at the Congress table—had great, if inarticulate, ability. The antithesis of the daemonic, Napoleonic or Byronic ideal which was the
ignis fatuus
of the age, they appealed to quiet men of property and commerce; a Ministry, as one supporter gratefully put it, without any of those "confounded men of genius.
^,,
They represented "the fear of democracy and the general property of the country"; they were inexorably opposed to what they called "the democratic spirit of the times" and thought anyone infected with it either wicked or deluded. They stood for Church and King, a "Bible, Crown and Constitution supremacy": for Bishops, rectors
and Justices of the Peace, for
Fellows of Oxford Colleges and honest, old-fashioned shopkeepers and steady merchants, for rents, tithes and investments, for the
status quo
in thought and deed. Their idea of the future was an unending extension of the present, though the old Lord Chancellor, Eldon—a rugged, self-made man of stoic character—dreamt of something more positive: a return to the tougher, more robust England of his youth before the French and American Revolutions.

Their enemies thought that they remained in office from love of power, their friends supposed it to be a habit of which they could not break themselves. They themselves attributed it to a sense of duty—"shadows who work all day in the cabinet and wrangle all night in the House, baited like bears at the stake." In this they were nearer the truth than the world supposed; for men of moderate ambitions, possessed of ample fortunes, there was nothing very attractive in guiding a high-spirited people through an interminable series of insoluble crises while enduring the vagaries of a spoilt unscrupulous Prince and the sallies of an irresponsible Opposition. It was their firm, unalterable conviction that they stood between the country and revolution; in this, by remaining in office—pilots, in Byron's jeering phrase, who had weathered every storm—they conceived themselves to be carrying on her struggle against Napoleon and the armed Jacobin. From that war there was for them no discharge. They received the support of all who thought, like Walter Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth, that those who demanded change were "rogue radicals" and "incendiaries."
¹
They were also supported by Wilberforce and his Evangelical "saints," who believed that the nation should endure affliction with resignation, that the glory of the poor was to be patient in adversity and of the rich not to question the dispensations of Providence but to live piously and soberly in gratitude for saving mercies.