The Age of Elegance (56 page)

The Opposition represented the great Whig Dukes and landowners—the Grenvilles, Cavendishes, Russells and Fitzmaurices; the disciples of Fox, led by Lord Grey and Fox's
nephew, Lord Holland; a sprinkli
ng of young patricians of rather raffish, radical views; the respectable middle-class intellectuals of the
Edinburgh Review;
and the Nonconformists. They enjoyed the rather disapproving

"
¹
See Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
ist May,
1820; 23rd
Sept.,
1820;
Auckland, IV,
385;
Brock
passim;
Byron.
Age of Bronze;
De Selincourt,
Middle Years,
II,
569, 806-15;
Farington, VII,
87;
Leigh
Hunt,
Autobiography,
I,
246;
Keats, IV,
320;
Lockhart, III,
112;
IV,
125;
V,
357;
Quarterly Review,
1843,
IV,
125
—Article by Rev. T.James; Simond, II,
161;
Stanhope,
287;
Two Duchesses,
362;
Woodward,
50;
Yonge,
passim
.

support of the utilitarian radicals, the followers of the rich jurist, Jeremy Bentham, whose programme was the greatest good of the greatest number ascertainable by processes of strictly logical deduction never likely to be pursued by any political Party. Weak in numbers through their unpopular opposition to the war, the Whigs made up for it by their eloquence and capacity for faction. They were great hands at denouncing everything Government did, but fundamentally, except for the extreme radical left wing, believed in much the same things as their opponents. They supported the hereditary peerage, the rule of law, the sanctity of inherited property,
laissez faire,
the right of traders and capitalists to pursue their own unrestrained advantage, and the subordination of the lower orders to their social superiors.
¹

Like most politicians who have been too long in opposition and lack a leader, the Whigs found it hard to get on with one another.
²
Since Fox's death, ten years before, their only real allegiance had been to his ghost. Their most brilliant orator, Sheridan, had long drunk himself into a decline, while the rising hope of the Party, the lawyer Brougham, was too erratic, pushing and plebeian to be trusted by his colleagues. Whitbread, the brewer, a shrewd honourable man, had committed suicide a few weeks after Waterloo. The titular leader of the Party in the Commons, George Ponsonby, was in failing health, and his lieutenant, Tierney, the son of an Irish wine merchant, was known to its irreverent younger members as Mother Cole.
³
The most distinguished Whig in the Lower House was Romilly, the advocate of penal reform and a foe of every form of cruelty and oppression.

For the Whigs the crisis was an opportunity. Only one of the Ministers—"a good, quiet, easily-beaten set of block-heads"—was capable of a tolerable speech, and he, Canning—the fallen Tory archangel and the one man of genius among Pitt's followers—was so distrusted by most of his colleagues as to seem a negligible factor.

¹
Hazlitt remarked that the two parties were like rival stage-coaches; they splashed each other with mud but went to the same place.

²
"They are a very powerful Party, indeed, if they would but abstain from fighting with each other . . . which makes it so unpleasant to have anything to do with them."—Dudley,
184.
See
idem,
198.
See Broughton, I,
138, 179;
Cecil,
Young Melbourne,
210;
Creevey Papers,
I,
124, 164, 172, 192, 207, 324, 327:
Life and Times,
55;
Granville, II,
485-6, 493-4;
Halevy, II,
53-4;
Holland,
Journal,
I,
28;
Moore,
Byron,
182,184, 345;
Simond, II,
25, 35, 163;
Stanley,
79-81;
Woodward,
53-6. 76.

³
After his habit of referring to himself as a plain, honest man, like the lady in Foote's farce who presided over a female establishment in Covent Garden and loved to indulge in flattering references to her own character.
Creevey Papers,
I,
327.

"Our ground
' wrote Brougham to Creevey, "is clearly retrenchment in all its ways, with ramifications into the royal family, property tax, jobs of all sorts and distresses of the landed interest; in short it is the richest mine in the world!" The clamour for tax reduction became almost deafening. The Government, inundated with petitions from the commercial interest—assiduously collected by Brougham—and threatened by its own supporters, promised to reduce expenditure from a hundred to eighty millions and jettisoned the income and malt taxes. Castlereagh, fearful for the peace of Europe, spoke sadly of an ignorant impatience of taxation; the Services were again drastically cut. The Regent, too, was forced to abandon his hope of crowning his metropolitan improvements with a new palace,
¹
and the northward march of Regent Street was halted at Piccadilly Circus. Even the Elgin Marbles were nearly sent packing back to Greece. "Economy is the order of the day," wrote Walter Scott, "and I assure you they are shaving properly close."
²

Yet, for all these measures, the distresses of the country increased. With the corn sprouting in October, wheat touched 103s. in December. In Ireland, where the potato crop failed, the poor were reduced to stalks and nettles. Bamford saw an unemployed calico weaver's wife drop dead from hunger, with her babe at her breast, as she begged before the Middleton overseers for relief. A Scotsman travelling across England at the year's end found half the houses along the road with placards announcing the sale of farming stock. Everywhere farmers were ruined, bankers failing, the bread like dough. The odious cotton and worsted mills, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote from Halifax, had become mere incumbrances on the ground. "Few get more than half work—great numbers none at all.
..
. For a time whole streets—men, women and children—may be kept alive by public charity, but the consequences will be awful if nothing can be manufactured in these places where such numbers of people have been gathered together. It can never be expected, or even wished, I think, that the state of our manufactures should ever again be what it has been, but, if there be not a revival of trade in a smaller way,

¹
"Our fat friend will have to live within compass and fire off no more crackers in the Park."—Walter Scott to J. B. S. Morritt, Lockhart, IV,
10-11.

²
Lockhart, IV,
7,10-11.
See Alison,
86-7, 94-7;
Brougham, II,
303-5. 312;
Colchester, II,
579;
Creevey Papers,
I,
247-8;
Life and Times,
99-100;
Farington, VIII,
77-8;
George IV,
Letters,
II,
154-5, 158-9;
Halevy, II,
6-8;
Hansard, XXXIV-XXXV; Peel, I,
211, 216-17;
Smart,
466-70, 497, 539
people and things cannot go on as they are." The national debt, it was rumoured, was to be wiped out, and Parliament reformed.
^’

Humbler men, no more able to understand what ailed their country than their rulers, took their own remedy. Throughout 1816 a savage anger, unknown in England since the Civil War, spread through the labouring classes. It began in the early summer among the population of the enclosed villages. In Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire ricks and barns were burnt, some by night and others openly by day, while crowds surrounded mills and bakeries shouting for price reductions. The worst outbreak was at Littleport, where the cellars were broken into and the town subjected to a sack. Anxious Justices were sent galloping Londonwards for help, and cavalry was dispatched to the shires. At Cambridge, where the arrival of the fenmen was hourly expected, three hundred special constables were enrolled and the Vice-Chancellor prepared to arm the undergraduates.

Despite resort by a Special Commission to the gallows—Government's sovereign remedy for all ills—the rioting spread first to the south-west and then to the manufacturing districts. The pitmen of the Tyneside and Staffordshire, the Irish slum-dwellers of Glasgow, who, nestling in crowds about the Calton, Bridgeton and Gorbals, were always ripe for mischief, the housewives of Sunderland, the Preston weavers and Welsh iron-moulders all attacked shops and factories. In October the employees of the Tredegar ironworks, faced by further wage reductions and rising prices, marched on Merthyr Tydfil to stop the blast furnaces. Later, 12,000 strong, they crossed the mountains to call out the colliers of Crundin, Newbridge and Aberca
rne. Only the arrival of the mili
tary prevented worse.
²

The most alarming outbreak of all came at the year's end. Throughout the autumn the radicals of the capital had been gathering strength. At a charitable meeting for the relief of the manufacturing poor organised by Wilberforce and presided over by the Duke of

¹
Ann. Reg.
1816,
Chron.
111-12,167;
Ashton, II,
97-8;
Bamford, II,
56-8;
Colchester, II,
584;
De Selincourt, II,
765-8;
Hamilton ofDalzell
MS., p.
108;
Hansard, XXXDC,
1430;
Smart,
490, 492, 512, 540;
Tooke, II,
12.

²
Ann. Reg.
1816.
Chron.,
60, 64-5, 67-71, 73-6, 79, 93,
ioo-l,
115-18, 127, 165-8, 173-4;
Ashton, II,
89-94;
Bamford, II, n; Colchester, II,
595;
Coupland,
Wilberforce,
419-20;
Halevy, II,
8-14;
Newton,
34;
Smart,
489, 492.

York, they shouted the royal chairman down and forced him to leave amid storms of booing. All over the country the revived Hampden Clubs, thrown open to the workers by penny-a-week subscriptions, met in alehouses and dissenting chapels to debate manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. Their proceedings were kept at fever heat by Cobbett, who, evading the stamp duty on cheap newspapers by issuing his
Political Register
as a twopenny pamphlet, sold nearly 50,000 copies of a single number. Thereafter he repeated his defiance weekly. Mass meetings occurred in all the principal industrial towns; at Manchester, Glasgow and Paisley over a hundred thousand were reported to have attended. In the middle of November a still larger gathering took place in Spa Fields, London, when the orator, Henry Hunt, supported by the tricolour and a cap of Liberty on a pike, told an excited crowd that their all was being taxed to pension the bastards of the Tory aristocracy. He ended by promising to carry their petition—"the last resort before physical force"—to the Prince Regent. A few days later Shelley, writing to Byron in Italy, predicted either radical reform when Parliament met in January or the triumph of anarchy and illiterate demagogues.

On December 2nd a further mass meeting was called in Spa Fields. It was preceded by a distribution of handbills proclaiming that death would be a relief to millions. Yet just as Hunt had stolen the earlier meeting from the parliamentary demagogue, Sir Francis Burdett, so Hunt's limelight was now stolen by a wagon load of fanatics supported by a gang of seamen with revolutionary tricolours. Two rabble-rousers named Watson, after inflammatory orations, asked who would follow them. Thereupon, before Hunt had even arrived, the sailors and a portion of the crowd set off fo
r a gunsmith's shop and, after ki
lling a merchant, marched on the City. They were opposed at the Royal Exchange by the Lord Mayor with a small detachment of police officers, whereupon they made off with a great hullabullo for the Minories, where they broke into two more gunsmiths' and acquired two small cannon. Later, after a futile summons to the Tower and a skirmish with the Life Guards in Aldgate High Street, they dispersed in small groups, whooping, breaking windows and robbing passers-by.
¹

¹
Alington,
72-3;
Ann. Reg.
1816;
Chron.,
190-1;
Ashton, II,
122-30;
Byron,
Corr.,
II,
20-2;
Halevy, II,
18;
Colchester, II,
581;
Smart,
493;
State Trials
.

Across the sea, those who wished England well watched anxiously. In Dublin, Robert Peel was asked whether it was true that the Duke of York was at the head of the Guards leading the people against his brother. The Regent had his pictures at Carlton House valued and insured. All the world was awaiting the opening of Parliament in January, when it was known that the reformers were to present petitions with half a million signatures. The National Convention of People's Delegates in London passed a resolution in favour of universal suffrage; the Lancashire delegates demanded annual Parliaments, manhood suffrage at eighteen, equal electoral districts and the exclusion of placemen and pensioners.
¹

On the morning of January
28th
,
at the Golden Cross Hotel in Charing Cross, Hunt, in all the glory of blue lapelled coat, top-boots and white hat and kerseys, handed the petitions to Lord Cochrane, who was to carry them to the Lords. The tribune of the people was in roaring spirits, rolling and unrolling the scrolls and exchanging greetings with the crowd. Later Lord Cochrane was borne shoulder-high to Westminster Hall, where it took him two hours to unload his
petitions. Meanwhile the Regent,
surrounded by Life Guards, drove to Parliament amid storms of abuse and ribaldry. As the royal cortege returned down the Mall, the glass of his coach was broken in two places, either by stones or by a bullet from an airgun.
²

The attack startled the country. From the Government's point of view the effect was salutary. It made the Regent, in Scott's words, "a good manageable boy," and sobered the House of Commons. For, as reports poured in from the provinces of designs for midnight risings, secret orders for pikes, and overtures to the armed forces, Whig and Tory alike stiffened against the reformers. If it was to come to a fight for hearth and home, Englishmen knew where they stood.

There was reason for alarm. The English poor were not weaklings; they were suffering almost beyond endurance. They were passionate, easily swayed by rumour, and uneducated. Behind the stubborn, rather bewildered, law-abiding artisan, marching with banners to

¹
Bamford, II,
13-14,24-6;
Byron,
Corr.,
II,
31;
Farington, VIII,
106;
Halevy, II,
20-1;
Moore,
Byron,
330-1, 337;
Peel, I,
235;
Smart,
545-7;
Trevelyan,
Grey.

²
Ashton, II,
135-6;
Bamford, II,
19, 21-2;
Colchester, II,
599-601;
Gronow, II,
308-9;
Halevy, II,
21-2;
Lockhart, IV,
43;
Peel, I,
237.