The War of Wars (16 page)

A third key new feature was a massive extension in the power of the press. The vigour and vitriol of press and pamphlet attacks in the eighteenth century would shame tabloid newspapers today: rarely in human history can political issues have been aired so freely, with such crude vigour and character assassination.

The test case for press freedom was, of course, the struggle of John Wilkes in his often scurrilous attacks against not just the King’s favourite, Bute, but the monarchy itself. Initially dragged off to the Tower in 1763, Wilkes was freed after middle-class and ‘mob’ uproar, discredited and then exiled. He returned in 1768 to secure election for Middlesex. When the government had him expelled from the Commons and fined for obscene libel, he was tumultuously re-elected while rioting spread, leading to the killing of twelve demonstrators by a company of grenadiers.

In 1769, Wilkes was again unseated, and disorder reached a crescendo, effectively bringing down the mediocre government of the Duke of Grafton, and ushering in the more pragmatic and skilful North ministry. The Wilkes agitation gradually subsided, not least because, although a gifted polemicist, he was no public speaker, nor even a real revolutionary. But his virulent journalism showed just how far the limits of press freedom now extended, and the vigour of the parliamentary debate about his own fate made it impossible for him to mobilize opinion against ‘the system’ – even if he had wanted to do so.

The nearest equivalent of a Danton or Robespierre in England had been, in the end, more of an Irish rogue, and not one to bring the constitution down. The Wilkes riots never posed the threat to the body politic that revolution did in France twenty years later. The system had shown that it could respond – indeed Wilkes had brought down a government – and the challenge gradually faded, after securing its greatest triumph: the right to report parliamentary debates in the press.

If Britain was politically vibrant and mature, it was also endearingly and dottily obsessed with precisely the same sorts of issues that preoccupy the British chattering classes to this day. The conduct of the royal children was a national obsession. Aristocratic scandals were highlighted by the press, from the trial of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy, to that of Lord Baltimore for rape (he was found to have been set up by the victim’s family), to the rakish life of Lord Lyttleton, and to the indiscretions of the dazzling young Duchess of Devonshire.

The fashionable woman, in 1775, was criticized by the
London Magazine
for her tendency to:

rise at ten, throw herself into a hurry, dress before she goes out, fly away to the exhibitions of painting and models and wax, and a thousand other things: take a peep at a play to encourage a poor player on his benefit night – fly to the Pantheon [the hugely fashionable new gathering place on Oxford Street] to hear Agujari sing – whisk from thence to Ranelagh, to meet dear Lord William, and adjourn with the dear creature to Vauxhall to finish the evening with a glass of burnt champagne: then, yawning on her return, assure her dreaming lord, that she cannot support it; it is too much; the human spirit will not endure it, sink dead as a flat into her bed, and rise next morning in pursuit of similar follies.

In 1787, there was a royal pronouncement against vice and immorality after a long campaign to restore family values, which inveighed against drinking, swearing and gambling. There was vigorous debate between those like the Derbyshire poet, Erasmus Darwin, who advocated bringing up children without discipline and those who urged mental control and physical punishment. Measures were enacted to improve the lot of poor children, keep them off the streets and to regulate their use as chimney sweeps (a result of the new narrow chimneys on Georgian terraced houses).

Animal and even vegetable rights were championed. Fox-hunting was criticized. Travel, and travel-writing, became middle-class obsessions. Women’s fashions were characterized by plunging necklines and provocatively protruding bottoms. Debate raged over the ‘masculine’ roles of active women and the need to keep them attending to home and children. Sexual mores were chewed over relatively openly, and books such as
Fanny Hill
fed the public’s appetite for the nascent industry of pornography. A prominent playwright, Samuel Foote, was ruined by his homosexuality.

Rich young men indulged in the ‘macaroni’ pursuit of foreign fashions and deriding English tastes. Capital punishment, penal reform and poverty were earnestly debated. Aristocratic decadence and irresponsibility were satirized and demonized while George III and Queen Charlotte came to represent the essence of bourgeois respectability taken to prudish extremes.

In fact, the age represented the triumph of the middle classes well before the arrival of the Victorians: if the latter have been identified with bourgeois values it is because the size of that class was much greater during the nineteenth century. If more extensive social reforms were passed later, it was because the conditions which required them had not yet materialized during the eighteenth century. But the middle classes then showed just as much sensitivity to social conditions as their descendants. The triumph of the respectable bourgeoisie had already taken place during the eighteenth century, overlaid as it was with an aristocratic veneer.

No period in British history could have been more agreeable for the well off. Scientific innovation, following in the footsteps of Newton in the previous century, abounded; intellectual and philosophical discourse raged. It was the era of a renewal of the British literary tradition – epitomized by the fashionable obsession for Shakespeare, popularized by the great actor-producer of the age, David Garrick – and such writers as Samuel Johnson, whose
Dictionary
was published in 1755; Henry Fielding, whose
Tom Jones
was published in 1749; and, later, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Sheridan and Jane Austen. Sir Watkin Williams Wynn was patron to Garrick, who was godfather to his son Charles, who in turn patronized his friend the poet Robert Southey. A member of the Dilettanti Society along with Sir Thomas Hamilton, consul at Naples and husband of the wayward Emma, Williams Wynn embodied the artistic and intellectual pursuits of the aristocracy in the late eighteenth century.

In architecture the Palladian fashion was succeeded by the neoclassical and, later, by the Gothic revival. Robert and James Adam, James Wyatt and William Chambers scattered their perfectly proportioned gems around England. In art, Hogarth’s acerbic and idiosyncratic brilliance was succeeded by the finest generation of British painters – Gainsborough, Stubbs, Constable, Hudson, Kauffman, Ramsay, Zoffany, Lawrence, Turner, Hoppner and Reynolds. The Royal Academy and the British Museum were founded.

The Grand Tour to Italy became
de rigueur
for wealthy Englishmen, who called on Venice, Florence and Rome, travelled to Naples to experience eruptions of Vesuvius, and, in the case of the wealthiest, had their portraits painted by Pompeo Batoni. It was the greatest flowering of art, literature and architecture in British history.

But Britain was also on the threshold of a new, altogether more serious age. The effervescence of the eighteenth century and its light, airy, exuberant art, architecture, literature and criticism were about to be replaced by the ponderousness of administration. The huge Indian empire acquired by Clive’s buccaneering adventurism in the finest tradition of the English gentleman amateur now brought searing responsibility. Above all, the new supremacy of the middle classes, based on prosperity, a flourishing entrepreneurial spirit and technical and business innovation associated with such pioneering giants as Brunel, Telford, Stephenson and Davy was about to give way to the new period of disfiguring mass urbanization and industrialization.

Major change was perceptibly creeping across the land. It was the age of speed, travel, and the end of the first generation of bright young things since the Restoration a hundred years before. The next fifty years wrought more change to the British landscape than the previous 500.

Speed astonishing by the standards of previous generations became possible. As late as 1740 it still took around six days to travel from Chester to London. By 1780 it took just two days. The time from London to Gloucester was slashed from two days to one. A journey from Bath to Oxford took only ten hours, at a miraculous speed of seven miles an hour.

By 1770 turnpike roads, which had barely linked Birmingham, Chester and Manchester with London twenty years before, crisscrossed the whole country in an intricate gridlock from Truro to Aberystwyth, Holyhead, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Hull, Norwich and Dover. By 1765 there were an astonishing 20,000 private coaches on the road, excluding stage coaches and hackneys for public transport. The proliferation of private transport broke down rural isolation and local commercial monopolies, bringing local prices tumbling.

Another communications revolution was under way – the canals snaking across Britain. This had begun with the waterways constructed to bring cheap coal to Liverpool and Manchester in the late 1750s. By the 1780s a hugely improved canal system permitted the economic transport of bulk goods the length and breadth of England, transforming local economies and making possible the development of cities well
away from the coast or from ready sources of raw material. It was this colossal public investment, harnessing private capital, that permitted the industrial revolution to get seriously under way.

A revolution was under way in the countryside too: enclosures, by which individual farmers took over common land, were spreading rapidly. The land not owned by the big estates was being privatized. Nearly 4,000 enclosure acts were passed between 1750 and 1810, affecting roughly a fifth of all land in England and Wales.

The old village communes were replaced by a class of prosperous middling farmers, while the poorer rustics became seasonal labour dependent on the owners’ whim. Much hardship was caused, but the employment offered by the new agricultural improvements was also considerable. ‘Engrossing’ permitted the amalgamation of small tenant farms into bigger units, driving many peasant smallholders off the land. Farming banks sprang up around the country, financing the new prosperous farms to stockpile their produce and drive up prices.

The novelist Frances Brooke summed up the impact of the changes in her
History of Lady Julia Mandeville
.

It is with infinite pain I see Lord T—pursuing a plan, which has drawn on him the curse of thousands, and made his estate a scene of desolation; his farms are in the hands of a few men, to whom the sons of the old tenants are either forced to be servants, or to leave the country to get their bread elsewhere. The village, large and once populous, is reduced to about eight families; a dreary silence reigns on their deserted fields; the farm houses, once the seats of cheerful smiling industry, now useless, are falling in ruins around him; his tenants are merchants and engrossers, proud, lazy, luxurious, insolent and spurning the hand which feeds them.

There was a breakdown in the old privileged relationship between landowners and farm labourers, many of the latter becoming the fodder for the new industries. It is wrong, though, to see enclosures as a cause of the industrial revolution, except in that they released some capital. Industry did not spring up to absorb surplus labour: rather the new unemployed were lucky that industry expanded at about that time to
provide them with work. Even farm workers with settled employment were attracted by the supposed comforts and wages of the new industries.

There was, too, a dramatic self-confident expansion of urban Britain. London, from around 500,000 inhabitants in 1700, had nearly doubled by 1800. Even more impressive in relative terms was the fourfold growth of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds between 1700 and 1770. At the beginning of the century only seven towns – Newcastle, Bristol, Yarmouth, York, Exeter, Norwich and Colchester – had more than 10,000 people; by 1800 the number was more than fifty. The urban population jumped from around a fifth in 1700 to around a third in 1800, or about 2 million of England’s 6 million people.

The second half of the eighteenth century also at last saw a concerted drive for urban improvement: the dingy, higgledy-piggledy, crack-paved, open-sewered streets were no more. In 1754 Westminster was paved and lighted. Drain-pipes replaced spouts. Jutting house signs were replaced by numbers. Piped water was introduced, as celebrated by George Keate in 1779: ‘The good order preserved in our streets by day – the matchless utility and beauty of their illumination by night – and what is perhaps the most essential of all, the astonishing supply of water which is poured into every private house, however small, even to profusion! – the superflux of which clears all the drains and sewers, and assists greatly in preserving good air, health, and comfort.’ Slums and appalling conditions continued to thrive in the approaches to London and other major cities. But the cramped industrial kennels of the Victorian era had not yet sprung up. For the most part England was a joyous combination of the best of the old with the vigour, dynamism and change of the new before the latter’s ill-effects were to sink in.

With France’s acceleration into revolutionary chaos after 1789, all this seemed at risk. Britain’s constitutional monarchy, its well-mannered oligarchical and aristocratic system, its ordered economic revolution – all seemed suddenly endangered by the call for ordinary people to rise against their masters on the other side of the Channel. Britain’s only defence was that it had evolved its own version of a Rousseau-style
social contract between governors and governed by sharply reducing the power of the monarchy, permitting free speech, and a lively and vigorously combative parliamentary system – in marked contrast to the centralized and stultified style of monarchical rule now tottering in France.

But would these defences hold, in the face of the French revolutionaries’ contemptuous dismissal of parliamentary democracy as a sham? Pitt by 1790 was not at all sure. He adopted a two-pronged policy: doing as little as possible to excite the enmity of revolutionary France – a policy which was deeply unwise and unrealistic, as we shall see in a moment – and, domestically, a crackdown on the very freedoms Britain had come to cherish over the previous three-quarters of a century.