The Years of Endurance (28 page)

Had the nation in its hour of need assumed a direct control of its own credit instead of allowing it to become the monopoly of the professional moneylender, Britain's history in the next century might have been happier. But to have done so would have required a revolution in men's ideas and a resort to first principles alien to the pragmatic English mind. An Englishman in difficulties always went to the "Jews "—the ever improvident leader of the Opposition called his ante-chamber Jerusalem—and the nation did the same. The result was not only the rapid rise of a powerful moneyed class,
which had as yet only imperfectl
y absorbed the national tradition, but a gradual disintegration of established standards, values and ways of life. Fox's criticism of Pitt's war finance that it turned a nation of sturdy peasants and squires into fundholders, industrialists and paupers was not wholly factious. It has been forgotten by posterity as much as it was by his own contemporaries that the great Whig in his seemingly treasonable opposition to the war was animated not so much by sympathy with French principles as by deep love of an abiding England which he felt was jeopardised by more than Jacobins. Like Cobbett after him he was haunted by a vague fear of the growth of something sinister: the indefinable "
it
" of the radical yeoman's angry jargon.

Yet Pitt's England was so strong that it was little troubled by shadows. Its feet stood firmly and confidently on the solid ground. Freedom of money to move where it pleased was part of its tradition. If an ever larger proportion of its riches was going into fugitive and shifting forms of wealth, it did not seem less prosperous for the change but more so. Britain kept bank and shop as well as it kept farm: money-grubbing seemed to suit its hearty and vigorous people. Even a little town like Ripon had three private banks: silversmiths, grocers and cornfactors at the slightest encouragement would set up a banker's sign, purchase their customers' bills and take money on deposit. In the north the industrial districts were full of thriving manufacturers whose grandfathers had been hammermen or weavers. Though they perpetually took great risks, they were making money hand over fist to spend and invest. Pitt is scarcely to be blamed that he refused to kill the men that laid the golden eggs. For he saw in the swelling industrial wealth of the country his trump card against the Jacobin.

A Scottish visitor to England in the summer of 1795 saw
little
sign of the strain through which the nation was passing. On the surface he noted everywhere the symbols of wealth and long-established civilisation. He journeyed through clean market towns and broad, main streets with fine porticoed cloth-halls, elegant shops and inns, caught glimpses of thriving manufacturies in the' hollows between the wild northern hills, and rejoiced in the smiling abundance of the countryside—the boundless Lancashire plain bright with corn, the rosy-faced girls in the fields with their petticoats of pink and blue tucked up as they tossed the hay, the universal

good breeding and courtly manners of the rustic population.
¹
All things seemed to betoken a widespread culture and a people strong in the plentitude of their heritage: the Thames winding placidly by Eton's groves and spires with its musical picnic parties, its coloured groups under the trees and classical temples on verdant slopes; the bells that sounded from every village tower; the fiddler on the roof of the stage-coach and the guard's horn; the rustic strings and hautboys of the church choirs; the painted signs over the alehouse doors with their rude, vigorous verses; the obelisks to Liberty and the " glorious Revolution " rising above the trees of stately parks.

At the top of Highgate Hill the traveller, first seeing London, paused for breath: a nearer view of that wonderful city, still enchanted by Wren's measuring rod, left him only the more amazed. The endless new streets and squares of Bloomsbury and Mary-le-bone; the sight of Covent Garden in the morning with its profusion of roots, flowers and fruits, its barrows, waggons and rushing thousands; the coloured regattas on the Thames and the sparkling flow of fashion in Hyde Park; the forest of masts in the Pool, and the illuminated walks and murmuring arbours of Vauxhall were like so many transformations in an Arabian tale. No wonder that when the departing minister of Clunie mounted the northern stagecoach at the Green Dragon, Bishopsgate, he sat for long in a kind of maze, dunking with an indescribable mixture of feelings on all he had seen, suffered and enjoyed during his three weeks in the metropolis: its magnificence, extent, populousness, riches, poverty, dissipation, luxuries, vanities, vices.

But this simple Scot, who on a bright July day followed the Horse Guards down the Mall behind an admirable band of music and gaped at them drawn up in all their splendour before Whitehall, was seeing only one side of English life in 1795. There was a dark reverse, and had he stood on
the
other side of the Treasury windows he might have learnt something of it from Mr. Pitt. A few talks with the polite rustics he passed on his ride from Carlisle to London would have taught him even more: the shocking truth

¹
" In passing along the public roads in this country one cannot help remarking the good breeding of the people, displayed even in their children. You never meet a country person here, young or old, but salutes you with a bow or a curtsey, and a * good morrow.' "—
MacRitchie,
39.

which John Byng discovered in the first autumn of war from a chance dialogue with a Staffordshire countryman; the rising price of every necessity and the growing misery of the poor. It was they whom war taxation on goods and services ruined, not the rich. For them there was no escaping its full force. One of the Bishops, defending the impartiality of Pitt's fiscal system, compared it to a building which, sinking equally in every part, suffered no structural injury. " True," replied Wakefield, the radical scholar, " and you, my Lord Bishop, who dwell in the upper apartments, might still enjoy the prospect from your window. But what would become of me and the good people who live on the ground floor? "
¹
The autumn of 1794 saw the first of a succession of bad harvests: the new year was one of the severest winters ever known in England. While the army was retreating across the ice in Holland, the peasant and the artisan were shivering and tightening their belts. The London death roll of February, 1795, was the highest since the Great Plague. The undertakers' supply of black horses giving out, they were forced to " mow away brown." Coal sold in the City at
3
guineas a chaldron, and so successful were the privateers on the east coast that during a whole month only a single collier entered the river. Throughout the summer—an exceptionally cold one which blighted sheep and crops—the rise in corn prices continued. By July the quartern loaf, the staple dietary of the poor, cost a shilling.

The remedies taken by the authorities only touched the fringe of the evil. Parish collections for the deserving poor, public kitchens —in Edinburgh during March 11,000 persons were fed by charity— royal proclamations advocating standard wheaten bread and discouraging the use of flour for powdering hair, softened but could not prevent acute national suffering.
The Times,
full of dieting advice, urged its comfortable readers to forgo foodstuffs essential to the poor. Fish was to be served as often as possible, the use of pastry to be forbidden, and " persons in affluent circumstances " were to sit down " with a determined resolution to eat only one kind of butcher's meat." The Middlesex magistrates forswore the consumption of puddings and pies, the East India Company abridged " the customary expense of their dinners," and the House of Lords and Privy Council put on solemn record the advantages of

¹
Espriella,
I,
41.

household bread. In all this the strength of libertarian tradition and the lack of any system of central organisation hampered the nation's war effort. Compulsion and uniformity were repugnant to the English mind. Remedial action was therefore voluntary, piecemeal and spasmodic.

According to its lights Parliament did what it could. Bounties were offered on imported wheat, and the manufacture of starch and distillation of spirit from grain were forbidden. The Army gave up the use of hairpowder and the Board of Agriculture—a semiofficial, semi-voluntary institution of the indefinable kind peculiar to England—encouraged the digging of allotments in parks and offered a premium of a ^1000 to the grower of the largest breadth of potatoes on virgin land. Prosecutions were also instituted against food speculators, forestallers and regrators and fraudulent bakers.

But as always in the eighteenth century, initiative in what was regarded as a domestic matter was left to the local powers—to the Justices of the Peace. On May 6th, 1795, the Berkshire Magistrates assembled at Speenhamland took a step of momentous consequence. Their immediate concern was the unemployment of clothworkers in the Newbury district. They had met under the terms of an Elizabethan statute to fix a standard wage for day labourers. After the manner of their race they were seeking what seemed to them fair. But, influenced by the new economic doctrine of
laissez-faire,
and faced by the growing dependence of employers on uncontrollable world conditions, they chose to alleviate distress by subsidising wages out of rates. By fastening the price of relief to the price of the gallon loaf and the size of the recipient's family, they met a war-time emergency by a measure which in the course of the next generation pauperised the bulk of the rural population. For not only was the labourer's reward dissociated from his own industry, but the farmer was encouraged to pay low wages by the knowledge that the parish would make good the deficiency out of rates. The consequent rise in the latter—in one village they were to touch 18s. in the £—in turn drove the poorer ratepayers on to the parish.

The Berkshire magistrates were confronted with a grave social crisis which demanded an immediate solution. They tackled it, English-wise, without thinking about the future. Their brethren in other distressed counties followed their example. In the summer of 1795 there were serious riots: at Portsea the mob attacked bakers' shops and forced them to sell at popular prices, at Seaford the Militia broke out of barracks and seized all foodstuffs in the town. The authorities could not allow such a state of affairs to continue with the Jacobin at the gate. They took the first remedy at hand.

That it was temporary and cheapjack is easier to realise now than at the time. The evil had roots deeper than the war. The social machine was not standing up to the strain imposed by rapid economic change. The rigid parish system of poor relief and settlement, which had sufficed for a purely rural community, proved inadequate to the stresses of industrialism. The progress of enclosure, accelerated by the demand of the ever-growing towns, was reducing the formerly proud and contented smallholder into a landless peasant dependent on a wretched wage.

For with the elimination of the small landlord by the great went the destruction of the social balance of a thousand years. The process was as yet only gradual and partial and largely un-perceived. The Government, absorbed in the war, saw the new rural poverty as a symptom of a purely ephemeral distress—something arising out of the struggle—instead of the first stage of a wasting disease. It mistook the resultant discontent with Church and State for abstract sympathy with the French Revolution. But the bitterness did not spring from any natural leaning to Jacobin ideology. It was merely the anger of men who compared their present lot with a happier past. It was the sorrowful and hopeless rebellion of the disinherited.

The sullen turbulence of the cottager deprived of the communal fallow and stubble pasture and his forefathers' right of cutting furze and turf on the common, seemed treason and defeatism to statesmen grappling with armed Jacobinism. Even a crowd at St. Neot's Fair, gaping at a peepshow of the King of France being guillotined, alarmed them. They could not differentiate between a factious partisan like the Duke of Bedford, who opposed the war and pretended to be a democrat while engrossing his neighbours' lands,
¹
and a bewildered peasant robbed of his birthright who damned the King and " Billy Pitt" over a pot of ale or inveighed against the Game Laws which kept him from feeding his starving family. But such a malcontent had really little in common with the ambitious
frondeur
who sought to enlarge his political power

¹
See
Torrington,
III,
200.

through a National Convention or the youthful idealist whom the lofty declamations of the Girondins had made a Republican. What he wanted was not liberty or equality but justice—the eternal need of his race. Yet with horror piled on horror in Paris and a world at war, it was hard for the Government to distinguish.

Ever since the outbreak of war the Home Office had been tightening its measures against those suspected of revolutionary sympathies. In 1793 alone 200,000 cheap copies of Paine's
Rights of Man
had been sold. In Scotl
and, a third of whose parliamentary seats were controlled by 1300 electors, a powerful minority demanded reform; the weavers of Dundee, always a turbulent town, actually planted a Tree of Liberty. Dundas, who beneath his bonhomie shared the stark pugnacity of his race, gave the official word for strict repression. Among the victims was the poet Burns, who, to keep his appointment as exciseman, was constrained to make a humiliating recantation of the " democractic " expressions that had escaped him in his cups. The ringleaders of the " pro-Jacobin " faction were savagely punished by the Lord Justice Clerk, McQueen of Braxfield—an irascible old judge who made no disguise of his hatred for " traitors." Palmer, an old Etonian, was sentenced to five years transportation for an " Address to the People " telling them that they had been plunged into war by a wicked Ministry and compliant Parliament. A young advocate, Muir—Vice-President of the "Associated Friends of the Constitution and of the People " —suffered even more severely on account of a suspicious visit to Paris and Ireland in the opening months of the war.

Agitation for parliamentary reform which had seemed innocent enough in peace-time assumed a different aspect when it took the form of denunciation of a war for national existence. In January, 1794, the London Corresponding Society called a mass meeting to protest against the war and urged a Convention of the People. It did not soften the Government's asperity against such dissentients that their views found support in educated circles and even in Parliament, where Pitt was taunted by Fox's faction with having himself been a reformer a few years back. After further mass meetings in April at Chalk Farm and Sheffield it decided to act.