Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (5 page)

The strain had been tremendous. For every Briton in the fight there had been at least two, and at times as many as four Frenchmen, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Italians and Danes. Yet outwardly Britain was not weaker and poorer for the struggle but richer and stronger. In the last three years of the century the annual value of her foreign trade had risen from £50,000,000 to £73,500,000 and her revenue from £19,000,000 to £33,000,000.
¹
She owed this to two factors: the initiative of her private citizens and her command of the se
a. Into every French, Dutch and
Spanish colony and island which her ships of war isolated and her red-coats occupied, her merchants had carried their trade. And, since the Navy raised its men from the Merchant Marine, every increase in trade had led to a corresponding growth in sea power. While the French armies absorbed immense multitudes from field and mart, Britain, with a comparatively small part of her population serving at sea, became the workshop of every nation with

¹
.
H. B. E.,
II, 78-9, 81, 83.

a coastline unguarded by Gallic bayonets. Served by the inventiveness of British mechanical genius and fed by healthy and vigorous rural stocks, the raw industrial cities of the coaly North and Midlands had grown during the war by leaps and bounds.

Thanks to Adam Smith and the libertarian bent of British law and habit, few administrative swathes had impeded this process. While Bumble and the squire still governed by ancient lights in the village, the winding road to the smoky towns in the northern dales was open to every man of enterprise. Activity followed opportunity, and wealth and power activity. The whirling wheels of Brummagem and Manchester span the pattern .of a new world.

The workmanship, durability, ingenuity and variety of British goods were the wonder of the age. Visitors to Sheffield saw knives with a hundred and eighty blades and scissors so small that they were hardly visible to the eye; at Leeds one could step at nightfall into clothes which at daybreak had been raw wool from the sheep's back. Every nation's fashions were carefully studied; Latins could walk their native Boulevards in their traditional costume and yet be clad from head to toe in the products of the West Riding.
¹
William Radcliffe on his return from the Manchester cotton market used to be asked by his mill hands from what remote land the week's returns had come. He and his like won and kept their customers by honest dealing; the label "English" was a universal passport.
²
To the hallmark of quality—legacy of generations of fine craftsmanship and integrity—were added the range and cheapness of the power-machines. Demand for English wares fostered the growth of machinery, and machinery, by lowering prices, multiplied sales. National necessity and the opportunity for growing rich quickly overcame a conservative people's prejudices against the snorting, roaring monsters that revolutionised their lives. At Bradford a steam engine, rejected in 1793 as a smoky nuisance, had become by 1801 the pride of that thriving town; at South Cary Parson Woodforde watched with approval a wool-carding machine with 3000 motions operating simultaneously.

All this, taking place in the midst of a great war, had involved an immense dislocation of social life. The ruling class, absorbed in the struggle for national existence, had neither time nor thought for the regulation of a new kind of society. Their eyes were riveted

¹
Letts, 129-30;
Espriella,
I, 70-1 j II, 145-6.

²
Sec Letts, 122. It was not, however, always so. The cheap ironmongers of Birmingham were beginning to acquire an unenviable reputation for shoddy wares; their contribution to the African Slave Trade, if Southey is to be believed, was guns sold to the negroes at a dollar and a half and which, on being fired, were apt to burst a
nd mangle the purchaser. —Esprie
lla, I, 118.

on southern horizons where their fleets contained the great explosive force of Continental Revolution; they could only spare a hasty glance northwards when some riot in hungry Lancashire or Staffordshire sent the yeomanry clattering over the cobblestones. Trade and men alike had had to find their own level in the rough England of endurance that stood the long siege of the Revolution militant.

The results were grave. To those who troubled to visit the new towns it seemed as though the nation had sold its soul to Mammon. Under the double effect of war and the new price-cutting economics, men, women and children were, subjected to influences which endangered the future morality and physique of the race. At the moment that British patriotism was being invoked as never before to defy the French, the conception of patriotism was being discarded in economic matters for the creed of a bagman. Liberty for the thrustful to grow rich was held to justify every abuse. Ancient pieties and ways of life were uprooted in a few years by the uncontrolled action of machinery and cut-throat competition. While cultured folk deplored the sufferings of French exiles, thousands of Britons were driven from their homes and traditional crafts by enclosure and unemployment and herded like slaves into the new mills without the leaders of national opinion uttering a word in protest or even apparently being aware of the fact. In Manchester and the surrounding cotton towns children, set to the looms at seven years of age, worked from five in the morning^ till six at night, while the population, multiplying itself every few years, was crowded into narrow, airless, sunless streets and underground cellars. Little girls of ten, naked and black with coal dust, dragged trucks on all fours down the tunnels of Northumbrian mines, and in Birmingham men went about with thumbs crushed into formless lumps by unfenced machinery. Stench and darkness, hellish din and ignorance were becoming the lot of an ever-growing proportion of the race. And this in a Christian country whose social happiness and freedom had long been the envy of the world! If the French paid for their victories in piles of mangled corpses, the British paid for theirs in the bitterness and human deterioration of the labour reserve of
laissez-faire.
For it was from the rising tolls on unrestricted trade that the Treasury financed the war and supported Pitt's alliances.

Yet the disease was still in its infancy,-affecting only a small part of the population, and might have been controlled by a modicum of statesmanship. The race was tough enough to stand a good deal without taking much immedi
ate harm. The hardihood of the
Britain of 1800 is not easy for the twentieth century to realise.
¹
Even in the upper classes men like Charles Apperley's father rose daily at six till past their eightieth year, and allowed their children to run wild and lousy with the sturdy rapscallions of the waste. At the great Midland school of Rugby ten-year-old boys from rich homes were flogged from their beds in the small hours to take up night-lines for their seniors
²
: softness was a thing almost unknown—the prerogative of degenerate fops and invalids. In the North the country women went in front of the reapers wielding the sickle; in the farms and manor-houses of the Welsh border phalanxes of buxom, rosy-faced maids gathered round the washing tub at midnight every Sunday for Herculean labours. Such bore the stalwart soldiers—" not particularly tall but full in the chest"
³
—whom Wellington was to use with such effect in the Peninsula.

A hardy and passionate race, not over-refined but self-centred, vigorous and given to internecine fighting, was the general verdict of foreigners on Britain. The cook at Plasgronow threw a cleaver at the gardener's head before marrying him; a hunt over the stony Welsh foothills generally ended in a free fight. The pride of that neighbourhood, students of Nimrod's youth will remember, was a farmer who could thrash any two men with his fists, beat them afterwards at drinking and lift an oak table
by his shining teeth. John Varle
y, the waterrcolourist, used to vary his prolonged labours with bouts of boxing, and was so full of life that he welcomed the daily procession of duns up his attic stairs, declaring that without his troubles he would burst with joy.

Fighting, not for the State but for personal rights, was an inherent part of the English system. There was antagonism and struggle in everything. " Check and counter-check," wrote Southey's Spaniard, "is the principle of their constitution, and the result of centuries of contention between Crown and people." Even the King, the most respected and safely-seated in Europe, was regularly caricatured in the newspapers, and, if he arrived late at the theatre, expected to be—and was—booed by the gallery. If his bow to his subjects was not deep enough, he would be greeted by shouts of "Lower! Lower!"; on one occasion when one of his sons bobbed in a perfunctory way, the Queen—wise woman—seized the Prince's head and pushed it down.
⁴

This universal spirit of contention was harmonised by two powerful attributes: respect for Law and love of fair play. At the

¹
A background against which the horrors and injustices described in Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's great books must be set; without it the historian is apt to lose his sense of proportion.

²
Apperley, 155.
³
Stanhope,
Conversations,
24.
4
Letts, 147.

time of the Peace the English were still without a police force. Yet if a man knifed another in the street, passers-by did not shrug their shoulders but spontaneously endeavoured to prevent the crime and seize the offender. Such a people, as Southey said, put out riot and insurrection as they would a fire. Many of their laws never appeared on the Statute Book; others were not even recognised in the Courts. A gambler who failed to answer his debts in the cockpit was hoisted to the ceiling in a basket and kept suspended there till the sport was done. And though fisticuffs was a universal activity which no one dreamt of stopping, a bully who drew his sword on an unarmed man would have a hundred indignant citizens round him in a minute. A Frenchman, visiting London during the Peace, was astonished to see the Duke of Grafton, instead of chastising the insolence of a rough with his cane, roll up his sleeves and "lamb him most horribly." In England it was the recognised way.
¹

From the crowd round the pillory hurling garbage, dead cats and ordure at the malefactor who had offended against popular standards of behaviour, to the gentlemen of the Commons sprawling on the benches, cracking nuts and eating oranges as they applauded or interrupted the speeches of the King's Ministers, open judgment by a man's peers was the English rule. When the Prince of Wales threatened to speak in the House of Lords on the affairs of India, Lord Ellenborough let it be known that, if he did, he should get neighbour's fare, for he would not spare him. It was this boisterous breath of liberty that kept the country so astonishingly free of political tyranny; despite the bitterness of Party feeling, the epidemic of food riots and the temporary suspension of
Habeas Corpus,
there were less than thirty State prisoners at the close of the war.

One saw the spirit of freedom in the London streets: the "multitudinous moving picture" of the Strand with the crowds coming and going like a continuous riot under the flickering oil lights; the rattle of the coaches and drays: the cheerfulness of the fashionable shops with their glistening panes and smart bow-windows huddled against lowly dwellings behind whose open doors and low, ragged hutches cobblers and other humble artisans did their work; "the mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury Lane theatre just at the hour of five"; the traffic blocks with the gilded carriages of the aristocracy patiently taking their turn behind droves of oxen, coal-wagons and blaspheming draymen; in the floating pall of congealed smoke that, rising from the chimneys of a hundred and sixty thousand houses and furnaces, hung for more than half the year, sometimes in impenetrable fog and at other times

¹
The Times,
23rd Sept., 1797.

in a glorious, sun-pierced canopy, over the domes and spires of the City and which always put the painter, Haydon, in mind of energy personified. In the capital of England—" Lunnon," as Fox called it— every one seemed to be absorbed in his business and every one had to look after himself. "You stop," wrote a dazed foreigner, "and bump! a porter runs against you shouting ' By your leave ' after he has knocked you down.... Through din and clamour and the noise of hundreds of tongues and feet you hear the bells of the church steeples, postmen's bells, the street organs, fiddlers and the tambourines of itinerant musicians and the cries of vendors of hot and cold food at the street corners. A rocket blazes up stories high amidst a yelling crowd of beggars, sailors and urchins. Someone shouts ' Stop thief!', his handkerchief is gone. Every one runs and presses forward, some less concerned to catch the thief than to steal a watch or purse for themselves. Before you are aware of it a young, well-dressed girl has seized your hand, ' Come, my lord, come along, let us drink a glass together I
'...
All the world rushes headlong without looking, as if summoned to the bedside of the dying. That is Cheapside and Fleet Street on a December evening."