History of England 1-6

In the more prosperous neighbourhoods, however, the nature and quality of demand were hard to foresee with any accuracy; in an age in which taste and fashion had suddenly become important considerations, the patterns of consumption became of absorbing importance. China-ware was unknown in 1675 but had become so familiar as to be the object of satire by 1715. Cabinetmaking became a major trade by the turn of the century, and cane chairs had a brief but spectacular reign in the drawing room. The purchase of books and of clocks, too, suggested a more sensitive awareness among the newly prosperous of what was ‘expected’. Defoe, in his Weekly Review of January 1708, wrote of printed cotton fabrics that they first ‘crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs and, at last, beds themselves were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs’.

Emulation was the key. As the British Magazine put it in 1763, ‘the present rage of imitating the manners of high-life hath spread itself so far among the gentlefolks of lower-life that in a few years we shall probably have no common people at all’. A more considered analysis of English society, given four years later by Nathaniel Forster in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Present High Price of Provisions, noted that

in England the several ranks of men slide into each other almost imperceptibly, and a spirit of equality runs through every part of their constitution. Hence arises a strong emulation in all the several situations and conditions to vie with each other; and the perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above them. In such a state as this fashion must have uncontrolled sway. And a fashionable luxury must spread through it like a contagion.

There were no social ‘classes’ in perpetual enmity – the idea had never occurred to anyone except the Diggers and Levellers of the previous century – but rather a multiplicity of different ranks each eager to outdo one another in the race for prosperity.

The confirmation that this new dispensation also affected the labouring poor can be found in the many surveys that demonstrate the rise of real wages in the first half of the century. In the first book of The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith observed that the increase in wages ensured that ‘the real quantity of the necessaries and conveniences of life which it can procure to the labourer has, during the course of the present century, increased perhaps in a still greater proportion than its money price’. Grain was cheaper. Potatoes were half the price. Turnips and cabbages could be had for a song. Some of this may be explained by wishful thinking, or by faulty observation and calculation, but the general restlessness and busyness of the age suggest that there was a general resurgence in economic activity.

You have only to look at the printed advertisements, almost a new thing in the culture of England. Sixty different advertisements were placed in the public prints for George Packwoods’s razor cleaners and shaving paste; Dr James Graham advertised his ‘celestial, or medico, magnetico, musico, electrical bed’; he added that ‘in the celestial bed no feather is employed … springy hair mattresses are used … in order that I might have for the important purposes, the strongest and most springy hair, I procured at vast expense the tails of English stallions’. Hawkin and Dunn offered ‘COFFEE MADE IN ONE MINUTE’, while Jasper Taylor advertised a range of ready-prepared sauces such as ‘SAUCE EPICURIENNE’. Adverts appeared for ‘POMMADE DIVINE’ or ‘PEARS TRANSPARENT SOAP’. Smaller notices promoted Dixon’s antibilious pills, Butler’s restorative tooth powder, Godbold’s vegetable balsam for asthma and Hackman’s pills for the gravel and the stone. The ‘puffs’, as they were often called, were placarded over walls and windows as well as journals and periodicals. It was truly a society of the spectacle, far removed from the sixteenth century when only playbills were plastered on the posts.

It was perhaps the hyperbole that caused Dr Johnson to confess that ‘the trade of advertising is now so near perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement’. Illustrations of jugs, and shoes, and hats, and plates, and tureens, and capes, and glasses, were everywhere. William Blake, the poet of eternity, designed some advertisements for crockery from Josiah Wedgwood with perhaps one of his great phrases on his lips: Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

The notion of the ‘consumer’ in the marketing sense emerged first in the 1720s as the belated recognition of the growing phenomenon. Belinda, in William Congreve’s The Old Bachelor, produced in 1693, explains that ‘the father bought a powder-horn, and an almanac, and a comb-case; the mother, a great fruz-tour [false headpiece], and a fat amber necklace; the daughters only tore two pairs of kid-leather gloves with trying ’em on …’. Belinda is describing the appearance of a country squire and his family in a fashionable London shop.

It was no doubt their first visit. These were the newly prosperous who had enough leisure on their hands to travel up to the city in an equipage or at least a coach. No doubt they went back to houses already furnished with carpets, screens and window curtains. The original meaning of ‘consumer’, in the Oxford English Dictionary, is of one who ‘devours, wastes, or destroys’.

All was done in the name of fashion, the god of the metropolis. Samuel Oldknow, the cotton manufacturer from Lancashire, declared that ‘nothing but new things will please fashionable women’. One of the correspondents of the Spectator, at the beginning of 1712, heard a woman in an adjacent pew of the neighbourhood church whispering to her companion that ‘at the Seven Stars, in King Street, Covent Garden, there was a mademoiselle completely dressed just come from Paris’. A ‘mademoiselle’ was a ‘moppet’ or puppet dressed with the newest fashions in the latest style. A month later another correspondent in the Spectator was complaining that his wife had changed all the goods and furniture in the house three times in seven years. Between 1770 and 1800 some thirty almanacs or annuals were issued for the fashionable woman, with all the panoply of advertisements and prints. No lady in society could afford to be ‘out of the fashion’. The men, too, were encouraged by their tailors ‘to strike a bold stroke’ with their latest attire.

Henry Fielding, the novelist and London magistrate, noticed in one of his many somewhat acidulous asides that the growth of commerce had quite changed the face of the nation, and particularly of the ‘lower sort’; as far as he was concerned, they had become greedy, crafty and vain. Trade also encouraged equality between buyers and sellers; ready money was the only mark of distinction. The old attitudes of deference to authority, orthodoxy and tradition had no place in the thriving market. There was no question of any religious duty to avoid excess profit. There was no sense of a ‘just price’ to be set by the community at large. In matters of vital sustenance, such as bread, the old tradition of prices was maintained for a little longer. But in the larger world the obligations had been sundered. This was becoming a secular and individualistic, no longer a corporate, world. Trade restrictions, and labour controls, gradually gave way. The power of the old guilds in dictating the terms and the nature of employment was severely curtailed.

The new commercial world affected other pursuits. Sir John Hawkins, friend of Samuel Johnson and historian of music, wrote that ‘the spirit of luxury rages here with greater violence than ever … the great articles of trade in the metropolis are superfluities, mock-plate, toys, perfumery, millinery, prints and music’. Johnson himself might not have agreed with his friend’s judgement since, like many other observers in the eighteenth century, he believed that luxuries gave employment and income to the industrious poor. ‘Now the truth is’, he said, ‘that luxury produces much good.’ Unnecessary and superfluous commodities, such as Venetian looking glasses, Turkey carpets, Japan screens, Flanders lace, vases from China and statues from Italy, were the lifeblood of high commerce.

The more humble cup or saucer of tea was considered, on its first arrival in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, to be an intolerable luxury that spread depression and lassitude among its consumers. It was conceived by many to be a dangerous, insidious and powerful concoction. It was not nutritious. It weakened the nerves. It prevented healthy sleep.

By 1717, however, green tea had become the drink of choice; and its use was now common among all classes and any attempt at prohibition, suggested by some, was sure to fail. The average annual import during the 1690s was some 20,000 pounds in weight; by 1760 it had reached 5 million pounds. The amount of sugar consumed, to sweeten the bitter herb, increased fifteen times over the century. The human cost of what was essentially colonial exploitation will be discussed in a later chapter. Behind the spoon of sugar lay the back-breaking labour of the slave. An abolitionist of the late eighteenth century, Elizabeth Heyrick, wrote that ‘the laws of our country may hold the sugar cane to our lips, steeped in the blood of our fellow creatures; but they cannot compel us to accept the loathsome potion’. It is ironic perhaps that the daily diet of sweetened tea helped to sustain the wage-earning slaves of the English cities.

All the roads of luxury and fashion have the signpost ‘To Etruria’ standing beside them. The master of that destination was of course Josiah Wedgwood, the tradesman who more than any other epitomizes the Georgian culture of commerce. He was born in the summer of 1730 at Burslem in Staffordshire, the heart of the pottery country, and the spirit of place animated him soon enough; he was truly a native genius. Little is known about his early years but it is clear that he soon embarked upon an ambitious programme of research and improvement. He began a life of labour and experiment on glazes and colours while at the same time becoming a pioneer of industrial design; he was determined to fashion the best creamware in the world. ‘I saw the field was spacious,’ he wrote, ‘and the soil so good, as to promise an ample recompense to anyone who should labour diligently in its cultivation.’

He realized from the beginning that his trade should be concentrated upon the rising ranks of ‘middling people’, ‘which class’, he wrote in a letter of 1772, to his business partner, Thomas Bentley, ‘we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior in numbers to the Great’. This might be described as the manifesto of the new consumer society. He realized, too, the vast importance of fashion in such an enterprise. ‘Fashion’, he wrote, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects.’ He was reflecting in part on the enormous success of his creamware in the replacement of porcelain. He wrote to Bentley again that ‘it is really amazing how rapidly the use has spread almost over the whole globe, and how universally it is liked’. But then he asked, ‘[H]ow much of this general use, and estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction – and how much to its real utility and beauty?’ It was a most pertinent question but one that did not and does not readily afford an answer.

The ‘mode of its introduction’, however, was of paramount concern to Wedgwood and his associates. His methods included those of elegant display and of widespread advertisement; he pioneered the use of catalogues and of trademarks to distinguish his products. If the name of a patron could be attached to a certain range of ware, so much the better. He opened a London warehouse and other showrooms where the merchandise was treated as if it were part of a gallery or museum; when he opened a new showroom on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and Great Newport Street, he made sure that its address was published in the St James Chronicle perused by ‘people of fashion, and which I suppose is that wherein the plays are advertised’.

He employed travelling salesmen, and took pains to export his ware to the royal and noble families of Europe. He had the ambition of being ‘Vase Maker General to the Universe’ which, in a manner of speaking, he became. If we can name him one of the founders of a commercial society, he can also be called one of the pioneers of a new industrial society. Many visitors made their way to his factory, where his employees were regimented and distributed with the same precision and order as the cups and tureens that came off the production line. The factory was in effect three large blocks running 150 yards alongside the Grand Trunk Canal with several courtyards and towers containing kilns and ovens. It was described by a foreign rival, Louis Victor Gerverot, as ‘an enormous building, practically a small town … a marvel of organisation’. We shall come across similar descriptions of English factories when we descend further into the bowels of the Industrial Revolution. The enterprise was designed for mass production along an assembly line, the first of its kind in the pottery industry.

Wedgwood divided the manufacture of pottery into components such as slip-casting and transfer-printing, each with its own experts working in unison. His purpose was ‘to make such machines of the Men as cannot err’; continued and uninterrupted production could thereby be achieved. It could have been Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four rather than 1769. He did not tolerate faulty goods. He had an artificial leg, as a result of a childhood illness, and it is said that he would smash inferior items of crockery with a blow from his wooden limb. He rang the bell for work at 5.45 a.m., and devised a form of ‘clocking in’ that became the standard practice of the factory system.

In the world of English commerce everything, from the time of ‘clocking in’ to the time of leaving, breathes and has its being through the agency of the market; if we may paraphrase Hermes Trismegistus on the nature of the divine, it had its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The concept of the market, in anything like a contemporary sense, was in fact even then being devised. Two of the earliest references are to be found in Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the book that can be said to be the founding text of the modern economy; when Smith alludes to the trade in a particular commodity or product, he calls it ‘the market’.

He believed that trade should be free, altogether liberated from the restrictions that had their origin in the medieval system; there should be no control over wages, hours, rates of interest, or prices of good; the mobility of labour and the flow of capital should not be regulated by any external authority. ‘Protection’, in all its forms, should come to an end. The sphere of traditional and paternalistic values should be destroyed and in its place a system of supply and demand should be instituted.

This of course had wider ramifications. Richard Price, writing on civil liberty in 1776, the same year that Smith completed The Wealth of Nations, wrote that ‘all government even within a State, becomes tyrannical as far as it is a needless and wanton exercise of power, or is carried further than is absolutely necessary to preserve the peace or to secure the safety of the State’. The duty of government was to promote internal justice and to defend against external aggression. That was all. The natural operation of supply and demand, therefore, would be to the advantage of all parties; and the best possible market was one allowed to regulate itself.

Just as trade was considered pre-eminently good in itself, so the basic principles of trade – to buy cheap and to sell dear – became paramount. What might be called the market nexus covered a whole range of social activities, from marriage to a hackney-carriage licence. Moll Flanders, in Defoe’s novel of that name, remarks that ‘the market is against our sex just now’. The result might be construed as ‘laissez-faire’, a phrase that became popular in the 1750s.

It was believed, for example, that businessmen and private investors should finance the building of bridges and roads, without involving the central administration, while the promotion of technology and science was to be left to aristocratic patrons and learned societies. Surely this would apply with redoubled force in financial and economic matters? The conviction slowly percolated through to the Commons and in 1796 William Pitt lamented the occasions ‘when interference has shackled industry’ and declared that ‘trade, industry and barter will always find their own level and be impeded by regulations which violate their natural operation and derange their proper effect’.

This was the permanent consequence of The Wealth of Nations. Smith himself was an unlikely prophet; at a young age he had been kidnapped for a short time by tinkers from his native Kirkcaldy, and it may be that some of his oddities were a result of that unplanned expedition. He had a habit of smiling and talking to himself, proceeding along the streets of Edinburgh in what was described as a ‘vermicular’ – worm-like – manner; he had a harsh voice and teeth like tombstones. He was once discoursing on the division of labour to certain colleagues, when he fell into a tannery pit of fat and lime; he had to be taken home in a sedan chair, complaining all the while.

He believed that an individual should take his own course in the belief that ‘the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security’, has enough intrinsic power to carry any society towards ‘wealth and prosperity’. When an individual attends to his own gains he is led ‘by an invisible hand’ to promote an end that was far from his intention, which may be described as the general good. It was he rather than Napoleon who described England as ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, thus justifiably defining the nation as uniquely dependent upon trade. In the second chapter of The Wealth of Nations he proposes that ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest’. From this sentence sprang an insight that controlled social and economic theory for more than a century. It is in fact one of the enduring legacies of the eighteenth century.

12

The What D’Ye Call It?

The old king had died, after waving farewell to his favourite German palace, but the information did not reach the royal apartments at Richmond Lodge until three days later. It was the duty of the pre-eminent minister, Robert Walpole, to broach the report to his new sovereign, George II, who promptly asked the minister to inform Spencer Compton; Compton was the treasurer of the new king’s household, and seemed likely to secure effective power. Yet it was not to be. Those who gleefully anticipated Walpole’s demise had underestimated his effectiveness.

His equable relations with George’s wife, Queen Caroline, have been noticed; it also became clear that Walpole had unrivalled command of the Commons. Walpole was in any case by far the most competent and authoritative man in the country, a fact which even a new king could not easily ignore. The king himself spoke English but with a strong guttural German accent, so he might sometimes need the aid of an emollient translator.

Yet he had lived in England long enough to be acquainted with the most powerful men and women in the country, and seems from the beginning to have decided to rule in a way different from that of his father. This bias obviously gave hope to the Tories who had been systematically excluded from power by George I. They flocked to court, but the best of intentions can sometimes be thwarted by events; as it was, the powerful forces ranged against them effectively barred them as possible Jacobites. The Tories had also been averse to the continental wars, of which Hanover had been a part, and were therefore still suspected.

The king himself was by no means a majestic spectacle. He was very short, and relied upon the effect of wigs and high shoes to accentuate the positive. The flatterers noted that he had bright blue eyes and a noble Roman nose; his enemies saw only feebleness of intellect and of character. He was somewhat stiff in his bearing, with the attendant characteristics of obstinacy and bad temper. It was reported that his ministers were forced ‘to bear … even with such foul language that no one gentleman could take from another’. The pattern of his conversation was one of boastfulness, bullying and bluster. Some of his words to his wife have been recorded by Lord Hervey, vice-chamberlain in the royal household. ‘Before she had uttered half of what she had a mind to say the King interrupted her, and told her she always loved talking of such nonsense and things she knew nothing of … she was always asking some fool or other what she was to do; and that none but a fool would ask another fool’s advice.’

Understandably for a monarch he had a great sense of his own importance, but he did not necessarily impress his peers. A caricature shows him with his leg lifted to kick out; he was well known for kicking his servants, and also for being brusque or even rude to casual visitors. He was more obdurate in appearance than in reality, however, and a courtier, George Bubb Dodington, recorded in his Diary that the king ‘would sputter and make a bustle but when they told him that it must be done from the necessity of his service’ he went ahead and did it. He was by obligation, if not by nature, a pragmatist.

He was aware that a Hanoverian king was not necessarily adored or admired by the English, and took care to manifest his status. He dressed strictly, according to the codes of etiquette, and carried himself with more hauteur than was perhaps necessary; he adored the regal world of pageantry and spectacle. Yet he was also aware of the sensitivities of his subjects; he did not claim any semi-divine status by touching for the king’s evil, and he discouraged any attempt at a cult of majesty with portraits or statues.

In fact he loved his subjects no more than they loved him. Lord Hervey records the king’s running commentary upon the faults and follies of the English. ‘No English or even French cook could dress a dinner; no English confectioner could set out a dessert; no English player could act; no English coachman could drive, or English jockey ride, nor were any English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden; no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor any Englishwoman how to dress herself …’ The palm in all these activities went of course to his German compatriots. This plain favouritism brought problems in a larger sphere, and it was feared by his ministers that he might try to steer England’s foreign policy in a Hanoverian direction without consulting the nation’s best interests. What had Westminster to do with Russia or with Sweden except as a way of obtaining wood? He had never been allowed to visit Hanover during the reign of his father but, after his own accession, he made many and prolonged visits to his electorate. He was a Guelph, one of the most ancient dynasties of all Europe, and it can be claimed with some confidence that he took a wider view of the continent than did his ministers.

Certainly he was meticulous in his duties; he was not one of those sovereigns who lose all cares of state on the hunting field. He read everything that was put before him, and every day was divided into its separate duties. Even the affairs of the heart were regulated. He visited his mistress, Henrietta Howard, at seven in the evening; if he was a little early he paced up and down outside her door with his watch in his hand until the tremendous moment came.

Walpole seems quickly to have got the measure of him, and confided to Hervey that ‘his majesty imagines frequently he shall do many things, which, because he is not at first contradicted, he fancies he shall be let do at last. He thinks he is devilish stout, and never gives up his will or opinion; but never acts in anything material according to either of them but when I have a mind he should.’ He concluded that ‘he is, with all his personal bravery, as great a political coward as ever wore a crown, and as much afraid to lose it’. He advised that ‘the more you can appear to make anything to be his own, the better you will be heard’.

So Walpole had to be an artist of stage management as well as of decorum. The weights and balances of power were still somewhat ambiguous and he had to tread very carefully. In Westminster itself, of course, and in what were later to be called the corridors of power, Walpole was still pre-eminent. Robin ruled the roost. His command of men and management in parliament was paramount; the front bench was composed almost entirely of his nominees, and he knew how to touch the ‘secret springs’ of others’ loyalty by promotion or by the discreet distribution of secret service money. He promised the king a quiet life, than which nothing suited George II better. ‘Consider, Sir Robert,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘what makes me easy in this matter makes for your ease too.’ They were friends for life.

Since the king was not called upon to do very much his reputation seemed to rise, and a French envoy noted in 1728 that ‘the king is much more popular than George I. As much as he can, he tries to make himself popular.’ This was in part the result of the efforts of Queen Caroline, who added a much-needed tone of levity and entertainment to what might otherwise have been a rather stiff court. Clearly his private animadversions against the English did not reach the public ear. The growth in wages and commerce, as outlined in a previous chapter, could have done nothing but increase his status.

Of course Walpole had many and various opponents; anyone with a dislike of the country’s administration could find a ready target in the rotund figure of the first minister. A large number of dissident Whigs regarded him as their enemy; he had not only kept them out of power but he was in the process of creating a despotism in the halls of Westminster. The Hanoverian Tories were by nature and instinct opposed to any Whig autocrat, especially when he held the strings of commerce and of patronage in his hands. And then there were the Jacobites, waiting hopefully for the day when the monarch over the water would return to claim his proper kingdom. These multifarious opponents might agree on ousting Walpole but they could not really concur in a coherent and positive alternative policy.

Many of the public prints were opposed to Walpole, most notably the Craftsman which as its name might imply was dedicated to exposing the men of craft or subterfuge. The first issue, published at the end of 1726, declared that ‘the mystery of StateCraft abounds with such innumerable frauds, prostitutions, and enormities, in all shapes, and under all disguises, that it is an inexhaustible fund, an eternal resource for satire and reprehension’. Thus was launched a sustained invective against Walpole and his allies.

A month later in the Craftsman came a character assassination of the first minister as a ‘man, dressed in a plain habit, with a purse of gold in his hand. He threw himself into the room, in a bluff ruffianly manner. A smile, or rather a sneer sat on his countenance. His face was bronzed over with a glare of confidence. An arch malignity leered in his eye.’ A later number issued a more general denunciation. ‘Corruption is a poison, which will soon spread itself thro’ all ranks and orders of men; especially when it begins at the fountain-head. A spirit of baseness, prostitution and venality will universally prevail.’

There was even a serial publication of a ballad, ‘History of the Norfolk Steward’:

A story concerning one Robin

Who, from not worth one groat

A vast fortune has got

By politics, Bubbles and Jobbing …

Other periodicals and pamphlets joined the hunt, assisted by notable combatants such as Swift and Pope, but nothing was more successful than a London musical.

In a letter of summer 1716, Swift suggested that his friend and fellow Scriblerian, John Gay, should write ‘a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there’. This was the cue, taken up eleven years later, for the most famous and successful musical comedy of the eighteenth century. The Beggar’s Opera was described by many names – comic opera, ballad opera, burlesque, satire, musical – just as victory in war still had many fathers. But no one knew quite what it was. In the course of the century, some of the theatres played it as low farce and others as sentimental tragedy. It was both, and neither. It goes from pathos to pantomime in the space of a line, and from cynicism to lyricism in a moment; there are passages in which the heterogeneous tones and styles cannot be distinguished, leading to bewilderment or exhilaration according to taste.

When we consider Pope’s Dunciad, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, we note the resemblances. This was a doubting and ambiguous age that found its quietus in satire and ridicule. To that end The Beggar’s Opera adopted all the popular modes and forms of the time, from street ballad to farce and folk song. All the life of the streets was somewhere within it, in implicit protest against the phalanx which ruled the state.

The eighteenth century is not supposed to have been a felicitous age of drama, with its ‘serious’ tragedies filled with sententious moralizing and sentimental pieties that sank John Dryden, for example, below the waterline. But The Beggar’s Opera did provide surprise and delight to the London stage, written as it was according to the Daily Journal ‘in a Manner wholly new’. It was still new when Bertolt Brecht purloined it for The Threepenny Opera of 1928.

The Beggar’s Opera was first presented on 29 January 1729, at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (not to be confused with the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane) where it ran for sixty-two nights. This marked an overwhelming public response, when most other new plays lasted for only six or seven. It concerns two young women who are in love with, and believe themselves married to, a resourceful highwayman named Macheath (‘son of the heath’). Polly Peachum, the daughter of a receiver of stolen goods, and Lucy Lockit, the daughter of the keeper of Newgate Prison, vie for his love in a setting of taverns and Newgate apartments filled with pimps, thieves, whores and all the other inhabitants of contemporary low life. Nothing but rough words and rough sentiments can be heard, while the lovers’ complaints are ringed with ambiguity and satire. It was unforgettable and was for the period a breath of fresh air (if the term can be allowed for such insalubrious elements) after a period of achingly boring acting on moral stilts.

The fact that Newgate Prison is the setting for much of the plot confirms its central place in the consciousness of the eighteenth century. Everybody knew it, by reputation if not by sight and smell. It had become the common name for any prison, and a ‘Newgate bird’ for any prisoner. It had stood on the same site in various incarnations for 600 years and was once more rebuilt in 1770, by which time it had inspired more poems and plays than any other building in England. All the characters of The Beggar’s Opera revolve around it, as if it were a dark sun, just as some of the most famous personalities of eighteenth-century London were associated with it.

The role of Polly’s father, Peachum, for example, was loosely based upon Jonathan Wild; Wild was a receiver of stolen goods and a notorious ‘thief-taker’ who would impeach the unnecessary, incompetent, or injured members of his own gang in return for a payment of £40. He devised the robberies and then advertised the stolen goods in the columns of a newspaper, thus gaining the rewards for his own crimes. It was a common trade of the time, but Wild was its supreme exponent. He was hanged in 1725 but such was his continuing fame that Henry Fielding wrote his supposed biography, The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, eighteen years later. Wild was a cunning and violent man in a profane and ruthless age. His surname was his character. Fielding himself described eighteenth-century London as a wilderness, ‘a vast wood or forest in which the thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Arabia and Africa’.

The hero or anti-hero of the opera, Macheath, is a highwayman, one of the great professions of the eighteenth century. Although Gay portrays him as a poor piece of work, entirely dependent upon the bottle, the highwayman himself was often seen as a cavalier adventurer, a gentleman of the road, a man of honour. His victims were recommended to him by landlords or tapsters of the various inns, where they were called ‘worth seeing’ or ‘worth speaking with’.

In his diary Horace Walpole recalled that ‘a black figure on horseback’ stopped the chaise in which he was riding with a Lady Browne. The highwayman asked for the lady’s purse, saying, ‘Don’t be frightened. I will not hurt you.’ He added, ‘I give you my word that I will do you no hurt.’ When she gave him the item he told her, before riding away, ‘I am much obliged to you. I wish you good night.’ This was perhaps the acceptable face of eighteenth-century crime, although it did not of course prevent the perpetrators from being hanged. Gay may even have helped to burnish the reputation of thieves and prostitutes. One contemporary remarked that ‘highwaymen and women of the town are not romantic figures, but our poet had made highwaymen handsome and lively, and women of the town beautiful and attractive. Over all he has cast such a glamour of romance and sentimentalism that even Newgate comes to resemble a select pleasure resort.’ But the real pleasure came in coins and notes.

This was a world of money, of stocks, of bubbles, of bullion and new paper notes of 1695 from the Bank of England. The language of trade and finance occurred naturally to Gay. He did not have to introduce it, or comment upon it; it came to him effortlessly because it reflected the temper of the time. Such terms as ‘business’, ‘account’, ‘interest’, ‘profit’, ‘debt’ and ‘credit’ are of many applications but they float up into the play with the bubble of money. This is a world of greed and gain. It is a culture in which someone could be bought or sold as easily as a piece of plate. Self-interest is the key as large as that which opened the great doors of Newgate itself. ‘Honour’ itself is false, when even pickpockets can call themselves ‘men of honour’.

Who was, then, the gentleman? Lockit was known as ‘the prime minister of Newgate’, and Fielding wrote that ‘Jonathan Wild had every qualification necessary to form a great man’. These were representative of the men who effectively ruled London and its surrounding countryside much more successfully than the men of Westminster who were nominally the masters.

When Peachum recites the names of the members of his gang, he mentions ‘Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bob Bluff, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty’. From that time forward Walpole was often disparaged as ‘Bob Booty’ or ‘Bluff Bob’. He had actually attended the first night and with characteristic sangfroid had applauded the references to himself, even asking for an encore. Yet the allusions to him may be of a more general application. As Lockit puts it,

Lest the Courtiers offended should be:

If you mention Vice or Bribe,

’Tis so pat to all the Tribe;

Each crys – That was levell’d at me.

The Italian opera was a relatively new fashion, introduced to the London stage in 1705. There had always been musical dramas and ballad operas ever since the Mysteries and Miracle Plays of the medieval period. Shakespeare’s characters break into song at every conceivable opportunity, and The Tempest might be described as an English opera. But the Italian style, with its use of recitativo and aria, its masque-like scenery and improbable plots, its castrato and its prima donna, captured the imagination of the early eighteenth century. In The Beggar’s Opera Gay satirized its happy endings, as well as its more melodramatic moments, but seems to have loved its deliberate excess. Contemporary moralists and critics (there was sometimes little difference between them) condemned the Italian opera for being depraved, enervating and effeminate; Gay shows no signs of agreeing with them, while stealing from the operas themselves the constant strain of excitement and exhilaration.

When two rival sopranos came to blows on the stage of the Opera House, in Haymarket, the admirers of either lady pitched in with what one report described as ‘cat-calls, howlings, hissings and other offensive manifestations’ so that ‘the evening concluded in one general and alarming riot’. It was the scene Gay revisited in the jealous rages between Lucy Lockit and Polly Peachum.

He adapted his music from the airs and ballads sung all around him; some were anonymous folk ballads while others were taken from fashionable operas and popular songs. A washerwoman could have sung them, or a porter whistled them. Tunes and melodies were always in the air.

Gay himself was a Devon boy, born and raised in Barnstaple where he attended the local grammar school. At some point in his seventeenth year he made the familiar journey to London where he was apprenticed as a draper’s assistant; drapers’ assistants were in this period often unfairly characterized as effeminate but Gay himself seems to have been diffident, uncertain, almost invisible. He once wrote that ‘the world, I believe, will take so little notice of me, that I need not take much of it’. He ascended from apprentice to literary hack by producing small prose items for a twice-weekly periodical entitled the British Apollo OR Curious Amusements for the INGENIOUS. He emerged as a public writer, rather than a private hack, with a number of poems and pamphlets which were well received.

Then began the long, cruel search for patrons. Patrons were more invidious and inconstant than Grub Street. Yet impoverished authors still needed them. This was not an age when publication alone brought many rewards. Swift characterized the aspiring authors good-naturedly in A Tale of a Tub. ‘They writ, and rallied, and rhymed, and sung, and said, and said nothing; they drank, and fought, and whored, and slept, and swore, and took snuff; they went to new plays on the first night, haunted the chocolate-houses.’

Gay turned his hand to everything in the fashionable mode – farces, satires, heroic tragedy, mock heroic and the strange mingling of moods and modes that are enshrined in the titles he chose such as Trivia, The Toilette and The What D’Ye Call It? He may justifiably have despaired of literary immortality, but he had been able to secure his immediate future with an appointment as a commissioner of the state lottery with rent-free lodgings in Whitehall. It was not a great deal, but it was something. He still complained of ‘disappointments’ but he remained on the treadmill of the court, kept revolving by gossip and malevolence. He may have consoled himself with the fact that the true poets of the age were the bankers and jobbers who conjured gold out of thin air and raised glittering palaces without any foundations at all. His career, like that of so many others at the time, was one of ambition and dependency, of fawning and favouritism, always in hope of further advancement but frequently overlooked.

All this changed with the first performance on that late January evening of 1729. No one had seen anything quite like it before and, soon enough, fire-screens, fans and playing cards were adorned with scenes from The Beggar’s Opera. The manager of the theatre, John Rich, packed the theatre to bursting. On the evening of 23 March, for example, ninety-eight spectators were accommodated on the stage itself. William Hogarth painted six versions of the climactic prison scene. Pope wrote to Swift that ‘John Gay is at present so employed in the elevated airs of the opera … that I can scarce obtain a categorical answer – to anything.’

The actress who played Polly Peachum, Lavinia Fenton, was surrounded by admirers wherever she went, and had to be escorted home after each performance. One observer remarked that ‘the audience catches her fire and enthusiasm. The curtain drops. A wild burst of applause – “Polly!” “Polly!” – from every side of the house. A pretty bow, a kiss, then off the stage she runs … past the scenery, out of the stage door, into a waiting coach-and-four – and away, away, away over the muddy roads of London.’ The poet Edward Young remarked that she ‘has raised her price from one guinea to 100, tho’ she cannot be a greater whore than she was before, nor, I suppose, a younger’. But she did manage to catch a duke, and became the duchess of Bolton. Thus did the social, theatrical and financial worlds mingle.

The Opera was literally the talk of the town, including endless speculation over the presumed or suggested targets of its satire. In truth it had many and various victims, among them courtiers, tradesmen, thief-takers, politicians and those strange creatures who were hysterically in love with opera and opera divas. But its general complaint was against human corruption. Lockit remarks that ‘Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.’ In the ‘condemned hold’ Macheath sings a lament to the tune of ‘Green Sleeves’:

Since Laws were made for ev’ry Degree

To curb Vice in others, as well as me,

I wonder we han’t better Company

Upon Tyburn Tree!

The Beggar’s Opera was, all in all, very funny – not the elaborate and artificial comedy of Sheridan or Oliver Goldsmith, but the uproarious fun of the ‘low’ theatres. It outshone the sentimental comedies and heroic tragedies that were the staple of the age with its own particular mixture of burlesque and carnival, smut and innuendo. A male actor dressed in drag to play Polly Peachum, in a performance of 1782, whereupon one member of the audience ‘was thrown into hysterics which continued without intermission until Friday morning when she expired’. The episode consorts well with the epitaph John Gay composed for himself.

Life is a jest; and all things show it,

I thought so once; but now I know it.

13

The dead ear

Sir Robert Walpole’s revenge upon Gay came rather late in the day when, in 1737, he introduced a bill to curtail the liberty of the stage. All plays had to be submitted to the lord chamberlain fourteen days before performance, and of course the vicious insinuations on the stage against Bob Booty ceased at once. The Licensing Act was in fact not fully revoked until 1968, and so Walpole’s retribution affected generations of playwrights.

But were the insinuations against Walpole in fact justified? He was always robust in his own defence, accusing his opponents of being ‘mock patriots, who never had either virtue or honour, but in the whole course of their opposition are actuated only by motives of envy and of resentment’. It is true that he kept so tight a grasp on government policy and government patronage that there were some who felt unjustly excluded. Yet of course there was more to it than that. Venality was as intrinsic to the House of Commons as points of order; it is often the case that men and women who make the law also believe themselves to be above the law.

In the time of Walpole direct bribes were not uncommon but corruption might take a more subtle guise. The granting of pensions, the distribution of honours, the placement of offices, the giving of sinecures, were accepted and acceptable means of gaining the support of any particular member. In a period when parliamentarians were not paid, a fine line divided justifiable patronage and bribery. It was not through his public salary alone that Walpole himself could have built the magnificent stately home of Houghton Hall. A reading of Anthony Trollope, however, might persuade detractors that the same tricks and devices were still at work in the 1860s. In more indirect forms they continue to this day. One of the principal rewards of power is money.

Yet Robert Walpole, despite his power and prestige, could not buy the House of Commons. Not every man had his price. A large number of parliamentarians still voted according to their consciences or to their principles. There was no more striking instance of this independence than in 1733, when Walpole wholly misjudged the mood of the members. He had wanted to free the Port of London from its entanglements with customs regulations and customs officers which actively served to deter trade. He proposed that all tobacco be placed in a bonded warehouse for a small fee. The goods destined for re-export could recoup the fee while tobacco destined for the domestic market had to pay the conventional excise of 4 pence per pound. The same methods would be applied to the import of wine. It was a way of expediting the export trade, curtailing the prevailing vice of smuggling and simplifying the customs’ work at the Port of London.

Unfortunately it was not seen in this benevolent light. Excise was believed to be an unnecessary and intrusive tax on the necessities of life. The subtleties of the scheme were ignored or misunderstood, and replaced by a vision of an army of excisemen combing the land in searches for offenders who had not paid the tax. Walpole’s opponents were quick to spread the rumour that he intended to apply excise to food and other necessaries, and that British liberties would be sacrificed; the model would then become the heavily administered and heavily taxed nations of Europe. True-born Englishmen would soon be reduced to the state of French peasants.

A pamphlet, ‘A Letter from a Member of Parliament for a Borough in the West’, noted that ‘little handbills were dispersed by thousands all over the City and country, put into people’s hands in the streets and highways, dropped at their doors and thrown in at their windows; all asserting that excise men were (like a foreign enemy) going to invade and devour them …’. Like most panics it was unjustified; but, like most panics, it was effective in the short term.

Walpole realized soon enough that the cause was hopeless. His effigy was burnt in the public markets, to a fanfare of rockets and bonfires, while cockades were worn with the motto ‘Liberty, property, and no excise’. The Whigs were still associated in the public mind with war taxes and the machinations of the Whig financiers who ruled the City; the people were understandably suspicious of what seemed to be new ways of raising money. After a supper at Downing Street, when the servants had left the room, he declared to his colleagues that ‘this dance it will no farther go, and tomorrow I intend to sound a retreat’. He had not altered his position but ‘the clamour and the spirit’ that had emerged over the excise had persuaded him to retire from the combat ‘for prudential reasons’. After the bill was abandoned he had to face a mob outside parliament; protected by a bodyguard he was obliged to flee in and out of a coffee-house before making his escape.

Walpole had miscalculated. His native optimism had triumphed over his natural caution. The earl of Egmont noted in his diary that ‘it may be foretold that Sir Robert’s influence in the House will never again be so great as it has been’. Even though the king held fast to him, for fear of something worse, the opposition against him was growing ever greater. A general election in the spring of 1734 lengthened the odds against his eventual survival; his party, or what might be called the ministerial Whigs, acquired 347 supporters while the combined opposition of Tories and recalcitrant Whigs numbered 232. It would require great care and management to keep things in order, especially since the opposition Whigs, among them a group known by Walpole as the ‘boy patriots’ or ‘cubs’, were eager for power at any cost. They were sick of the ‘old gang’ or ‘the old corps’ or whatever opprobrious name was thrown at Walpole and his closest colleagues. What George II thought of the situation is unclear; he preferred conversation in the royal closet to correspondence, but his sympathy for Walpole remained.

If there was one constant principle and motive in Walpole’s policies it was the wish to avoid war. He had an aversion to conflict. It was wasteful of men and money. It was uncertain, and provoked divisions within the nation. As early as 1726, the year before the old king’s death, there had been rumours of a war with Spain as retribution for attacks on British ships, but a somewhat half-hearted blockade of Porto Bello, the Spanish fort and naval base off the coast of Panama, came to nothing. Negotiations ensued which were, for Walpole, the next best thing to peace.

Walpole also managed to stay out of the ‘War of the Polish Succession’ which began in 1733, one of those continental imbroglios involving many nations vying for mastery over slices of territory, but this was perhaps at the risk of ignoring international obligations and undermining previous alliances. The war lasted for five years until 1738, while Walpole remained on a neutral course. Many now sought an active war, however, largely on the understanding that France and Spain were denying English vessels access to foreign markets. Nothing more infuriated the English than the loss of trade. It was widely believed that Walpole had treated the Spanish with more leniency than they deserved. Petitions were presented to parliament setting out in animated language the continued Spanish attacks on English vessels, despite the ‘understanding’ Walpole had negotiated. Alderman Wilmot, otherwise unknown to history, lamented that ‘seventy of our brave sailors are now in chains in Spain! Our countrymen in chains, and slaves to Spaniards! Is this not enough to fire the coldest? Is this not enough to arouse all the vengeance of a national resentment!’

A previous incident further inflamed the situation. In 1738 Captain Robert Jenkins displayed to the Commons the severed ear that had been struck from his head by a Spanish officer in the course of an embarkation seven years before in 1731. The ear was too old to be confirmed as his, but it served the purpose of provoking public fury. It is possible that the captain lost his ear in some other disciplinary proceeding. The leathery appendage might have been picked up at a London hospital, or found in the street. Who knew, or cared to know, the truth? You could pick a fight over a dead ear.

The Spanish were not eager for conflict, and Walpole still favoured the slow dance of peace, and so a ‘Convention’ was cobbled together to cover all differences. It was not well received, particularly in the Commons. Walpole spoke for two and half hours in favour of the arrangement, but then a young man rose to speak against the contrived peace. ‘Is this any longer a nation?’ Shall we ‘bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention? It carries fallacy or downright subjection in almost every line.’

William Pitt sat down, having fired one of the first verbal salvoes in what was for a while known as ‘the War of Jenkins’ Ear’. It would have taken a political seer of genius to realize that this young man of thirty would determine the nature of English politics, after Walpole, for forty years. William Pitt – ‘the elder’, as he later became known after the exploits of his equally famous son – came from a family that had grown rich on the spoils of India; his grandfather was called ‘Diamond’ Pitt. The young man followed the familiar course of Eton and Oxford before joining the 1st Dragoon Guards in 1731. He took a parliamentary seat four years later. It was his destiny.

He was known as one of the ‘cub Whigs’ because of his youthful opposition to Walpole’s administration. He had also attached himself to Frederick, prince of Wales, who was implacably opposed to his father, George II, and thus to his father’s principal minister. Queen Caroline said of her eldest son that ‘my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world; and I most heartily wish he was out of it’. Nevertheless Pitt set himself up in the prince’s headquarters at Leicester House and was eventually installed as a ‘Groom of the Bedchamber’. From early on, therefore, Walpole marked him down as his enemy. Pitt’s speeches against peace were simply another token of their hostility.

Yet his rhetoric could sting. Horace Walpole, the first minister’s son, remarked ‘how his eloquence, like a torrent long obstructed, burst forth, with more commanding impetuosity! … haughty, defiant, conscious of injury and supreme abilities’. It was believed that he did not know what he was going to say until he was on his feet but then, extempore, he drove all before him.

It was sometimes difficult, in fact, for his spellbound auditors to recall exactly what he had said. Another parliamentarian, Henry Grattan, remembered that he voiced ‘great subjects, great empires, great characters, effulgent ideas and classical illustrations’. Pitt had a great fondness for Shakespeare and would read out the more tremendous passages to his family; he would quote only from the tragedies, and would pass the comedies to someone else. It is an inkling of his dramatic imagination. When we examine his illustrious contemporaries, in fact, the politicians of the age were on the whole consummate actors. Lord Shelburne, one of his closest allies in later life, described him as a ‘completely artificial character’. ‘He was always acting,’ Shelburne said, ‘always made up, and never natural, in a perpetual state of exertion, incapable of friendship, or of any act which tended to it, and constantly upon the watch, and never unbent …’ This was the man who became known as the great commoner.

Shelburne also described Pitt as ‘tall in his person … with the eye of a hawk, a little head, thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect’. Extant portraits reveal a somewhat haunted face with watchful and weary eyes. He began to suffer physical ill-health at Eton which in the medical manner of the time was diagnosed as ‘gout’. Over succeeding years the ‘gout’ attacked various parts of his body so that he had the appearance of an invalid, spare and lean. When he began to suffer from bouts of mania and depression he was diagnosed with ‘gout on the brain’.

For a man almost constantly in pain, and weary with the importunities of clients and colleagues, it was almost inevitable that he stayed somewhat aloof. He was cold and reserved, except in the company of his few intimates. He could be directed or swayed, but he would not be dictated to. That is also why he earned the reputation for being incorruptible, although in truth he was not without ambition and desire for profit; he also had the gift of changing his principles rapidly when the occasion demanded it. Yet he once spoke of the sense of personal honour ‘which makes ambition virtue’. There is not one public man in whom contraries do not collide. We may say in these early years of Pitt’s political career, however, that he had two principal ambitions; he aimed for English supremacy at sea and England’s supremacy over its neighbours.

Pitt, then, was one of those who hammered Walpole on the necessity for war. He also hailed his political ally, Frederick, the prince of Wales, as the protector of the naval strength of England and the guardian of the trade of the country. Liberty of the Seas! Liberty and Property! Prosperity of the City of London! These were the catchphrases used by Pitt and his youthful allies. Adam Smith described a war against Spain as a ‘colony war’ to safeguard the high seas as well as British possessions overseas. Horace Walpole blamed the martial pressure upon ‘the disaffected and discontented part’ in parliament, and also upon those who belonged to the court of the prince of Wales who wanted to create a warrior prince on the model of a medieval monarch. ‘My God,’ Queen Caroline said, ‘popularity always makes me sick; but Fretz’s popularity makes me vomit.’

Yet it was public opinion itself, animated by these belligerent parties, which pushed Walpole into a war that he did not wish for. To compound the insult many of his former allies now blamed the first minister for acquiescing in the fervour for conflict. When he eventually declared war in October 1739, there was an outburst of popular rejoicing. ‘They now ring the bells,’ he said in one of his more maladroit remarks, ‘they will soon wring their hands.’

All seemed to go well with the first victory of the conflict when Admiral Edward Vernon in November 1739 captured the Spanish base of Porto Bello in South America. It was greeted with jubilation and in the following year, when Vernon was preparing a second fleet, ‘Rule Britannia’ was first sung at the prince of Wales’s country retreat at Cliveden. The towns and cities of England organized festivals to the ‘Immortal Vernon’ and his name was aligned with those of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. The stunning success of the ‘blue water’ policy was also a harsh rebuke to Walpole and those ministers who preferred a less belligerent policy.

But no war goes to plan, as Walpole was uneasily aware. The conquest of Porto Bello lasted for no more than three weeks, and in the following summer Admirals Nicholas Haddock and John Norris failed to stop the Spanish and French fleets from sailing into Caribbean waters. Another truism of war states that one conflict can blend into another without the protagonists being fully aware of the fact. So the war against Spain was changed, as if by a transformation scene at the ballet, into the ‘War of the Austrian Succession’.

This is how it happened. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI, had no son, so it had been agreed that he should be permitted to leave intact his Habsburg dominions (including Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, the Netherlands and parts of Italy) to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa. No sooner was the emperor in his grave, however, than the various interested parties pounced on his legacy. There was no honour among thieves, even if they were sovereigns; they swarmed about the sight of blood. Frederick II of Prussia invaded the Habsburg province of Silesia since, in his own words, ‘ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me, carried the day, and I decided for war’. He was, at least, candid. Spain and France were also two of the principal aggressors and, since they were also two of England’s most prominent enemies, England itself was in 1740 perforce drawn into the European conflict. There were too many monarchs, and too few thrones, to satisfy every combatant. New dancers came on the stage with reverberating clashes of thunder and bolts of lightning.

In September 1741 George II astonished his ministers, and his people, by declaring the electorate of Hanover neutral. It was understandable. His territory was surrounded by the larger powers which already had their mouths open for more. Yet he had withdrawn from a dispute in which England was still an active participant; he had in effect two foreign policies, one of peace and one of war. A nation at war cannot be led by Janus, and it was widely believed that the foreign interests of the country were subordinated to those of Hanover. Pitt in particular was scathing about what he considered to be the parasitical Hanoverians, a stance that incurred the lasting enmity of the king.

Walpole had endured enough, and in the first month of 1742 he resigned his office. ‘This war is yours,’ he told a fellow minister, soon to become the duke of Newcastle, ‘you have had the conduct of it. I wish you joy of it.’ Newcastle himself deserves a reference in this history in his own right since he was quintessentially, inimitably, of the eighteenth century; he could have come from the stage of Congreve or the pages of Smollett. He was a powerful Whig grandee and consummate master of electoral tactics, but he was also something of a buffoon. In an age of tears he was well known for copious weeping; he refused to sleep in beds not previously slept in, had a great aversions to chills and damps, would not travel by sea, and never stopped talking. It was said that he had woken half an hour late in the morning and spent the rest of the day trying to make up for lost time. W. E. H. Lecky, in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, described ‘his confused, tangled, unconnected talk, his fulsome flattery, his promises made at the spur of the moment and almost instantly forgotten, his childish exhibitions of timidity, ignorance, fretfulness, perplexity …’.

His rapid and garbled speech was accompanied by nervous jerking movements so that he was never for a moment at rest. He loved the hustle and agitation of business rather than the formulation of policy; but he went about his affairs in such a gyratory and sporadic way that his colleagues were often openly scornful of him. He did not seem to mind their derision, but any attempt to curtail his power sent him into paroxysms of paranoia; he lived in perpetual fear. Yet he enjoyed large levees, or grand assemblies, where to general amusement he hugged, kissed and embraced everyone in sight. Nevertheless he had within him the secret of longevity; he held major offices of state for almost forty years.

Robert Walpole left for honourable retirement and was created earl of Orford for his labours; he returned to Houghton Hall where he could gaze upon the fruits of his public office. His departure was greeted with great joy and celebrations, as if all the disappointments of war rested upon his shoulders.

But the fortunes of war were not materially improved by his absence. Its wavering course was not followed with any eagerness, and seems to have been prosecuted mainly by subsidies and mercenaries. No one cared much about its victories or its vicissitudes. Who took Juliers or Berg, Brieg or Wohlan, were matters of indifference. The conflict was marked in its last six years by treachery and criminality, double dealing and division, defections and secret treaties, lies and bloodshed on an enormous scale. When peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, not a moment too soon, it could record no single important result. Thomas Carlyle, the great Scottish historian with a style of fire, eventually described it as ‘an unintelligible, huge English-and-Foreign Delirium’.

Everyone had wanted Wapole to retire, including his closest associates, but in truth his retirement made very little difference; the members of the old team were still there, now looking for support from some of the ‘new Whigs’ and the ‘prince’s party’. There was no great millennial change, as some had wanted or suspected. More Whigs of various tendencies did in fact join the ministry, and in time became known with some of their Tory counterparts as ‘broad-bottomed’. They could sit on anything. Whigs now battled against Whigs, Tories against Tories, Tories and Whigs against Whigs and Tories, in a game of internecine struggle that lasted for some sixteen years. Of course everybody became bored in the end. The earl of Stair noted in 1743, a year after Walpole had gone, that ‘London seems entirely employed about whist.’

Some excitement was aroused by the landing of Charles Edward Stuart, the son of the ‘Old Pretender’, in Scotland during the summer of 1745. The Young Pretender, better known to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie, was taking advantage of the continental war to cause a little local difficulty. Some troops fighting in Flanders were recalled to home soil but the prince was able to occupy Edinburgh and to score a notable victory over the ancient enemy at Prestonpans to the east of the city. There ensued something like panic in London. The fear rather than the reality of an invasion necessarily caused consternation. To breach the moat defensive to a house was always a momentous event, especially at a time of general war.

The Young Pretender gathered with him some 5,000 men and marched south into England where he reached as far as Derby. Further panic ensued. He was in fact unlikely to have advanced much further. The Scots did not flock to his banner, and the Tories that were inclined to the Jacobite cause went to no great lengths to support him. In a country generally concerned with national prosperity, no social or political revolution is ever likely; the Bank of England effectively destroyed the Stuart cause. Charles demanded from his French allies an invasion, but the French were too engaged in Flanders to oblige. At Derby the Jacobite generals knew that their game was lost and, over the prince’s strenuous objections, they eventually retreated into the Highlands. It was not the end of their humiliations.

Charles chose with his advisers to fight the enemy on the open moorland of Culloden and, within an hour, his troops were wholly defeated by the British army under the guidance of the duke of Cumberland. Some of the Scots were ready to fight again in more auspicious circumstances, but their resolve was undermined by the Young Pretender’s decision to return to France. So ended the last attempt by Scotland to affirm its independence by violent means. Jacobitism was dead, its exequies marked by the brutal licentiousness of Cumberland’s soldiers who went through the highlands in a systematic campaign of rape, slaughter, theft and execution. In the aftermath of the bloody defeat all Highlanders were obliged to surrender their arms, and any man or boy wearing ‘the Highland clothes’ would be imprisoned for six months without bail. Transportation would follow a second offence. It was a deliberate policy of cultural genocide.

The cheers and applause of the victors may have been enough to drown out the tears and lamentations of the renegade Scots. ‘Rule Britannia’ had been set to music five years before, and ‘God Save the King’ was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine at the time of the Young Pretender’s landing before becoming a popular refrain.

The young prince ventured one further journey to England when, in 1750, he travelled to London in disguise. He seems to have stayed with a staunch Jacobite in Theobald’s Road, and conformed to the Anglican faith in the empty hope of being eventually accepted as sovereign. He must have worn a mask and costume as he walked through the streets of London; but, in that respect, he was very much part of a city that was often no more than a great stage.

14

Mother Geneva

When an eighteenth-century visitor, Matthew Bramble, arrives at London in Tobias Smollett’s novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), he is much astonished by the fact that ‘the different departments of life are jumbled together – the hod-keeper, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican, the shopkeeper, the pettifogger, the citizen and courtier all tread upon the kibes of one another’. Profligacy and licentiousness ‘are seen everywhere, rumbling, riding, rolling, rushing, jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption – all is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest’.

Some years earlier another innocent visitor had arrived, fresh from the coach, in the yard of the Bell by Wood Street. In William Hogarth’s representation of the scene, Moll Hackabout is immediately surrounded by strange sights. Chamber pots are being aired on some railings, while some ragged underclothes are hanging above a balcony. A well-dressed ‘rake’ is looking at her and fondling himself in a doorway. But the strangest sight of all is that of an elderly woman, patched and peeling with old beauty spots, who greets her as her cousin from the country. Her name is Mother Needham, a notorious procuress of the 1720s and early 1730s; she was eventually displayed in the pillory, and died of the injuries inflicted on her by the public.

These two images of London are closer to the truth of the eighteenth-century city than anything found in the Spectator or the Gentleman’s Magazine; they are not caricatures, but intensely realistic. The polite literature of the period adverts to the auction houses and the coffee-houses, the reading societies and the debating clubs, the assembly rooms and the dancing masters, the masquerades and the balls, the theatres and the galleries, the lecture halls and concert halls. These were indeed part of the vesture of eighteenth-century London but beyond them was a deeper and darker life that had not changed for the better. No ‘improvement’ could touch it. The wider streets and the open bridges, the fashionable squares and the shopping arcades, had nothing to do with the shadows that London had always cast. Close by the rooms devoted to this ‘age of pleasure’ were those devoted to an age of privation, an age of poverty, an age of punishment and an age of pain.

The smell of London was noticeable from several miles away, comprised, according to a tract of 1733, George Cheyne’s The English Malady, of ‘the infinite number of fires … the clouds of stinking breaths, and perspiration, not to mention the ordure of so many diseased, both intelligent and unintelligent animals, the crowded churches, churchyards, and burying places …’. Above all else mounted the smell of horse-dung.

The smell of the streets was a great leveller for the ranks of artisans, wits, apprentices, publishers, rakes, clerks, men about town, clergymen, stationers, ladies, serving-girls, actors and singers, politicians and vagrants who walked along them. There was a phrase that ‘one is not smelt where all stink’. The footpaths were not only thronged with pedestrians but by hackney-chair men and porters, dust-carts and post-chaises, dogs and mud-carts, the boys with trays of meat on their shoulders and the begging soldiers, the flower girls and the chair-menders, the second-hand-clothes merchants and the pastry sellers. There was not one culture, but several, in the space of a single street.

It was no good trying to avoid these inconveniences by hiring a coach; the streets were so narrow and circuitous, the obstacles so many, that all the drays and carriages were often brought to a dead halt or ‘lock’. The coachmen would then begin to whip each other’s horses and often jump down from their vehicles to engage in a fist-fight, encouraged by a circle of citizens who liked nothing so much as a free brawl. The air of the city was always blue with oaths and maledictions, blasphemies and curses. The noise of the streets was like that of Bedlam; from a distance it resembled a great shout echoing into the firmament. To some it sounded like a volcano.

This was the old violent London, which never went away and will never go away; the eighteenth-century city, until the improvements of its latter decades, was the arena for public hangings and floggings. The mad people of Bedlam were one of the city’s sights, as were the gibbets along the Edgware Road and the rotting heads on top of Temple Bar. The mendicants bared their ulcers, while the prostitutes tried to cover their sores.

Moll Hackabout became just such a prostitute, and indeed it was a common fate for those who came up from the country or for those who were simply born and bred in the streets. Sex was plentifully available in the eighteenth century, from the most expensive harlot with lodgings in Covent Garden to the small boy or girl who was easy prey for a penny. Cheap and plentiful sex was the undercurrent of London’s energy. The richer citizens or merchants could have more or less whomever they wanted, and it is hard to believe that the religious pieties of the day prevented them. In his Autobiography (1771–1854) Francis Place, a radical campaigner, even at the end of this period when metropolitan ‘improvements’ were meant to be ubiquitous, noted that ‘the breasts of many [prostitutes] hung down in a most disgusting manner, their hair among the generality was straight and hung in rats’ tails over their eyes, and was filled with lice, at least was inhabited by considerable colonies of these insects …’. They would go ‘behind the wall’ for twopence.

Addison left a more tender picture of the trade in his account of being accosted in St James’s Street by a slim and pretty girl of about seventeen. ‘She affected to allure me with a forced wantonness in her look and air; but I saw it checked with hunger and cold: Her eyes were wan and eager, her dress thin and tawdry, her mien gentle and childish.’ The same figures populated the streets more than a century later, provoking the journalist William Thomas Stead into writing The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885). Some aspects of London seem to be eternal.

Crime and violence belonged to its streets as much as its flints and stones. There was of course no organized police surveillance except the decrepit system of watch and ward, its elderly members boiling tea or gin in their little watch-houses. The streets were dark and treacherous, the tenements grim and the slums dangerous. The night was filled with crimes to which no one responded. At times of crisis the press-gangs sought out unwilling recruits for the navy. When James Watt came to London in 1754 he hardly dared stir out of his house for fear of being taken up.

‘One is forced to travel’, Horace Walpole wrote in 1751, ‘even at noon as if one were going to battle.’ The thieves had their own lodging houses, clubs and taverns where they were divided even as an army might be, into housebreakers, pickpockets, footpads and highwaymen. Yet the detestation of a standing army was so great that even the call for more police was resisted by some citizens who did not wish to live in a military camp.

As the city grew through the eighteenth century, its boiling point was lowered. Matthew Bramble, in Humphry Clinker, remarks to an acquaintance that ‘in the space of seven years eleven thousand new houses have been built in one quarter of Westminster, exclusive of what is daily added to other parts of this unwieldy metropolis’; so ‘unwieldy’ that ‘the capital has become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support’. Bricks arrived at the building sites before they were cool enough to be handled, and the bemused traveller might stand amazed at a nasty wilderness of half-finished houses.

There was a driving method behind this madness of speculation. London was power and money. The voracious demand for food in the city helped to revolutionize the agriculture of the country. Tea and hemp and cotton cloth came from all over the earth. Sugar was ‘boiled’ in the capital. It was the largest industrial city in the world. The densely packed factories lined both banks of the Thames at the eastern end. This was the place of scientific equipment, kitchen ranges, gas meters, furniture and hackney carriages. The coal came down the east coast to stoke the fires.

The divines and moralists, listening to the swearing and indecency rising up from the dens and caves of the city, were not slow in predicting an ultimate judgement. The songs of London were considered enough to arouse divine wrath:

I’m sure she’ll go to Hell,

For she makes me fuck her in church time …

It should be remembered that Londoners as a whole were tremendously superstitious, as if they knew that they lived in a doomed city. Phantoms and witches and apparitions were reported in the city, and the king himself was said to believe in vampires – although that may have been part of his Germanic legacy. You should never listen to a cuckoo without money in your pocket. You should return home if a snake crosses your path. You should look down if a raven flies over your head. A screech owl in the morning presages a day of danger. Crowds flocked to a house in Cock Lane when numerous knockings and scratchings were heard. Samuel Johnson was one of a committee established to investigate the phenomenon, which turned out to be no more than the tricks of an older daughter. The reports of a ghost had nevertheless caused a sensation.

A lady from Godalming, Mary Tofts, began to give birth to rabbits, after she had miscarried when trying to catch one. She was brought to London where at a bagnio in Leicester Fields she was visited by the more prominent doctors of the day. A courtier, Lord Hervey, reported that ‘every creature in town, both men and women have been to see and feel her: the perpetual motions, noises and rumblings in her belly, are something prodigious; all the eminent physicians, surgeons and man-midwives in London are there day and night to watch her next production’. This, too, was all an imposture. But it had worked on the superstition and credulity of the London crowd.

On 8 February 1750, the tremor and reverberation of an earthquake were felt beneath London and Westminster; the people ran out of their houses, fearing an apocalypse. On precisely the same day one month later, 8 March, a second and more violent earthquake shivered to dust some of the foundations of the houses and occasioned much damage in the streets. It was now considered certain that a third earthquake, even more terrible and destructive than its two predecessors, would erupt on 8 April. The Gentleman’s Magazine, perhaps best known for its rational bias, reported that ‘earthquakes are placed among those methods by which God punishes a wicked and rebellious people’. The sins of London, mounting ever higher for many years, seemed to have found their apotheosis. The city was too black, too poisonous, too diseased, too venereal, to survive the wrath of the heavens. The bishop of London wrote a pastoral letter in which he denounced ‘the abominations of the public stews’, the ‘histories and romances of the vilest prostitutes’ and books by deists and others who scorned ‘the great truths of religion’.

A week before the expected tremor those who could leave London did so. A performance of Handel’s oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, was cancelled. Horace Walpole counted 750 carriages passing Hyde Park Corner into the relative safety of the country. Many of those who were panic-stricken migrated into the fields of North and South London. The centres, the black centres, the City and Westminster, were to be shunned. In the event all was calm. God rested. But the phenomenon and the panic were enough to turn some, if not all, to thoughts of repentence. Others had already turned to a different source of consolation. The arms of Mother Geneva were open.

William Hogarth’s Gin Lane was issued in 1751, from the Golden Head in Leicester Fields, in the same year that Henry Fielding warned in a pamphlet, ‘An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers’, that ‘a new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us … by this Poison called Gin’. In Hogarth’s print a pawnbroker is engaged in a thriving trade; he inspects a carpenter’s saw while a harassed woman presses upon him a kettle and saucepan. Beneath their feet is to be seen a gin-cellar with the familiar sign of Gin Royal hanging above it. It is no more than a hole in the wall, a dark tunnel leading to the lower depths. Above it are printed the words.

Drunk for a Penny

Dead Drunk for twopence

Clean Straw for Nothing.

It is unlikely that such words were ever inscribed for a gin shop, and Hogarth himself could well have invented them, but nevertheless they have become proverbial.

Gin Lane is unknown to the topographer and gazetteer but Hogarth has situated it in the parish of St Giles, notorious for its beggars, cripples, vagrants and the very poor. The site of the print is now at the northern end of Shaftesbury Avenue. A dazed and drunken woman sits upon some steps. It looks as if time has been suspended around her, except that an infant is falling from her useless arms onto the ground below. An emaciated ballad-singer lies dying on the steps immediately below her. Close by, a man and a dog quarrel over a filthy bone.

But the woman is the centre of this part of the composition. She has the tokens of syphilis upon her legs. She is filthy, and her clothes are in tatters. She must have been on the streets of St Giles to pay for her addiction. A commentary on the print noticed that ‘if a woman accustoms herself to dram-drinking, she becomes the most miserable as well as the most contemptible creature on earth’. A recent case pointed the moral better than words. Judith Defour had taken her two-year-old child to a workhouse where it received better care and a set of new clothes. She returned to the workhouse a few days later and claimed the child; she then took the infant to a nearby field where she strangled it and dumped the body in a ditch before pawning the new clothes for a shilling which she then spent on gin. It was an extreme case, but not so extreme as to be implausible.

Beside Kilman Distillery, on the right of Hogarth’s print, two young girls are quaffing the gin, while some beggars fight for a dram and a young mother is pouring the drink into her baby’s mouth. Signs of death are everywhere, with a suicide hanging in plain sight, a baby accidentally impaled upon a spit, a swinging coffin as a sign of an undertaker’s shop, and a makeshift funeral. The pawnbroker’s sign hangs like a cross over the street scene while in the distance is the steeple of St George’s Bloomsbury with a statue of George I on its pinnacle. He is the only king so to be honoured in London, but on this occasion he seems as cold and remote from his realm as the church itself. Hogarth’s print is composed of minute particulars which, taken together, make up one overwhelming statement. The two girls, for example, wear their parish insignia of ‘GS’ or St Giles. The churchwardens, the vestry and the overseers of the poor are exposed as incompetent or irresponsible.

Hogarth’s print sold for a shilling, together with its companion piece, ‘Beer Street’, and although its cost would have been beyond the reach of the poor, it is reasonable to suppose that it found a place on the walls of the tavern or the alehouse where it might act as a satire or as a corrective. An advertisement in the London Evening Post remarked that ‘as the Subjects of these Prints are calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People, in hopes to render them of more extensive use, the Author has publish’d them in the cheapest Manner possible’.

The craze for gin began, approximately, in 1720 but it had been readily available since the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. William III brought the drink with him from the purlieux of Rotterdam, and soon enough the Dutch spirit had supplanted the taste for French brandies. Anything French was suspect. The soldiers of William’s army were encouraged to imbibe ‘Dutch courage’ before action. Two years after his successful invasion an Act was passed ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’. The farmers and distillers were further rewarded when the duty on their liquor fell from a shilling to a penny a gallon. London had always been a city of hard drinking but in the streets of the capital the current of gin grew stronger and faster. In times of want, and pain, and cold, many ran into it willingly. A nasty steam, or fog, arose from the vats of the distillers.

The gin was sold in the shops of weavers, dyers, barbers, carpenters and shoemakers; the workhouses, prisons and madhouses were awash. There were degrees of nastiness and discomfort. Inns had lodging rooms for guests, while alehouses provided ‘houses of call’ for the various trades of the city; the brandy shops or dram shops were of the lowest grade, where cellars, back rooms and holes in the wall provided shelter for copious consumption. Gin was sold from wheelbarrows, from temporary stalls, from alleys, from back rooms and from cheap lodging houses. It was consumed greedily by beggars and vagrants, by the inmates of prisons or workhouses, by Londoners young and old. It was a particular favourite of women, who also used liberal quantities of the stuff to silence children and to ward off the privations of cold and hunger. It was a way of staving off the world.

The consequences were dire. Children would congregate in a gin shop, and would drink until they could not move. Men and women died in the gutters after too much consumption. Some drinkers dropped dead on the spot. It was not at all unusual to see people staggering blindly at any time of night and day. Fights, and fires started out of neglect, were common. A foreign observer, César de Saussure, noted that ‘the taverns are almost always filled with men and women, and even sometimes children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away’. It kept the poor warm and dazed, at least for an hour or two.

William Maitland, whose The History of London was published in the mid-eighteenth century, reckoned that 8,659 gin shops were operating in the city, with particular clusters around Southwark and Whitechapel. The sale of spirits had doubled in a decade, with 5.5 million gallons purchased in 1735. Women were not only customers but also vendors. It has been estimated that between one quarter and one third of unlicensed sellers of spirits were female. It was one London trade from which they were not excluded, and the influx of girls and young women into the capital provided a ready source for exploitation. In a pamphlet of 1736, ‘Distilled Spirituous Liquors: The Bane of the Nation’, it was recorded that the dram shops were filled with ‘servant maids and laboring men’s wives’, emphasizing the belief that gin was in some sense a female drink. It was known as ‘the ladies’ delight’, and the passage of the Gin Act in 1736 was said to have provoked ‘widows’ tears’ and ‘shreeks of desponding Matrons’.

Several attempts were made to administer or temper the sale of gin, with diverse consequences. The Gin Act introduced a duty of 20 shillings per gallon on spirituous liquors, and retailers of gin were required to purchase an annual licence of £50. This simply served to encourage the illicit selling of spirits that now expanded out of all proportion. Gin was sold as medicinal draughts or under assumed names such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift or King Theodore of Corsica. Subtle means of distribution were invented. An enterprising trader in Blue Anchor Alley bought the sign of a cat with an open mouth; he nailed it by his window and then put a small lead pipe under one of its paws. The other end of the pipe held a funnel through which the gin could be poured. It was soon bruited ‘that gin would be sold by the cat at my window the next day’. He waited for his first customer, and soon enough he heard ‘a comfortable voice say, “Puss, give me twopennyworth of gin”’. The coins were inserted into the mouth of the cat, and the tradesman poured the required amount into the funnel of the pipe. Crowds soon gathered to see ‘the enchanted cat’ and the liquor itself came to be known as ‘Puss’.

The evidence of Westminster interference in the once flourishing gin trade provoked riots in the poorer parts of the city; the turmoil became so violent that it was deemed by some to be a danger to the state. Shoreditch and Spitalfields were practically under siege. Informers, those who swore to the justice that a certain establishment was selling gin unlawfully, were hounded and struck down by the mobs. Some of them were beaten to death, while others were ducked in the Thames, the ponds, or the common sewers. It was a form of street power. A woman in the Strand called out ‘Informers!’ whereupon ‘the Mob secur’d’ the man involved ‘and us’d him so ill that he is since dead of his Bruises’.

The legislation of 1736 proved impossible to enforce. The Act was modified in the light of public complaint and a new Act was drawn up seven years later; it was known as ‘the Tippling Act’, and in 1747 the gin distillers won back the right to sell their product retail. Spirit, raw or mixed with cordial, was once more the drink of choice. It was estimated that, in Holborn, one in five dwellings was used as a gin shop.

The effects were predictable and familiar. In 1751 Corbyn Morris, a customs administrator, noted the fall in births as well as ‘the sickly state of such infants as are born’. He observed also that the hospitals were crowded with ‘increasing multitudes of dropsical and consumptive people arising from spirituous liquors’. The drink was also associated with sexual licence, and it was reported that ‘young creatures, girls of twelve and thirteen years of age, drink Geneva like fishes and make themselves unfit to live in sober families … there is no passing the streets for ’em, so shameless are they grown’. This was the immediate context for Hogarth’s print and Fielding’s pamphlet.

Yet, in one of those ultimately unfathomable changes of taste, the craze for gin subsided. This had nothing to do with the attempt at prohibition, which had become a dead failure. Bad harvests rendered gin more expensive. The influence of Methodism was growing even among the urban poor. And, suddenly, there was the new fashion for tea.

It is fitting that William Hogarth should have become the most celebrated observer of this London craze, as he was of other urban phenomena. This was the Hogarthian moment. He was a Londoner by birth, out of Smithfield, and an urban tradesman who started his career as a goldsmith’s engraver. His first paintings were of a scene from The Beggar’s Opera. He is as intrinsic to the eighteenth century as Samuel Johnson or Henry Fielding. He was a model and an inspiration for the new generation of novelists. ‘It would take the pencil of Hogarth’, Tobias Smollett wrote in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), ‘to express the astonishment and concern of Strap.’ Samuel Richardson’s The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1733) wishes that ‘the ingenious Mr Hogarth would finish the portrait’. In The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Henry Fielding interrupts his narrative to exclaim, ‘O Hogarth! Had I thy pencil!’

Hogarth touches upon so many and so various eighteenth-century concerns that he might be called the presiding deity of the period. He understood the randomness of life from the chance encounter to the unexpected event, from the fall of a building to the overturning of a coach; he also understood the extremes of living, rich beside poor, sick and dying beside the healthy, vice beside virtue. He loved the low life of the streets, and spent much of his life in celebrating it. Melodrama and spectacle, as common on the streets of the city as among the players of Bartholomew Fair, were some of the spirits of the age. ‘We will therefore compare subjects for painting’, Hogarth wrote, ‘with those of the stage.’

He was also an astute man of business. He became the professional above all others. He advertised his prints in the newspapers and sold directly to purchasers without going through the medium of dealers or print-sellers; he hung a shop sign outside the door of his house. He also secured the passage of legislation, known as ‘Hogarth’s Act’, that managed to protect the copyright of engravers. Artists had always exploited the market, and manipulated their patrons, but perhaps in never so overtly a commercial fashion. Whether in his robust moralism, or in his evocation of urban fever, or in his financial acuteness, he caught the temper of the times.

15

The pack of cards

William Pitt would be conceived and fashioned in war; from the beginning he had despised Robert Walpole’s policy of peace at any price. He had taken on Walpole and won. Now his time had almost come, when he would be saluted as the war master of the age, the ‘great commoner’ who had become a great warrior. Eight years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, negotiated by Britain, France and the other combatants of the War of the Austrian Succession, his first intimations of blood came in the distant colonies across the ocean. It took once again the form of Anglo-French enmity. The policy of France in North America, as far as the English were concerned, was one of expansion and aggression; it was believed that they aimed for ‘universal commerce’. They had settled on the St Lawrence to the north, and on the Mississippi to the south, and were thus in a position to control with a line of forts all the territory west of the New England colonies. If the British were confined to that narrow strip along the Atlantic shore, they would have no part in the burgeoning and profitable fur trade. It did not help that the French were in alliance with the confederation of Native Indians known as the ‘Six Nations’. In April 1754, a French force from Canada occupied the fort that would one day be the site of Pittsburgh. Offensive expeditions were in turn sent out by the British, but with very little effect. The battlegrounds were not yet important.

America was still a far-off land of which the British knew very little. Snippets of news from ‘the colonies’ appeared in the public prints, under the headings of ‘American Affairs’ or ‘British Plantations’, but there was no genuine bond of sentiment or sympathy between the two communities. America was considered to be a nation of farmers, in a wilderness dotted with small farms and villages. That was far from the case – Harvard and Yale had already been established, Harvard more than a century before. The merchants of England of course also knew better; they traded in fish and lumber products, as well as the great wheat and grain crops that were already pouring out of the ‘bread colonies’. And then there was the tobacco of Virginia and Maryland. In the end these commodities would be the root and cause of war.

The relations between France and England, exacerbated by the tensions in America, were becoming more ominous closer to home. In March 1756, an invasion scare prompted the administration to send for Hanoverian mercenaries to defend the shores. The use of German troops was unparalleled and raised a tempest against the presence of Hanoverians and Hessians. Their strength, however, was never tested; it may be that the French never intended to invade but were making a feint in advance of more serious hostilities. Sure enough, on 18 May, a general war was declared which can be seen as the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession. War was the familiar bed-fellow of politics and trade.

All the old alliances were give a new twist, however, when England and Prussia were joined against Austria and the Bourbon powers of France and Spain. The struggle had many names, according to the theatres of battle: in North America it was known as ‘the French and Indian War’, in India ‘the Third Carnatic War’. On the European mainland it was called ‘the Pomeranian War’ or ‘the Third Silesian War’. In England it eventually came to be known, more directly, as ‘the Seven Years War’. It probably did not occur to any of the participants that the conflict would last so long.

Even before war was declared it was ascertained that a French fleet was being prepared at Toulon for action in the Mediterranean. The French had for a long time threatened Minorca, the island having come under British control in 1708, and so a defence force of ten ships was dispatched from Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Byng. The battle was confused and uncertain, compounded by Byng’s caution and the poor condition of his ships. When it was believed that the English could do no more, Byng sailed back to Gibraltar without assisting the British garrison on Minorca itself. The garrison surrendered in June, just a month after the general war had been declared. It was not a happy beginning.

The Admiralty was eager to shift the blame to an expendable officer, and Admiral Byng was court-martialled before being shot on the deck of HMS Monarch; Voltaire had said of the incident that ‘it is a good idea to kill an admiral from time to time, simply to encourage the others’. But the sacrificial killing of Byng did not appease the English public who considered their nation to be the acknowledged ruler of the high seas. There was a rise in public suspicion and anger with which Newcastle, still the first minister, was singularly unable to deal. Byng may have been burned in effigy by irate crowds, but the images of others were also held up in derision. A ballad of the day declared ‘to the block with Newcastle and the yardarm with Byng’. In the autumn of the year the duke of Newcastle resigned. All eyes were now upon William Pitt who, much to the king’s annoyance and even disgust, seemed likely to be the new leader of the administration. It had been Pitt, after all, who scorned the Hanoverian loyalties of the king. But Pitt was certain of himself. He informed the duke of Devonshire that ‘I am sure I can save the country and nobody else can.’ In the conventional histories of the period one figure exits stage left while another makes a grand entrance. But it was never as simple as that.

All the cards were to be reshuffled. The players crowded around the table and met in corners. The remarks in the political correspondence of the period set the scene.

There are so many wheels within wheels that no eye can see … the patriot of Monday is the courtier of Tuesday, and the courtier of Wednesday is the patriot of Thursday … if he is a good boy in the meantime … the opposition, like schoolboys, don’t know how to settle to their books again after the holidays … more than one has thrown away a very good game … Pitt has lent his paws to draw the chestnuts out of the fire … you know here is no such thing as first minister in England, and therefore you should not seem to be so … he treated it as words and mere amusement … patriots we have none, all is election jobbery.

The discourse concerned demands, deceits, threats, conspiracies, manoeuvres and intrigues. X wished to be chancellor of the exchequer but, if Y vetoed the proposal, he could become minister for the House of Commons with the lucrative post of paymaster. A wanted B to remain lord lieutenant of Ireland, so that B could relinquish the office to A in an emergency. It would not surprise an observer of political life, in any century, to acknowledge that politics took precedence over policies.

Pitt, however, held all the trumps with the support of the public and with the confidence of the Commons; so in the face of the king’s opposition he became secretary of the southern department, the most senior secretary of state, and allowed the duke of Devonshire to become nominal first lord of the treasury. He took office at a time of unease and failure, marked also by Pitt’s dismay at the convenient execution of Admiral Byng. He hardly had time to expedite his own war policy when the king’s younger son, the duke of Cumberland, refused to take up his command in Germany while Pitt remained in charge. It was the opportunity for which George II had waited, and at the beginning of April 1757 Pitt was dismissed.

All was confused and uncertain. For three months a succession of ministers attempted to coordinate policy against France, but none of them had the verve or self-confidence of Pitt. In May a French army invaded Hanover, George’s own electorate, and at the battle of Hastenbeck in July the allies were beaten; the defeated commander, the duke of Cumberland himself, was forced to concede a treaty that gave authority to the French. The king was beside himself with fury, and laid the blame upon his incompetent son. He greeted him with a frigid silence. ‘Here is my son,’ he told his courtiers, ‘who has ruined me and disgraced himself.’ Since Cumberland never again took up a military office, his animus against Pitt would no longer be a consideration. It must have occurred even to the king that a strong hand was required against manifold enemies.

At the end of June, when it was feared that the great wheels of the machine might stop, Pitt had agreed to enter a coalition with that veteran of all veterans, the duke of Newcastle. Pitt would take care of the war while Newcastle would administer all domestic business, including the raising of the revenues that Pitt required. Pitt and Newcastle were by no means natural allies; in fact they despised one another. They were united only in their desire to be ministers. ‘Fewer words, if you please, my lord,’ Pitt told the voluble Newcastle, ‘for your words have long lost all weight with me.’ The unlikely coalition turned out to be one of the most successful in English history.

The circumstances of Pitt’s return were not propitious. The earl of Chesterfield wrote at the time that ‘whoever is in, or whoever is out, I am sure we are undone, both at home and abroad; at home by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill luck and incapacity … We are no longer a nation. I never yet saw so dreadful a prospect.’ In the autumn of 1757 John Wilkes, soon enough to become a vociferous agitator, wrote that there was ‘the most general discontent I ever knew, and every person I converse with, of all parties, seems to be under the dread of something very terrible approaching’.

Pitt was faced with what, in the circumstances of the time, looked very much like a global war. From Quebec to Guadeloupe, from Senegal to East Frisia, from Prague to Louisiana, the two combatants and their allies faced each other in a battle for naval and commercial supremacy. It was the kind of war Pitt was born for. His over-arching policy was to open as many ‘fronts’ against France as possible, in order to tie down its forces, and to promote and support as many of its enemies on the field of battle. For this he needed ships, men and money, the latter of which Newcastle furnished him by imposing additional taxes. Pitt told the Commons that he needed funds ‘for the total stagnation and extirpation of the French trade upon the seas, and the general protection of that of Great Britain’. He demanded sovereignty over the high seas, in other words; he also faced a war of four fronts other than that of the European mainland – against the French on the continent of America, among the islands of the Caribbean, along the African coast, and in India.

Macaulay wrote in an essay in the Edinburgh Review, in 1834, that Pitt had serious weaknesses as war minister. He wrote that ‘we perhaps from ignorance, cannot discern in his arrangements any appearance of profound or dexterous combination’. Pitt was, perhaps, just lucky. He could not of course have by himself conceived and carried out all the manifest events of the war; much of the praise must be ceded to the officials of the Admiralty. But, if any man held together the various strands of the war effort, it was Pitt. His panache and energy were accompanied by hauteur and by sarcasm to his colleagues; he had very little faith in their abilities, and rarely confided in them. He was egotistical with the proud and domineering with the weak. Yet he had a vision of England and of the nation’s destiny, bound not by the narrow frontiers of Europe but by a global trading empire that would ensure the nation’s commercial and naval supremacy.

16

What shall I do?

On a May evening in 1738 John Wesley was walking along Aldersgate Street in order to attend a Church of England religious society; in this period the walls of London were scrawled with messages such as ‘Christ is God’ and ‘Murder Jews’ while rising above him beyond Aldersgate Street was the recently finished dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. He had the proper Anglican credentials for an orthodox religious society; he had been a tutor of Lincoln College, Oxford, where he and his brother Charles set up a small society of fellow believers known as the ‘Holy Club’. In the late autumn of 1735 he had travelled across the ocean to the newly established colony of Georgia, a settlement of yeoman farmers that had turned its back on slavery. He returned, after a legal dispute, at the end of 1737.

He had a companion in spirit. George Whitefield had joined the ‘Holy Club’ with the Wesley brothers and soon became known for his histrionic genius; he could make a congregation swoon in sorrow and David Garrick, the actor, told a friend that he would give £1,000 to utter an ‘Oh!!!!’ in the manner of Whitefield. But Wesley was temporarily bereft of his spiritual comfort. In 1738 Whitefield had also made the journey to Georgia.

Yet by the time Wesley walked out of the little society in Aldersgate Street he was spiritually changed. One of the members of the society was reading to the assembly Martin Luther’s Preface to the Epistle of the Romans ‘about a quarter before nine’. He was reciting the passage that describes ‘the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ’. As Wesley put it: ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed.’ This was the first stage in what became known as ‘the awakening’, that moment when in Wesley’s words ‘God began His great work in England’ and which gathered its fruit in the Methodist movement.

Wesley had found in Luther’s preface the belief that ‘we are under grace and not under the law’. That grace was the great bounty and blessing he tried to instill in congregations never before touched by the spirit. On his own return from Georgia, in 1739, George Whitefield preached in the open air, itself a rare and almost unknown occurrence, to an assembly of colliers at Kingswood outside Bristol. His words acted as a sword, releasing acts of collective piety and mass emotion. ‘Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ.’ It was this outward call to repentance that galvanized the Methodist cause. Crowds assembled from the local neighbourhoods to listen to what they considered to be the voice of God, and in March 1739, Whitefield wrote to Wesley that ‘you must come and water what God has enabled me to plant’. Four months later he wrote in his journal that ‘a great and visible alteration is seen in the behavior of the colliers. Instead of cursing and swearing, they are heard to sing hymns about the woods …’

It was an unprecedented event in the history of English spirituality. ‘Field preaching’ had in previous centuries been the preserve of a few unorthodox or marginal figures, and the Dominicans had set up their pulpits in the marketplaces of the towns, but now whole communities who had never before been known to attend a church, gathered in the hills and open spaces.

Whitefield said that ‘a preacher, whenever he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear’. He cried aloud; he stamped on the wooden platform; he wept. ‘Oh my hearers, the wrath is to come! The wrath is to come!’ Wesley himself noted of one Methodist congregation that ‘the people [were] half-strangled and gasping for life’; ‘great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead; some with extreme noise and violent agitation. One man hurled himself upon a wall again and again, calling out “Oh what shall I do? What shall I do? Oh for one drop of the blood of Christ!”.’ It was said that Methodist preachers were ‘paid by the groan’.

In previous centuries the Church would have turned on them with all the guile and fury at its command; the Lutherans of the sixteenth century, the Quakers and Anabaptists of the seventeenth century, felt the fist and the fire. But the Church was now not so strong. Anglicanism was, shall we say, slumbering? Many of its members were easy or indifferent; they attended worship every Sunday as a social duty, but nothing more.

The Toleration Act of 1689 achieved exactly what its critics had prophesied; the religious temper was cool where it was not cold. Voltaire wrote in Letters Concerning the English Nation that ‘if one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace’. Various religious sects and groupings came together in public debates where matters of grace and redemption were argued in an atmosphere of civility. There was nothing mean or trivial about that, of course, but it did not provide the best response to the fierce piety of the Methodists and other evangelicals. The established emphasis now rested on a faith that was ‘pure’ and ‘rational’, amiable and undogmatic. The philosopher, David Hume, described it as ‘the most cool indifference’.

‘Old Dissent’ was in no better state. It had in its own fashion become orthodox. It contained no surprises and offended no one’s sensibilities. Once even the most fervent Church becomes established it surrounds itself with rules and regulations, customs and conventions, that weigh it down. The adherents of Old Dissent were the craftsmen and well-known traders; they had become as much part of English society as the squire and the parson. One of their number, Philip Doddridge, explained that they did not accommodate ‘the plain people of low education and vulgar taste’. Concerning the Roman Catholics the same bland latitude obtained. Daniel Defoe, in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, commented upon Durham that the town is ‘old, full of Roman Catholics, who live peaceably and disturb nobody, and nobody them; for we, being there on a holiday, saw them going as publicly to mass as the dissenters did on other days to their meeting houses’. Popular suspicion and resentment of them, however, among the London mobs, would once more emerge in the 1780s.

In 1740 Wesley and Whitefield came to a crossing from which two paths led. Whitefield took the less travelled path and adopted the predestinarianism of the Calvinists, together with the exclusive notion of ‘election’; Wesley remained true to the Church of England, and in particular to the doctrine that redemption was available to all who willingly sought their salvation in Christ. He was a man of great talent for administration and organization and was sometimes called ‘Pope John’. In the course of his ministry he established 356 Methodist chapels, and organized the faithful into ‘classes’ and ‘bands’ with an annual conference at which he would exhort, condemn, praise and rebuke his followers.

Wesley himself was a man whose optimism was matched only by his energy. ‘I do not remember’, he wrote when he was an old man, ‘to have felt lowness of spirit for one quarter of an hour since I was born.’ That enthusiasm lasted for all his eighty-seven years. He rose long before dawn, and preached his first sermon at five in the morning. In his eighty-fifth year he preached eighty sermons in eight weeks, and in the last year of his life travelled 70 miles on horseback in a day. He preached 800 sermons a year and in the course of his life travelled one quarter of a million miles. Such is the effect of burning conviction. More orthodox Anglicans (for Wesley insisted all his life that he remained a firm and committed Anglican) were afraid of his fire. He noted in his journal at the beginning of his ministry that ‘I was roughly attacked in a large company as an enthusiast, a seducer, and a setter forth of new doctrines’. Yet he always remained calm and self-disciplined, turning away wrath with a soft answer.

One of Wesley’s critics denounced his followers as tinkers, barbers, cobblers and chimney sweeps; but in truth his constituency was much wider. It included a large body of artisans as well as those workers who were associated with commerce and manufacture; these might be described as the newly significant trades, among them miners, quarrymen and hand-loom weavers. The association between the Methodist ‘awakening’ and the onset of industrialism, however, is not easy to discern. It may be that Methodism offered its adherents a tight-knit social community, with its own principles of cohesion, at a time when other social ties were being weakened. It is also instructive that approximately half of the Methodist congregation were women, perhaps alienated from the male preserve of Anglicanism.

The faith spread in the manufacturing districts of the north-east, the north midlands and the Potteries; it flourished in the mining areas and in the fishing villages, areas that had tended to protect themselves from official authority. Cornwall and Wales were, for that reason, centres for those of Methodist persuasion. Methodism, more than Anglicanism, was aligned to native sensibilities; Wesley, for example, was happy for his preachers to speak in Welsh. Methodism also appealed to that sense of rapture dear to the Celts and to many other oppressed peoples. Towns were more susceptible than villages. It was perhaps not surprising that Wesley, who professed himself to be a Tory and a devout Anglican, should gather together a motley congregation of whom many were radical and antiauthoritarian in tendency. The message of individual redemption, beyond the orthodoxies of the established Church, was more important than the messenger. As a result, individual Methodists were denounced as levellers, democrats and even atheists.

Methodism was also the spring and fountain of the evangelical enthusiasm that materially affected the climate of English spirituality in the 1780s. The meetings of the Methodists were well known for weeping and hysterical laughter, cries and shouts and confessions; it was returning in spirit to the ‘enthusiasm’ of the previous century that had largely been extinguished at the time of the Restoration. The early eighteenth century had not been a time for God’s elect, but under the leadership of Wesley the elect returned in armies to the Lord. ‘Old Dissent’ was in turn partly replaced by ‘New Dissent’, when the enthusiasm of artisans and other urban workers affected the congregations. The middle decades of the eighteenth century were indeed the time for sects who walked and prayed on wilder and wilder shores. In the streets of mid-eighteenth-century London appeared little clusters of Moravians, Muggletonians, Sandemanians, Hutchinsonians, Thraskites, Salmonists, Swedenborgians and Behmenists. For the young William Blake it was a ‘golden city’.

The evangelical revival seems to have appeared at approximately the same time as the emergence of Methodism; this is not at all unexpected, since they were the roots of the same tree. As the Methodist movement grew in strength and intensity, so did the emphasis on a new awakening infuse Anglicans and dissenters with the same desire for personal spiritual renovation. Yet the evangelicals, as they became known, were averse to open-air meetings and to the wilder manifestations of enthusiasm; some of the more famous of them, like William Wilberforce and Hannah More, worked quietly but actively for social reform and the inculcation of Christian manners. They worked against all the forces of eighteenth-century society that they deemed to be immoral – gambling, drinking and cruelty to animals among them. They were also strict Sabbatarians. They belonged to the world of property and patronage, and can perhaps be best seen as the more established or higher-ranking equivalent of the lowly Methodists. One of Hannah More’s great successes was a little book of 1795 entitled Tales for the Common People.

It was much more likely, therefore, that their missionary activity would take the form of societies and small groups of like-minded supporters such as the Clapham Sect or Clapham Saints which began to meet in 1790. Societies for the ‘reformation of manners’ became familiar, among them the Society of Universal Good Will, the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, the Society for Promoting the Religious Instruction of Youth, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. They were complemented by the Society for the Propagation of the Bible in Foreign Parts, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society.

One of the principal effects of the evangelical revival, however, was the steady growth of ‘Sunday schools’ in the later years of the eighteenth century. The Sunday School Society was established in 1785, and within half a century some 17,000 schools had been instituted for the benefit of poor children who might acquire the elements of reading and writing. But the first purpose of these institutions was to promote religious and moral instruction, and in particular to indoctrinate the children with the rules of discipline and obedience. Many of the pupils in fact became part of the child labour force that was a significant aspect of the Industrial Revolution.

17

Do or die

William Pitt’s vision, of global supremacy, seemed within reach. The early course of the Seven Years War was wholly changed by the victories of Frederick of Prussia, the ally of England, who soon acquired a reputation as the Protestant hero of Europe. In November 1757, at Rossbach in Saxony, he defeated the combined armies of France and Austria. A month later, at Leuthen in Bavaria, Frederick defeated a much greater Austrian army and seized Silesia. As if emboldened by these victories another allied commander, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, chased the French out of Hanover and pushed them back across the Rhine. Chesterfield, so doleful before, conceded that ‘the face of affairs is astonishingly mended’.

Pitt was now free to pursue a continental strategy, with his enemy in retreat, but already he had more extensive ambitions. In the spring of 1758 an allied force captured the French fort of St Louis in Senegal; its principal commodity of slaves was now secure for the British Crown. At the end of the year an English force took Gorée, an island off the coast of Dakar, which thirty years later would contain the notorious ‘House of Slaves’. So from the boiling and fever-stricken coastlines of West Africa came slaves and ivory, gum and gold dust, that were packed for the Caribbean or for England and then stored in factories with armed guards supplied by the local chieftains.

News came in this year, also, that Robert Clive had emerged victorious from the battle of Plassey and had taken control of Bengal, with its 30 million inhabitants, in a campaign Clive himself described as a medley of ‘fighting, tricks, chicanery, intrigues, politics and the Lord knows what’. The victory led directly to British domination of South Asia and to the subsequent extension of imperial power. Yet not all welcomed these developments. There was a sense of unease over this meddling with exotic and alien foreign lands. There seemed to be no sure foundations on which to build. Only in the nineteenth century were these doubts resolved.

Within three years the French had been compelled to leave India. Without effective sea power they were destined for disappointment. The East India Company soon had all the trappings of an oriental state, with its own police force and native army. It was the tiger in the jungle, dripping with blood and jewels. India became the cockpit in which it was shown that trade was war carried on under another name. In the poetry of the period, in fact, allusions to Africa and India became commonplace; they had become part of the imagination. Yet there was still no talk of empire.

The West Indies had become the most profitable possession, even if the prize had to be shared with the French, the Spanish and the Dutch. An expedition sailed in the winter of the year and took Guadeloupe, the home of cotton, sugar and molasses; for Pitt the island of sugar was a greater prize than Canada, so much stronger were commercial than territorial ties. It sent forth each year 10,000 tons of sugar and in return required 5,000 slaves. It was considered to be a fair bargain. In the hundred years after 1680 some 2 million slaves were forcibly removed from their homes to the work camps of the West Indies.

The conditions of the enslaved workers were notorious. Another sugar island of the Indies, Jamaica, was described by Edward Ward in Five Travel Scripts (1702) ‘as sickly as an hospital, as dangerous as the plague, as hot at hell, and as wicked as the devil’. The slaves could not breed in these torrid conditions, so even more had to be transported. These were the least of the slaves’ torments. Many of England’s overseas possessions were no more than penal colonies rivalling any of those in Stalinist Russia.

Slaves were simply beasts of burden. They were already suspended on a cross of three points, known as ‘triangular’ trade: they were purchased on the west coast of Africa with the proceeds of cloth or spirits before being transported across the ocean where they were sold to the plantation owner; the merchant seamen then returned with their holds filled with sugar, rum and tobacco. It was simplicity itself. A few local difficulties sometimes marred the smooth running of the enterprise. The slaves were manacled to the inner decks with no space to move, with women and children forced promiscuously among the male prisoners. When a ship was in danger of foundering, many of them were unchained and thrown into the sea; when some of them hit the water they were heard to cry out ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ The putrid and malignant diseases from which they suffered, in close proximity to one another, spread all over the vessel. The ‘middle passage’ across the ocean often created the conditions of a death ship.

Yet the church bells were ringing all over England. Even as the stinking and putrescent slaves were marched onto Jamaican or Bajan soil the new year in England, 1759, was being hailed as an ‘annus mirabilis’. The early capture of Guadeloupe was only the harbinger of overseas victories that guaranteed England’s global supremacy. Horace Walpole remarked that the church bells had been worn thin by ringing in victories, and wrote to Pitt ‘to congratulate you on the lustre you have thrown on this country … Sir, do not take this for flattery: there is nothing in your power to give what I would accept; nay there is nothing I could envy, but what you would scarce offer me – your glory.’ That had always been considered the French virtue above all others; gloire and le jour de gloire were later to be immortalized in the second line of ‘La Marseillaise’. But in 1759 they had been snatched away.

After the capture of Guadeloupe, Dominica signed a pact of neutrality with the victors. Canada, or New France as it was then known, was to come. In June General Amherst captured Fort Niagara and, in the following month, Crown Point. These victories were followed by the fall of Quebec in the autumn, when Major-General James Wolfe stole up the Heights of Abraham like a thief in the night. The capital of the French province lay on a precipitous rock at the confluence of the St Lawrence and St Charles rivers. Early assaults had come to nothing against what seemed to be an impregnable position. Wolfe wrote in his dispatches that ‘we have almost the whole force of Canada to oppose’.

Do or die. He planned to land his force on the bank of the St Charles, to scale what seemed to be the insuperable heights, and then to attack Quebec from the relatively undefended rear of the town. Recovering from their surprise at the success of the enterprise the French attacked but were beaten back. The French commander, Montcalm, was shot as he stood; Wolfe received a wound in the head, followed by two other bullets in his breast and his body. Yet in death his was the victory. The beaten and demoralized French army evacuated much of Canada and retired to Montreal; a year later the garrison at Montreal also surrendered, and Canada joined the list of England’s overseas territorial possessions.

The consequences of human actions are incalculable. With the threat of the French removed from the British settlers over the ocean, they began to resent the presence of English soldiers. Who needed the protection of the redcoats now that the enemy was gone? And so from small events great consequences may arise. An action that Voltaire derided as a conflict ‘about a few acres of snow’ gave rise in time to the United States of America.

The events in the European theatre were no less promising. The threat of French invasion was diverted. The reports of an invasion force, complete with flat-bottomed boats for landing, provoked Pitt into calling out the militia to guard the shores. At Quiberon Bay in November 1759, off the coast of southern Brittany, the French navy was caught and for all purposes destroyed. There would be no further threat of a French invasion.

And that, it might seem, was that. England had achieved maritime supremacy and gathered up more territorial possessions than ever before. The economic strain at home was beginning to show, however, with multifarious taxes imposed to bolster the revenues for the war. Yet if there was a sense of war weariness, it was not evident to the first minister. Pitt had been successful in Canada, the East Indies and the West Indies but he was determined to guide the destiny of Europe and confirm the strength of his country’s global trade. The duke of Newcastle wrote to a colleague that ‘Mr Pitt flew into a violent passion at my saying we could not carry on the war another year; [he said] that that was the way to make peace impracticable and to encourage our enemy; that we might have difficulties but he knew we could carry on the war and were one hundred times better able to do it than the French … in short, there was no talking to him’. Pitt knew that his colleagues were now in favour of a negotiated peace; negotiation meant, for him, compromise with the French. He would not rest until their most important possessions were in his hands. But the most carefully laid plans do not always come to fruition.

Suddenly all was changed. On 15 October 1760, George II rose early to drink his chocolate; he then felt the need to visit the water closet from which the valet-de-chambre, according to Horace Walpole, who seems to have known the most arcane secrets of the royal family, ‘heard a noise, louder than royal wind, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in’ and found the king on the floor with a gash on his forehead. The king expired shortly afterwards, bequeathing a new king to a not necessarily grateful nation.

18

The violists

In January 1759, the year of victories, the British Museum was formally opened at Montague House; it was largely designed to accommodate the extensive collection of Sir Hans Sloane who, in the manner of an antiquary of the old school, had collected books, manuscripts, works of art and objects of natural history. It represented prize specimens from all over the world, and what better home might it have than London? The collection included a pointed flint hand-axe, one of the first evidences of primordial antiquity; the mirror of Doctor Dee, the conjuror who had held out a vision of the English Empire to Elizabeth I; some birds-of-paradise from Papua New Guinea as a reminder of the exotic world just over the horizon; some ritual wooden artefacts from Jamaica that had now become an island of blood; an ivory figure of Xiwangmu, a Chinese goddess known as ‘the queen mother of the west’; and a brass astrolabe from Isfahan for calculating the position of the sun and other stars.

In 1768 the Royal Academy had been established, of which Sir Joshua Reynolds became the first president. It was pre-eminent in a city that had, in the previous decade, harboured no art galleries or exhibitions of any kind. The first public exhibition was held in April 1760, at the Society of Arts in the Strand; the crush was so great that several windows were broken. But it inaugurated, if nothing else, a new relation of art with the public. There was a new market. There was a new commodity. It was perhaps no coincidence that the first recorded reference to the phrase ‘fine arts’ comes from 1767 when Dr James Fordyce stated of young women that ‘they … wanted instruction in the principles of the Fine Arts’.

There had been in the earlier part of the century associations for young artists, most notably among them a new academy in St Martin’s Lane where William Hogarth was a member. The members were, or had been, apprentices to one of the decorative arts; but now they sought other opportunities based on European models, and were particularly interested in ‘life drawing’. The aspiring painters among them would previously have been confined to ceilings, stages and portraits, but their ambitions were also lifted. They had become interested in the style of the light and agitated line, or what Hogarth called ‘the serpentine line of beauty’.

Soon enough the novels and plays of the age would be full of a new and interesting figure, the young artist. The young artist who is hired to superintend the lessons in drawing for young ladies. The young artist who is invited to paint a country house and its occupants. The young artist who has recently removed himself to Rome where he might study the classical masters and perhaps act as a cicerone for Englishmen and Englishwomen on the grand tour. The young artist who earned a precarious living in London, loitering around the Royal Academy or the auction houses in the hope of inviting stray custom. The virtuosi of course considered only works in oil by the Italian masters, or canvases that at least resembled them, to be worth examination. But watercolours and line drawings were coming to seem respectable on the walls of the aspiring middle class. It was no longer considered pretentious or laughable to style yourself an ‘artist’. This was one of the new professions.

So the Royal Academy became a notable centre for aspiring artists who were bolstered by their membership of what was already a grand national institution. Art had arrived in the public arena. William Blake entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1779; James Gillray had entered in the previous year, and Thomas Rowlandson in 1772. In 1789 James Mallord William Turner made the journey to Somerset House as a student. In the following year the Royal Academy opened its doors to the public. An entirely new national enterprise had begun under the most favourable circumstances.

A new London concert society, the Concert of Ancient Music, began giving performances in 1776 at what became its regular venue, the Crown & Anchor in the Strand. Its name suggests an association with ale and spirits but in fact it was a ‘great assembly room’ with staircases and lobbies. This was the meeting place of a respectable and indeed formal group of musicians devoted to the English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It soon became common for them to treat as ‘ancient’ any music composed twenty years before, which is perhaps an indication of how the grip of ‘modernity’ – what was recent, what was new – imbued the nature of the fine arts in the period.

There was a suggestion of lightness, or what in another era was known as ‘pleasaunce’, about English fine art. In Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) Archibald Alison remarked that ‘The fine arts are considered as the arts which are addressed to the imagination, and the pleasures they afford …’ They might include an essay, a print, a watercolour, an epigram, a light air, a Chinese bowl, all of which comprise elegant pleasures that, in the words of the philosopher Lord Kames, furnish ‘love of order’ and ‘delicacy of feeling’.

The members of the Concert of Ancient Music were independent professionals, no longer necessarily tied to a court or a church. The feudal ties had been severed, with sometimes unintended consequences. Haydn was overwhelmed by the liberality of his fees in London after the rigours of the Esterhazy court; he earned extravagant sums for concerts and for individual commissions; after receiving £800 for a concert in 1794 he remarked that ‘this one can only make in England’. The sum is equivalent to £45,000. It was the true mark of a new musical culture.

The first professional concert series took place in the 1760s, in the same period as the first public exhibitions of art were also held in London. A concert room was built in Hanover Square in the subsequent decade, together with the Pantheon in Oxford Street whose manager brought Hadyn to London. There came a time when many large towns and cities had their resident orchestras.

Another sign of that new culture could be found in the unlikely purlieux of Clerkenwell where in Jerusalem Passage a ‘small coals’ man, Thomas Britton, organized a series of weekly concerts where could be heard performances of music, vocal and instrumental, that were acclaimed as ‘the best in town’. A ‘small coals’ man was a coal-merchant, and above his store-room he had created a musical space where some of the most ingenious composers and instrumentalists of the day came to perform in front of an appreciative audience. So the public recognition and reward of music emerged in venues high and low.

Music had of course always been the accompaniment of social life. In the sixteenth century England had been described as a ‘nest of singing birds’. But in the eighteenth century it took on a public and more formal structure. This was no longer the private and improvised music in which Samuel Pepys participated. Music was now expected at pleasure gardens and at tea gardens, by chalybeate wells and in theatres, at masques and polite assemblies. Musical evenings were organized with spinet and harpsichord, and chamber music became a fashionable entertainment. Music clubs and music rooms and concert rooms became the arena for professional musicians; the amateur singers around the drawing-room table were no longer the mode. In the eighteenth century music had become the natural and inevitable accompaniment to all public or semi-public gatherings. It invited pleasure rather than duty or contemplation. You could not go to an assembly hall, a theatre, a ballet, or a pantomime without being surrounded by the sound of violins and violas. Sometimes they even invaded the fashionable shops and the coffee-houses. The players were known to Samuel Johnson as ‘violists’.

19

A call for liberty

The accession of George III in the autumn of 1760 marked a profound change in the English monarchy. He was the first of the Hanoverian kings to be born and educated in England, and the first to avoid the broad German accent of his predecessors. In his draft for the speech from the throne to parliament he declared that ‘I glory in the name of Briton; and the peculiar happiness of my life will ever consist in promoting the welfare of a people whose loyalty and warm affection to me I consider as the greatest and most permanent security of my throne.’ These were unexceptionable sentiments, no doubt written by a secretary. But they would soon be tested.

He had come to the throne at the height of Pitt’s war that had endured for four years, and had already brought signal advantages to the nation. Yet the new king hated the war, and hated Pitt. He associated them both with his grandfather, George II, with whom he had conducted a family feud ever since he could reason. He believed that his grandfather had been a ‘king in chains’, in thrall to greedy and mendacious ministers. He believed that Pitt had used him and his father, Frederick, prince of Wales, to leap into the royal closet; he denounced the minister as possessing ‘the blackest of hearts’ and as having been a ‘snake in the grass’. It was inevitable that he would wish to make his own way. His mother had often repeated to him, ‘George, be a king!’ He did not intend to disappoint her. The image of Duty was always hovering before him.

He seems to have inherited a strain of obstinate self-righteousness from his Hanoverian predecessors; he had the deficiencies of a closed mind, including overweening self-confidence combined with long spells of resentment and sullenness. Lord Waldegrave, his early governor, described him in his Memoirs as ‘scrupulous, dutiful, ignorant of evil and sincerely pious; but neither generous nor frank’. He was in certain respects something of a zealot, or prude, and sincerely regretted the lack of decency or propriety at court. A week after his accession he issued a proclamation ‘for the encouragement of piety and virtue, and for preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness and immorality’. He had a high opinion of the royal prerogative and would no doubt have gone to the death in defending the Anglican Church; fortunately he did not live in a period which demanded such self-sacrifice or indeed such strident leadership from any king.

He demanded order and system as the watchwords of the new reign. It may have come as a warning to the courtiers that he kept a collection of clocks and barometers; rigour and precision would be the accompaniments of proper service. He knew all the little things about the Army List and courtly etiquette; he knew what buttons should be worn and on what occasions; he knew the routine of everyone attending court, from the highest ambassador to the lowliest page. He rose at six in the morning, and then shaved and dressed before attending to the correspondence that had arrived in the night. He rode before breakfast, which was his only meal before dinner at four. The day was given to business, formal or informal, but he met selected guests for supper at ten. He was always a frugal eater and a prudent drinker.

Yet it would be wrong to paint too staid a portrait of a king who, after all, was only following the example of his Elizabethan and Stuart predecessors in insisting upon the prerogatives of a king. Nothing he said or did would have shocked Elizabeth I or Charles II, except perhaps for his protestations of piety. He loved the outdoors, revelled in sports such as riding and hunting; later in his reign he picked up the soubriquet of ‘Farmer George’ for his love of all aspects of the land.

In the draft of his first formal proclamation to the privy council he had written of ‘a bloody and expensive war’. Pitt of course could not allow any such judgement on the conflict that he had guided towards victory, and in the published version the sentiment had been transformed into this ‘expensive but just and necessary war’. It was believed, not without reason, that the young king had been bullied or otherwise persuaded by the first minister into changing his declaration; this was a lesson that the king would not forget in all his later dealings with his politicians. He came to believe that he had a right to implicit support, and he refused to make concessions; he was not dismayed by criticism and opposition because he knew that he was right. ‘I know I am doing my duty’, he once said, ‘and therefore can never wish to retract’ to which may be added the remark that ‘I would rather risk my Crown than do what I think personally disgraceful.’ This was the habit of mind that lost America.

At first George III revelled in the name and nature of the ‘patriot king’, and even earned the praise of the acerbic Horace Walpole as ‘handsome, open and honest’. The duchess of Northumberland compounded the praise by describing him as ‘fair and fresh coloured’ with blue eyes and white teeth. What more could a king enjoy? But who could have known or guessed that during his long reign he would face madness, the French Revolution, the glory of Napoleon and the loss of America?

Yet already he had ideas of his own, and such a monarch might turn out to be dangerous. He had conceived a hatred for Whigs and Tories alike; he despised the cynicism and the back-biting, the profiteering and the posturing, the lies and the hypocrisy. So he decided to rule without the aid of any party at all, bringing in a variety of ministers as and when he thought fit. It was hoped and believed that this would introduce a new period of peace and understanding in which the Tories, in particular, hoped for the dismantling of the Whig juggernaut and a return to royal favour. The king would once more assume a central political position. This was more than a policy; it was a moral duty.

He brought in a close confidant to help him; Lord Bute was in his late forties and had been his cherished councillor since childhood, and the equally intimate companion of his mother, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha. The young king, not trusting any of the councillors and politicians who had clustered around his grandfather, relied upon him for everything. Two days after his accession he told Pitt that ‘the king would have no meetings held at which he [Bute] was not present’. This did not of course impress Pitt, who was accustomed to managing matters in his own way. ‘I know’, he wrote, ‘it is impossible for me to act in a responsible ministerial office with Lord Bute … I can’t bear a touch of command, my sentiments in politics like my religion are my own. I can’t change them … I cannot be dictated, prescribed to …’

The king’s trust and dependence upon Bute, however, do suggest that he was still too modest, or too diffident, or too anxious, to exercise his power with proper self-confidence; he always possessed a strain of melancholy and nervous excitement that may have contributed to his later periods of madness.

Bute repaid the trust with loyalty and gratitude, but in other respects he did not seem altogether suitable for the highest offices. He was by no means popular. Scotland was his birthplace and ever since the Act of Union in 1707 the English had had an ambivalent attitude towards the Scots themselves, born out of pride and prejudice. They condemned the majority for their slatternly habits and yet at the same time denounced the most prominent for rapacity and ambition. The fact that his name chimed in the popular ear as Lord Boot was not helpful.

Lord Waldegrave noted that Bute ‘has a good person, fine legs, and a theatrical air of the greatest importance … for whether the subject be serious or trifling, he is equally pompous, slow and sententious’. The new king’s father had once remarked that he would make an excellent ambassador in a court where nothing happened. It seems that he was dry and awkward in company, but he compensated for his social incapacity by endless business. Chesterfield noted that ‘he interfered in everything, disposed of everything, and undertook everything’.

The politics of the realm were in confusion, with the principal ministers at loggerheads. The king and Bute wished to discontinue the war as soon as practicable; Pitt and Newcastle were in favour of its full continuance. There was a lack of trust at the highest levels, therefore, and Pitt in particular felt that he was impeded and hindered. The Tories hardly knew who or what they were any more, having found royal favour after almost fifty years in the wilderness, and the Whigs were split and dissipated into so many factions and interests that they scarcely recognized each other. As one member, Henry Conway, put it, ‘parties seem not only to have lost their animosities, but the very line that distinguished them is effaced’.

Encouraged by the presence of the king and of Bute, with their known animosity towards Pitt’s war policy, there was a general movement towards peace among the political classes. It was well known that the country was tiring of war but, more particularly, it was tiring of taxes to pay for it. The first move came from the French king, Louis XV, who believed or hoped that the financial resources of the enemy were close to exhaustion. At the end of March 1761 he issued a declaration that talks between the parties should be held on the basis of territorial possessions now held. The technical term for this arrangement, uti possidetis, was a diplomatic nicety that could be interpreted in any number of fashions.

In this period, perhaps fortuitously, a general election was held that engrossed the attention of political spectators. It was a hard and expensive campaign with Horace Walpole describing ‘West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals’ descending on every borough. ‘West Indians’ were the owners of plantations and ‘nabobs’ were the English who had picked up the riches of India. Bribery and corruption increased proportionately and one parliamentary borough, Sudbury, even advertised itself for sale. Given the confused and heterogeneous mixture of alliances, groups, loyalties, factions and coteries – all of them floating above the divisions between Whigs and Tories – it was of course difficult to decide who, if anyone, had ‘won’. The inevitable result was insecurity, and instability, at a time when the challenges to the king’s administration had never been greater.

Pitt, however, was still the dominant minister until the parliament assembled in October 1761. One member, Richard Rigby, described him as ‘the Dictator’ and the French ambassador, François de Bussy, remarked that ‘he has few friends in the Council, but there is no one there strong or bold enough to try to replace him’. He was of course all for continuing the war against the French, on the principle that it is better to knock out your enemy when he is already down.

Pitt also called for a pre-emptive war against Spain so that the two Bourbon powers might not have the time or opportunity to ally against the common foe. He called together his colleagues to reveal to them the information that France and Spain had indeed concluded a family pact. It was doubly important to intercept the annual plate fleet from the Americas that filled its treasury. ‘France is Spain,’ he told them, ‘and Spain is France.’ His colleagues were not inclined to draw the same conclusions. The City declared that there was not enough money for further warfare; Admiral Anson complained that the fleet was not ready. A thousand plausible reasons could be given for caution or inaction.

Pitt reacted in the only way he knew. He would, he said, ‘be responsible for nothing but what he directed’. He resigned on 5 October, to the great relief of Spain, France, the earl of Bute and the new king. ‘I would say,’ George wrote, ‘let that mad Pitt be dismissed.’ But Pitt, to the dismay of his supporters and the incredulity of his opponents, then decided to accept a government pension of £3,000 per year. The cynical response, although brief, was overwhelming. The great patriot could be bought after all, and his selfless direction of his country could now be seen by cynics in a different light. As Horace Walpole put it, ‘Alack! Alack! Mr Pitt loves an estate as well as my Lord Bath.’ Pitt’s resentment was such that his supposed retirement from politics turned out to be temporary. He burned for revenge on his calumniators.

It was now the turn of the earl of Newcastle, the old warhorse of the administration for thirty-eight years, to bow to the force of the ‘new men’ and resign his office as first lord of the treasury. He had already complained that ‘my advice or opinion, are scarce ever asked, but never taken. I am kept in, without confidence, and indeed without communication.’ His lament emphasizes the extent to which public policy was determined by a small handful of councillors. In the early years of George’s reign a group of principal men, generally seven or eight in number but reaching up to thirteen, now took on the name and nature of an inner cabinet as opposed to a larger outer cabinet of assorted worthies. The earl of Bute himself took command of policy with a profound sense of self-importance. Lord Shelburne had remarked that he was ‘always on stilts’.

By the new year Pitt’s prognostications had in fact proved to be correct. The treasure ships sailed into Spanish harbours and the Spanish authorities, so provided, rejected complaints concerning their provocations against English vessels. A war upon Spain was declared in January 1762, and the superiority of English sea power was manifest in the conquest of Havana and Manila. From the West Indies to the Philippines the Royal Navy seemed to be invincible. Yet even as the smoke cleared Bute was pursuing the path of peace; through various intermediaries he was in contact with the courts of Madrid and Versailles. He was perhaps in concert with the popular mood, since in this year there occurred a sharp economic depression which was the harbinger of a decade of droughts and poor harvests.

The preliminary articles of peace were signed at Fontainebleau at the beginning of November, and in the welter of complex negotiations it became clear that England was the gainer of most spoils. Minorca, Nova Scotia, Canada, Senegal, St Vincent, Grenada and other territories now became her property by conquest. The French also ceded British supremacy in India. But Pitt, the man who had fought the war, was not content. He came to parliament with his legs and feet wrapped in flannel; he suffered so badly from gout that he was allowed occasionally to sit as he spoke. Nevertheless his speech against the preliminaries of peace lasted three and a half hours, in which time he described France as a powerful and dangerous rival who should not be rescued at the last minute. Yet the war was over.

The treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, set the seal on the general peace that followed. The countries of Europe were exhausted after seven years of conflict, and the majority of them had gained little if anything from the bloodshed and the destruction. Nobody could keep a list of the homes pillaged, the fields devastated and the inhabitants destroyed by invading armies. Nobody kept a list because nobody cared. The mood, in England at least, was sanguine to the point of smugness. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend that ‘you would not know your country again. You left it a private little island, living upon its means. You would find it the capital of the world … St James’s Street crowded with nabobs and American chiefs, and Mr Pitt attended in his Sabine farm by Eastern monarchs and Borealian electors, waiting till the gout has gone out of his foot for an audience.’

It would seem, then, that by the early 1760s England took its place at the centre of what was rapidly becoming a vast trading network from Canada to Bengal. It was still not seen in imperial terms, and the concept of empire was usually reserved for the vast Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Mughal Empire; it was not a European pursuit as Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published thirteen years later, helped to demonstrate. Nevertheless the gains acquired during the Seven Years War seemed to some to have political as well as mercantile associations, and allusions to empire became more frequent in the 1770s. But there was no planning, no strategy, no coherent policy for the vast agglomerate of colonies, territories, provinces and states that were now under English rule. The response was one of caution and indecision. The prevailing mood was one of unease and uncertainty, with an upsurge in prophetic dissent and apocalyptic moralism that tried to counter what many contemporaries denounced as laxness and irresponsibility. England had a relatively small population on a small island. It was predicted that within a few years more people would inhabit North America.

Trade was the key. Trade promoted wealth and independence; trade nurtured strength. The standard theory of mercantilism held that there was only a finite amount of bullion in the world, and that England should control the largest share. Commerce could, according to Edmund Burke, be ‘united with and made to flourish by war’. Slaves, sugar and tobacco were the principal commodities that expanded in the new climate. The war had repercussions at home, with the gunsmiths, sword-smiths, and dock-workers in eternal demand; the foundries, forges and mills were red-hot. It was not yet clear to contemporaries that this was the prelude to something on an altogether larger scale.

The effort of funding a world war for seven years, of furnishing ships, of paying mercenaries, of collecting taxes and of begging for loans from companies, also ensured that the nation itself would be changed inexorably. It was no longer a private little island that could, theoretically, keep to itself. It had become a giant enterprise with all the demands and appurtenances of state power. It relied upon an expanding treasury and the support of high finance; it depended upon an ever-increasing number of bureaucrats and administrators – let alone the teeming excise men and customs men – to maintain its authority. By the 1720s it had enrolled 12,000 government servants.

A foreign observer noted that ‘the English are taxed in the morning for the soap that washes their hands, at nine for coffee, the tea and the sugar they use at breakfast; at noon for the starch that powders their hair; at dinner for the salt that savours their meat, and for the beer they drink’. The bricks that built their houses, and the coals that kept them warm, the candles and even the windows that gave them light, were also the subject of tax. It is perhaps ironic that the people who complained most loudly about taxation, on the grounds of liberty, were in the end the most willing to pay it. It was part of a generally equivocal attitude towards authority that encouraged revolts but not revolution.

By these means, and others, the English administration consumed the largest proportion of national income of any European state. A substantial 83 per cent of this public money was spent for military purposes. Between the reigns of James II and George IV, at the beginning and end of this volume, taxes had multiplied sixteen times; in the same period England had declared war against foreign enemies on eight separate occasions. The administration had become in effect a war machine directed principally against the Bourbons. It was the most egregious fiscal and military country in the world. Whether many people understood the implications of that fact is another matter. Their awareness is more likely to have expressed itself in the popular patriotic songs that rang out in the halls and tea gardens where it was taken for granted that:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, ever, ever shall be slaves.

Bute had said of the treaty of Paris that ‘he wished no other epitaph to be inscribed on his tomb than that he was the adviser of it’. Yet two months later he resigned from office; his pride was of the brittle kind that is shattered by criticism. There were some who complained like Pitt, for example, that Spain and France had been let off too lightly. It was Bute who had defended the peace and his thin skin does not seem to have been capable of withstanding assault. He had already been badly rocked by the imposition of a cider tax that provoked riots in the West Country and elsewhere. And so, on 8 April 1763, he went. He did not disappear altogether. It was believed that he simply slipped ‘behind the curtain’ to lend the king clandestine advice for the next three years. From that position, therefore, he was about to watch two of the most incendiary events in eighteenth-century English and American history.

20

Here we are again!

He was called ‘Dictionary Johnson’ and ‘the old elephant’, the former term both more eloquent and more accurate after the publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language in the spring of 1755. It was an age of prescription as well as of enquiry; what was loose was confined; what was energetic or exuberant was chastened by rules of good order. The language had been in Johnson’s own words characterized by ‘perplexity’, ‘confusion’ and ‘boundless variety’. He himself was a great shambling devourer of words, a bibliophile and an antiquarian all at once.

The Dictionary was not in one sense unique or unusual. Many dictionaries had already been written, the first of them being Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall published in 1604. The eighteenth century itself was the epoch of dictionaries, with John Kersey’s A New English Dictionary in 1702 and Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological Dictionary published nineteen years later.

The first Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1768. A rage for order permeated public consciousness, with a new interest in sources and beginnings, derivations and definitions.

But Johnson’s work was different. He was not an etymologist or a lexicographer, but a writer. He poured all his eloquence, and his learning, into the anatomy of words with abundant examples of their use from a multiplicity of authors. In the definitions of ‘brim’ and ‘brimful’ he enlists Bacon and Crashaw, Swift and Dryden, Milton and Sidney, and others, but he is more than a hunter-gatherer of allusions. He called it ‘my Book’ and it was for him the book of books, a distillation of the language which was a history and an encyclopaedia, a treatise and a moral tract. It was the expressive world of the English.

He spent his youth in his father’s bookshop on Breadmarket Street in Lichfield, from which he was dispatched to a dame school and then to the local grammar school where he first encountered the sacred mysteries of Greek and Latin. In the Dictionary ‘school’ is defined as ‘a house of discipline and instruction’. He attended Pembroke College, Oxford, for a while until a shortage of funds drove him home to Lichfield. A spell of schoolmastering there did not endear him to the life of a pedagogue and, with David Garrick as his companion, he moved to London where a world of hackery awaited him. This was his proper home, and he embraced it like a lover. The Dictionary was his first major work.

He has become a representative eighteenth-century personage and in truth he could not have flourished in any other century. His melancholy was nothing new, but his melancholy madness smacks of the age of Christopher Smart, William Cowper and George III. Like Cowper he believed himself to be in imminent danger of perpetual damnation; he took large quantities of opium and desired to be confined and whipped. One of his diversions was the new taste for travel literature; his first published work in 1735 was a translation of Father Jerome Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia, and he never lost that contemporaneous taste for the exotic and the unknown.

He is also deemed to characterize the eighteenth century as a result of his enormous eccentricity. The engravings of Hogarth and the fictions of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne afford ample evidence of the same preoccupation with extraordinary characters. In the work of artists and novelists London becomes a pantomime and a masquerade populated by grotesques. Johnson’s most famous biographer, James Boswell, noted that ‘while talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand’. In the intervals between talk ‘he made various sounds with his mouth, sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen …’.

When he walked ‘it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon’. He wandered in his walk, swerving from one side of the path to the other in a zig-zag, and he had the obsessive habit of touching every post he passed in the London streets; if accidentally he missed one, he hastened back to tap it. He might stop in the middle of a thoroughfare and raise his arms above his head; before he crossed any threshold he would whirl around in order to make the sudden leap. He enjoyed rolling down hills and climbing trees. He was deeply marked by the scars of scrofula, contracted in his childhood; he was slovenly, often dirty and dressed absent-mindedly. He may be seen as the epitome of the way in which the eighteenth century developed an interest in, and relish for, human character.

The century also marked the true beginning of a taste for reading among the newly literate that included a section of the labouring population; a French observer, César de Saussure, noted in the 1750s that ‘workmen habitually begin the day by going to the coffee-house in order to read the latest news’. Instruction manuals and even novels were scrutinized to learn the principles of good behaviour, of dress and diction; books of practical education, in trade and in agriculture, were greatly in demand. Two years after he had finished his dictionary Johnson persuaded the managers of the London Chronicle to begin reviewing books in its pages. It was an ‘age of authors’, as Johnson had written. Johnson himself was of course one of the most celebrated. That is a prime reason for his emblematic status.

The style of the Dictionary, at once sonorous and peremptory, accounts for some of its power. He himself was sometimes obliged to be ‘Johnsonian’. He once said of a drama that ‘it has not wit enough to keep it sweet’ and then corrected himself with ‘it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction’. When he said of somebody that ‘the woman had a bottom of good sense’ there was general laughter; he bridled at that and continued, in solemn fashion, ‘I say the woman was fundamentally sensible.’ The registers of eighteenth-century speech could be measured and taught. The purpose of the Dictionary was didactic as well as creative, and was very much in the spirit of the age.

He began his preparations by excessive and intuitive reading. He was an omnivore of books, sometimes literally tearing them apart to get at their contents. When he came upon a word he liked or needed, he would underline it and then mark out the extract in which it was embedded. His small and sometimes ragged retinue of assistants, sometimes four and sometimes six, occupied the upper chamber of his house in Gough Square where they sat at tables like clerks in a counting house. Johnson himself sat on an ancient elbow-chair, with three legs and one arm, propped against a wall.

When he had finished with a book it was passed to one of his companions who would then copy the marked passages onto a quarto sheet; when the sheet was filled with a column of references it was cut into single slips which were then deposited into a number of ‘bins’. In the first edition of the completed work there were 40,000 words and more than 110,000 quotations. It was a wholly practical method of dealing with recalcitrant material, and must compare favourably with the prolonged discussions among the learned scholars of Paris or Florence about their own dictionaries. But it was also the great business of his life, expelling idleness and therefore melancholy. He wrote it, as he said, ‘amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow’, but the majesty and importunity of his work sufficiently elevated him.

He wrote a ‘Plan’, a ‘Preface’ and a ‘History of the English Language’ to accompany his work. He believed that the Dictionary itself would uncover ‘the exuberance of signification’ and would in the process comprise ‘principles of science’, ‘remarkable facts’, ‘complete processes’, ‘striking exhortations’ and ‘beautiful descriptions’. Yet these were essentially ‘the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer’. He began his quest in the time of Philip Sidney and ended at the Restoration, because the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries was the one in which ‘the wells of English undefiled’ were to be found and tasted.

He treated his sources with the bravura of a master; sometimes he quoted them whole but, more often than not, he abbreviated them or condensed them. He refused to quote from Thomas Hobbes because he believed his works to be wicked; he quoted much from Milton’s verse but only once from his prose, on the understanding that the prose-writer Milton was a radical and subversive. Johnson considered his Dictionary to bear a moral as well as didactic purpose; he furnished even the simplest words with devotional or ethical associations. ‘Table’ was defined by a sentence from John Locke that ‘children at a table never asked for any thing, but contentedly took what was given them’. It was a work of practical morality. He was a devout and orthodox member of the Anglican communion, for whom words were the building blocks of faith. The first illustration of ‘teach’ comes from the Book of Isaiah with the sentence that the Lord ‘will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths’.

In the course of his survey he came upon words that in a later period would seem hard or strange, but were then part of common discourse. So in succession we find ‘breedbate’, a starter of quarrels, ‘brontology’, the science of thunder, ‘brunion’, a fruit somewhere between a plum and a peach, ‘bub’, strong malt liquor, ‘bubbler’, a cheat, ‘bubby’, a woman’s breast and ‘budget’, a bag. A ‘bedpresser’ was a heavy or lazy man, while ‘pension’ was ‘generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country’.

He lists 134 uses for ‘take’, in an account which covers five pages and amounts to 8,000 words. Johnson, however, was not omniscient. He often stated that ‘I know not the meaning’. ‘Tatterdemalion’ is defined as ‘tatter and I know not what’. Of ‘plication’ he merely remarks that it is ‘used somewhere in Clarissa’. Words fade or disappear while new ones emerge; some glimmer for a while before being extinguished while others thrive to become great roots for new systems of thought. In his Plan for the Dictionary Johnson remarked that ‘all change is of itself an evil’ but in the end he was obliged to realize that words are born and die like mortal beings. In that sense it is both a very personal and a very necessary book. To browse through it is to walk through the eighteenth century rendered more vivid by flashes of lightning.

At dawn on the morning of 6 September 1769, a triple discharge of seventeen cannon and twelve mortars on the shores of the Avon at Stratford announced the opening of the Shakespeare Jubilee. It was to be a national festival lasting three days, designed by David Garrick in honour of the nation’s greatest writer; there were to be pageants and plays and processions, attended by all the notables of the time. Dukes, duchesses, actors, politicians, admirals and generals came out in force. Boswell turned up, dressed as a Corsican in order to boost sales of his recent account of that island. He wrote that Garrick ‘observed me. We first made an attitude to each other, and then cordially shook hands.’

The first day passed well enough but on the second the rains of autumn intervened; the cobbles of the town were under water and the waters of the Avon were rising dangerously. Many of the public events were cancelled or abandoned, and the audiences for what remained were wet and miserable. It had not been altogether a triumph but it was in its own terms a succès d’estime; it was the beginning of the festive commemoration of Shakespeare that at a later date would be termed half-ironically as ‘bardolatry’. It also marked the beginning of the national celebration of English drama as an expression of the national spirit. The playwright was a token of growing cultural self-confidence and an emblem of patriotism.

Boswell’s sense of occasion was immaculate since, in the period, drama was the form and substance of the age. Everyone, from the politician to the preacher, took his cue from the stage. The dialogue was noted down and copied. The costumes, of the actresses in particular, were observed. When Boswell ‘made an attitude’ on first seeing Garrick he was copying a gesture from the stage. Snatches of stage dialogue became catchphrases. The most popular performers became the object of burlesque and street theatre. The whole of London was a theatre with even the mendicants ‘dressing up’ for their roles on the streets of the city; there was a costume for the parlour maid, and a costume for the fishwife. When people began to dress ‘above their station’, as was often reported, then social chaos beckoned. The names of Congreve, Sheridan and Aphra Behn are familiar; but every hack writer or journalist, every out-of-work actor or Oxbridge scholar down on his luck, turned to the stage as the most likely means of earning a living.

The two principal licensed London theatres were the Theatres Royal at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, to which the usual variegated London crowd thronged. The gentlemen and those who considered themselves gentlemen were happy to pay 3 shillings to sit on benches in the pit, close to the action, while citizens and their wives paid 2 shillings for the first-floor gallery. The lower sort had the higher seats in the upper gallery, where fruit-sellers and prostitutes wielded their various wares. The most celebrated or wealthy patrons had already hired boxes for their private pleasure. These two theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane were alone licensed to present spoken drama, but of course this did not prevent other venues from providing theatre of a different kind.

Some old relics, used in Elizabethan and Stuart times, were pressed back into service. In 1728 the ‘Old Theatrical Booth’ by the Bowling Green in Southwark, for example, presented operas and ‘an entertainment of dancing in grotesque characters’. The same theatre promised dramatic entertainments on Jack Sheppard, the notorious criminal and escapee, as well as ‘dramatic operas’ and ‘ballad farces’. Other theatrical booths were set up in the courtyard of the George Inn along Borough High Street and by the hospital gate at Smithfield. We read in the Daily Advertiser of 22 October 1776, that ‘the beautiful Patagonian Theatre’ has reopened in ‘the Great Room, over Exeter Change’ with a burletta entitled Midas and a pantomime called The Enchanter. Most of these venues were eventually abandoned, decayed, or burned down. But they are a reminder of London’s teeming theatrical life. By the beginning of 1726 some thirty-six theatrical productions were being advertised.

Everything was of the moment; the jokes and remarks were topical, the allusions immediate, the objects of satire were such modern phenomena as Methodists and ‘bubble’ speculators. People came to hear the latest news or the latest rumours, no doubt from the other members of the audience as much as from the stage. Romances, melodramas and what another age would call variety shows, were also played.

The audience was just as much a matter of attention and speculation as the actors; the chatter of gossip and comment continued through the performance, and there were times when the actors could hardly make themselves heard. The denizens of the pit ate plum cake and blew on tin whistles if they disapproved of any action; the sounds became known as ‘cat-calls’. The theatre was an occasion when the town came to regard itself, as well as to look upon its image on the stage. It was truly a communal experience. The auditorium itself was better lit than the light of day, and the audience had some of the characteristics of the London crowd from which they came – violently so on those occasions when riots took place over the price of seats or the presence of foreign performers. There were times when the interiors of the theatres were wrecked, even, and especially, after the manager had come upon the stage and appealed for calm.

In the world of the eighteenth-century theatre the spectator could often take on the role of the actor. Well-known theatregoers were the talk of the town. One spectator in the upper gallery of the playhouse signalled his approval of the action of the stage by giving loud knocks, with an oaken staff on the benches or on the wainscot, that could be heard all over the house. He was, according to Addison, ‘a large black man whom nobody knows’ and was known as ‘the trunk maker in the upper gallery’ after the noises made by those workers. Another ‘lusty fellow, but withal a sort of beau’, again according to Addison, would leap from one of the side boxes onto the stage before the curtain rose; here he took snuff and made several passes at the curtain with his sword before facing the audience. ‘Here he affected to survey the whole house, bowed and smiled at random, showed his teeth which some of them indeed were very white. After this he retired behind the curtain, and obliged us with several views of his person from every opening.’

The paucity of playhouses in the capital meant that several were built without a formal royal licence; demand prompted supply. Two were opened in the Haymarket, for example, one for the opera in 1705 and one for miscellaneous variety in 1766. A third theatre had been established in Ayliffe Street, Whitechapel, in 1727; there had been an earlier theatre in that vicinity in 1703 where yet another playhouse was created in 1732. So Whitechapel was the second home of drama. The unlicensed playhouses were given tacit permission to open on the understanding that, if their plays gave serious offence, they would be immediately closed.

The Licensing Act of 1737, which obliged plays to be corrected by the lord chamberlain, had an immediate effect upon the stage. There would be no oblique passes at obscenity or blasphemy; there were to be no more political satires. From the defenestration of the eighteenth-century theatre emerged a moral and sentimental drama with appeals to right feeling and right thinking. As Dangle says in Sheridan’s The Critic (1779), ‘Now egad, I think the worst alteration is in the nicety of the audience – no double entendre, no smart innuendo admitted, even Vanbrugh and Congreve obliged to undergo a bungling reformation.’

But the restrictions of the Act not only created a theatre of moral sentiments. They also prompted writers in new directions, thus changing the nature of fiction itself. All the inventiveness and energy, all the wit and drama, were transferred from the stage to the page. The Licensing Act heralded the rise of the serious and successful novel in England. Previously fiction had been considered by Defoe and his contemporaries as simply a digression from journalism, but now it took on a wholly independent life.

Fielding and Smollett, for example, had previously turned their attention towards the stage, Fielding being so successful that he was dubbed ‘the English Molière’. Now their comedy found a new form of expression. What could no longer be seen on stage could still be described in Tom Jones or in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. The comedy and the innuendo, the dramatic confrontation and the melodramatic reversal, had become the stuff of fiction.

The six volumes of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones appeared in the early months of 1749 and the four volumes of Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle were published exactly two years later. As a fitting prologue for the immensity of these productions the full seven volumes of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady appeared in 1748. Three incomparable novels had appeared in four years. The eighteenth-century novel had come of age with the implicit declaration that prose fiction could encompass the whole range of human experience in ways that transcended the limitations of the stage.

It became the age of novelists. In the literary history of the mid-to late eighteenth century we hear little of poets or of dramatists; all the attention is drawn to the innovation and invention of the writers of prose fiction. Fielding himself, in the second book of Tom Jones, described prose fiction as ‘a new province of writing’ and declared ‘I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein’. There are no dramatic ‘unities’ to keep and no orders of scansion to follow. The novels of the eighteenth century have very little command of narrative structure; one chapter is very much like the preceding and succeeding ones, but with intricate variations to maintain the reader’s interest.

Smollett, in his preface to The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), describes a novel as ‘a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of a uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient’. Since the presence of ‘a uniform plan’ was the greatest truth of the age, its use here is not necessarily significant. Smollett was in essence remarking that the subject of the novel was human life in all its various detail. There were no rules. So Fielding described Tom Jones as ‘this heroic, historical, prosaic poem’, which might mean anything or nothing. Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle is another case in point in its combination of satire, melodrama, bawdry, theatricality, sentiment, pathos, realism, bathos, suspense and comedy. All that had been banned from the stage, even the characters themselves, poured in crowds onto the page crying out ‘Here we are again!’

Despite the provenance of some of the novelists – Smollett was born in Dunbartonshire and Fielding in Somerset – theirs was a distinctive London vision. The novel was an urban form. It had its origin in satire and in journalism, not necessarily in romance or in allegory. Fielding himself called the novel ‘a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not’. The London roots go very deep. Fielding had a thoroughly urban sensibility which embraced the pantomimic and the scenic, which revelled in energy and adventure, and betrayed little interest in psychological or moral complexity. The outrageous eccentric was his version of the subtle personality. Smollett’s characters in Roderick Random also had to struggle to be heard among ‘the modish diversions of the town, such as plays, operas, masquerades, drums, assemblies and puppet shows’.

Another aspect of the novel’s popularity was concerned precisely with the ‘middling’ classes who now comprised many of its readers. The novel dealt directly with those of ‘quality’, whether foul or fair; in the country they were squires or landowners, and in the city ladies and gentlemen. For those aspiring to gentility, therefore, the novel could become an instruction manual or ‘pattern book’; novels were guides to etiquette and polite society. The characters attain wealth and status through their individual virtue, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) was advertised at the time as written ‘in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes’. Richardson no doubt meant it, but the sentiment may have been taken with a grain of salt by Hogarth and Smollett. The general mood of eighteenth-century fiction is one of high-spirited if ironic gaiety, where the dominant tone of voice is at once comic, inspired and facetious. But the best and truest word is irony.

21

The broad bottom

The earl of Bute, stung and surprised by his general unpopularity, had resigned. After the water covered Bute’s head, up rose George Grenville eight days later. Grenville was from a distinguished family and had enjoyed an equally distinguished political career, partly in association with William Pitt whose animus against France he shared. He was not, however, a favourite of the king who did not relish the replacement of his Scottish confidant with what might be considered a standard Whig politician. He also detested his long-winded and hectoring manner. ‘I had rather see the devil in my closet’, the king said, ‘than George Grenville.’ The king also said of him that ‘when he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch, to see if he may not tire me for an hour more’. But the arch-bore became first minister in the spring of 1763.

The new minister’s first test of fire came before the month was out. In the king’s speech at the opening of parliament on 19 April, he hailed the treaty of Paris signed two months before as ‘honourable to my Crown, and beneficial to my people’. This was still open to question. The year before, John Wilkes had established a newspaper under the name of the North Briton as an ironic allusion to Scottish Bute. He was now set upon vilifying Grenville and the king. Madame de Pompadour, the principal mistress of Louis XV, had asked Wilkes how far press liberty in England reached. ‘That’, he replied, ‘is what I am trying to find out.’

In the forty-fifth number of the North Briton, published on 23 April 1763, he effectively accused the king of lying; there was no peace with honour, but peace born out of corruption and weakness. He wrote that ‘every friend of this country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures, and to the most unjustifiable public declarations, from a throne ever renowned for truth, honour and unsullied virtue’. To accuse a king of lying, even indirectly, was a case of sedition.

The name of Wilkes was in everyone’s mouth. The standard portrait of the man as a grinning malevolent was the creation of William Hogarth; so was the wig curiously reminiscent of the horns of the devil. Wilkes, however, was genuinely cross-eyed. He was in fact a London radical of an old-fashioned sort. The son of a malt distiller from St John’s Square in Clerkenwell, the home of radical groups and meetings since the time of Wat Tyler, he had a somewhat scandalous early life and two or three lacklustre years in parliament before his pen came vividly to life in the pages of the North Briton.

The outcry against his attack on George III was immense. The calls for his arrest were predictable but, perhaps unfortunately, the government issued a ‘general warrant’ that could be used against anyone whom the authorities deemed to be deserving of it. Wilkes himself was placed in the Tower, but in two appearances in Westminster Hall at the beginning of May he denounced general warrants as illegal; as a member of parliament, also, he claimed freedom from arrest. In his second speech to the judge he declared that ‘the liberty of all peers and gentlemen, and what touches me more sensibly, that of the middling and inferior set of people … is in my case this day to be finally decided upon’. Whereupon the chief justice set aside any charges of felony or treason, and ordered Wilkes to be freed. Wilkes had applied the usual practice of the political radical, not by identifying with a popular cause but by creating a popular cause out of his own situation. He proclaimed that he was an honest citizen who had become enmeshed in the toils of the Crown and its servants. In his own person he posed the question whether English liberty ‘be a reality rather than a shadow’. So arose the slogan that echoed through the streets of London, ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ A crowd of thousands escorted Wilkes from Westminster to his house. Soon enough there would be a plethora of handbills, posters and pamphlets proclaiming his cause.

Immediately after his release Wilkes sued the secretary of state, the 2nd earl of Halifax, for signing the general warrant; he was awarded £1,000 in damages by a sympathetic court. Wilkes had effectively taken on the government apparatus and had won. It was a boon for those who felt that something was wrong with the machinery of power.

But power itself could be malicious and devious. Some years before, Wilkes had played a part in the composition of a satiric parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man entitled An Essay on Woman, an obscene elegy ascribed maliciously to the bishop of Worcester. One of the objects of its insinuations was Fanny Murray, erstwhile mistress to the 4th earl of Sandwich. The poem opened, ‘Awake, my Fanny!’ which in some texts appeared as ‘Awake my C …’. She was also compared to the Virgin Mary.

Wilkes had perpetrated a joke but he had also committed a blunder. Parts of the poem were now read aloud in the House of Lords. The noble gentlemen, far from supporting a parliamentarian who had demanded immunity from prosecution, were outraged at one who had the mob and the judges on his side. The leading Whigs held back from expressing their support. In November the Lords condemned An Essay on Woman as ‘a most scandalous, obscene and impious libel’. In the same period the Commons had concluded the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton to be ‘a false, scandalous and seditious libel’ that should be burnt by the common hangman at the Royal Exchange. A large crowd of Londoners assembled on the site, however, and prevented the sheriffs from consigning the paper to the flames.

The Commons now decided that Wilkes himself was not immune from a charge of seditious libel. Although he was detained by a bullet in the groin as a result of a duel with a political opponent, he recovered in time to slip away to France at the end of 1763, avoiding a certain defeat in the courts at the hands of his powerful opponents. He had not lost his sense of humour, however. When asked to play a game of cards he declined on the grounds that ‘I cannot tell a king from a knave’.

In his absence he was tried for seditious libel, found guilty and sentenced to exile. In Paris, according to reports, he was never so happy, preferring the wit and culture of the erstwhile enemy to the more formal and prudish manners of his London contemporaries. Tobias Smollett, in Peregrine Pickle, concedes that ‘France abounds with men of consummate honour, profound sagacity, and the most liberal education.’

Wilkes might have been equally welcome in North America where his impassioned defence of liberty was universally acknowledged; it was said by some that Wilkes and America would stand or fall together. While he had been incarcerated in the Tower, Virginia sent him tobacco and Boston dispatched a consignment of turtles; South Carolina sent him £1,500 to clear his debts and the newly established American colleagues, Sons of Liberty, addressed to him a formal declaration of amity and sympathy. He was fighting their cause against a corrupt administration.

The situation of the American colonies was in any case precarious. Some of them had already been attacked and harassed by a confederation of Native Indian tribes in what became known as ‘Pontiac’s War’ (1763–6) after the name of one of its leaders. The vicious fighting seems to have been confined to the Great Lakes region, to Illinois country and to Ohio country, but the panic fear spread among all the colonists. It was said that the English troops, in retaliation for native atrocities, spread among them blankets infected with the smallpox virus. This was unlikely. It was agreed in London that a large military force should be permanently stationed in North America, not only to discourage the Native tribes but to deter any French incursions on what had once been their territory. France still held the area around New Orleans, in any case, and so controlled the mouth of the Mississippi. Pontiac’s War lasted for a little more than two years.

This conflict of course had to be financed and it seemed to the first minister, George Grenville, only reasonable that the colonists themselves should bear part of the burden of cost. The king had already accused him of having the mind ‘of a clerk in a counting house’. It was entirely in character, therefore, that the minister should devise a ‘stamp tax’ on the grounds that it was not too onerous or too obvious; it was raised on the stamps required to authenticate official documents. He even gave the colonists a year to come up with any proposal of their own to raise the required sums. Yet he failed to anticipate the clamour against what was a wholly new tax imposed without colonial consent. It was worse than a provocation, it was an insult. The Americans were, in a phrase of the time, ‘jealous of their liberties’ and apt to condemn any intervention from England as a form of tyranny.

George Grenville resigned four months after he had introduced the Stamp Act but not as a result of his ill-starred proposal, even though the Act has some pretension to being the most disastrous piece of legislation in English history. He was obliged to leave because he had angered the king once too often. It was over a matter of place involving the king’s mother, but on his dismissal from office the wheels of fortune began to turn. The Butes, the Rockinghams, the Chathams, the Grenvilles, the Shelburnes, the Foxes and the Norths circled around and around on the vast gaming table of state until the golden ball dropped. The marquis of Rockingham was the fortunate recipient of the prize, but he did not last very long; he was in office for a year. When seventeen years later he picked up the golden ball a second time, death mercifully intervened after four months.

This did not encourage steadiness or coherence of policy. Grenville’s Stamp Act had already provoked a furious reaction from the Americans. Virginia was the first to protest with a series of resolutions that were described as ‘the alarm bells to the disaffected’; the officer chosen to administer the Act in Boston was hanged in effigy from a tree and his office was levelled to the ground. The riots spread and became more violent, with the houses of officials ransacked and the records of the courts burned. The merchants of the various colonies agreed that they would order no more goods from England, and cancel all existing contracts; this would have a significant impact upon trade. It may not have been rebellion, but it looked very much like it.

In October 1765, a Stamp Act Congress was convened in New York, when a number of colonies agreed to petition for relief, and also denied that parliament had any power of taxation in their territories. Yet it seems that the Americans were in many respects as confused and as uncertain as the English. Some were enraged at the apparent intention of the mother country to impose a system of colonial oppression, with a standing army. Others supported the king to whom they still believed that they owed allegiance. It has been estimated, but cannot be proved, that between one-third and one-fifth of the colonists were committed loyalists. The fact that each of the thirteen colonies had a different constitution and different precedents only served further to heighten the confusion.

On 1 November 1765, the date on which the Stamp Act came into law, the bells of the American churches were tolled in funereal style and the flags hung at half-mast. The English response to this unhappy and unlooked-for revolt was divided; some ministers argued for compromise, while others wanted to stand fast on a matter of principle. Rockingham, only recently appointed as first minister, realized that it was better to bend in a gale than snap in a storm; he also recognized that the British administration was effectively powerless to mend matters across the wide Atlantic. In March 1766 ministers and members came to an agreement to repeal the Stamp Act with a decisive majority of more than 100 votes. Edmund Burke, Rockingham’s secretary, described it as ‘an event that caused more universal joy throughout the British dominions than perhaps any other that can be remembered’. It was of course a concession to force and to the threat of force, but it was accompanied by a ‘declaratory Act’ that the British legislature had the right ‘to make laws and statutes’ which would ‘bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever’. It was, in other words, a compromise and a muddle which few people noticed at the time. It was enough that the hated Act had been repealed.

Some saw its significance at a later date. Thomas Paine, the champion of American independence, asserted in a pamphlet of 1782 ‘that the “declaratory act”’ left the colonists ‘no rights at all; and contained the full grown seeds of the most despotic government ever exercised in the world’; he added that ‘it went to everything. It took with it the whole life of a man … It is the nature of law to require obedience, but this demanded servitude.’ He sensed that it had been the real cause of war in 1775 and British defeat. Another proximate cause might be in the Stamp Act Congress itself, which brought together various colonies in the face of a common enemy.

Rockingham did not last long enough to savour the consequences of his policy, however, since in the summer of 1766 he was replaced by the ageing Pitt who was still under the impression that he was a man of destiny. He had made what to many had seemed to be the mistake of accepting an earldom; he was no longer the ‘great commoner’ of political legend. As earl of Chatham, however, he was forced to convey his policies from the Lords where he was neither as authoritative nor as eloquent as he had been in the lower house. A ‘squib’ or pasquinade exposed his pretensions. ‘To be disposed of, considerably under prime cost, the stock in trade of a late eminent patriot, consisting of a large assortment of confident assertions, choice metaphors, flowery similes, bold invectives, pathetic lamentations, specious promises all a little worse for wear.’

He chose to become lord privy seal, and the relatively unknown Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd duke of Grafton, was appointed first lord of the treasury, a recipe for unstable administration. The new earl of Chatham had never been known for his attention to administrative detail, but that incapacity now became fatal in a summer when a failed harvest led to bread riots and mob action. He pieced together a cabinet from diverse sources, which Burke described as a ‘tessellated pavement without cement’, so unknown to each other that the first question was often ‘Sir, your name?’ or the first comment ‘Sir, you have the advantage of me’. Frederick of Prussia told the British envoy in Berlin that it was impossible to do business with the British government; it was too unstable. Chatham was a dead failure and perhaps knew as much since, within a matter of months, he had descended into illness. He was first laid low again by gout, that universal ailment, and remained in Bath for October 1766; he then spent the first two months of the new year in the same resort. An absent first minister (even though he did not take the name) is not good for business. By the summer of the year he had grown infinitely worse and one contemporary, Lord Lyttelton, a former chancellor of the exchequer, believed that he now suffered from ‘insane melancholy’. Pitt the former, as he might be known, refused to deal with any administrative matters and an official letter would send him into a fit of trembling; he would sit in a darkened room in silence and suffering.