History of England 1-6

O’er which the smoke of unremitting fires

Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths

Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.

As so often in his work Wordsworth is equivocal, refusing to give judgement. In a subliminal way he seems to enjoy the experience of industrialism even as he denounces it.

The 1760s and 1770s became known as ‘the age of sentiment’ guided by ‘the sentimental muse’; it was a time of high feeling and moral sensibility which can be seen as an alternative to the harsh and unremitting world of industry and manufacture. What was natural; what was free; what was spontaneous and governed by the heart. Such were the themes of Robert Blair’s The Grave of 1743 and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts of 1745. These were the precepts of a movement that excluded from view the mills and the chimneys. Since The Grave and Night Thoughts were established upon artifice and false nostalgia, they could not endure as the poems of the ‘Romantic age’ managed to do.

There was as much or more to be said for the art, rather than the poetry, of the Industrial Revolution. If you could surpass nature, as some of the industrialists had done, it should be possible to reach the sublime in another sphere. The industrial landscapes of John Martin are filled with fulminating life as if the energies of the earth had finally been manifested in flame, smoke and fiery blaze. He was in particular inspired by the spectacle of the Black Country than which, as Martin’s son said, ‘he could not imagine anything more terrible, even in the regions of everlasting punishment. All he had done, or attempted in ideal painting, fell far short, fell very far short of the fearful sublimity of effect when the Furnace could be seen in full blaze in the depth of night.’ This was the painting of magnificence and chiaroscuro. His canvases seem to roar, whether in rage or in defiance. He drew upon Egyptian, Oriental and Greek imagery to conjure up visions of sublimity and terror, where the unfamiliar landscape of caves, ruins and pyramids whispered of ancient powers now once more unleashed upon the earth. Another Cyclops might walk among the mills and manufactories. In mezzotint he scraped away blackness to create form.

A more gentle sensibility had also come to life. When a professional architect, John Wood, listed the pleasures of industrial change he mentioned deal floors covered with carpets, marble rather than stone hearths, mirrors and trinkets in the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Oriental’ manner, walnut and mahogany furniture. He was concerned in other words with the material stuff of life that had been improved by the age of the machine. ‘I went to see the beautiful manufacture of silk, carried on by Mr Fulton and Son’, William Cobbett, no avid champion of industrialism, wrote. ‘I never like to see the machines, lest I should be tempted to endeavour to understand them … as in the case of the sun and the moon and the stars, I am quite satisfied with witnessing the effects.’ He wrote these words as late as 1833, at a time when it would have been hard to believe that England was indebted for her success and prosperity to Arkwright and Watt rather than to Nelson and Wellington.

27

Fire and moonlight

Science and industry were the twin horses of the eighteenth-century apocalypse. Even as parts of the landscape were altered by ironworks and manufactories, so itinerant ‘experimentalists’ or ‘natural philosophers’ would tour the larger towns and houses with their compendia of wonders. In taverns, in coffee-shops and in the houses of the wealthy, they would bring out their alembics, their orreries, their lunaria and their electrical machines in order to elucidate the workings of the universe to a largely uninstructed audience. They were the conjurors of the eighteenth century. It was the first public phase of the scientific revolution.

It needed, perhaps, the genius of an artist to see it clearly. Joseph Wright was born in Derby, in 1734, just thirteen years after the first fully mechanized factory was erected in the vicinity. Lombe’s Mill has already entered these pages as one of the wonders of the new age, and it soon became an object of pilgrimage for those who wished to view the new engines of power. Since much of Wright’s subsequent work is devoted to the manifestations of industry, we may fairly guess that he was one of its admirers.

This is the context in which to set one of Wright’s most celebrated paintings, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768). A travelling experimenter, with a magus-like flourish, has set up an air pump for the delectation of the members of a wealthy family (perhaps of merchant stock from the midlands); in the glass dome of its receiver a white cockatoo is clearly struggling for life and breath as the air is drawn off. Two small girls can barely look while their father reassures them; another well-dressed man is timing the action with a watch while in the background a young couple are looking into each other’s eyes rather than at the experiment on the beleaguered bird. An older man, sitting in the foreground, contemplates a glass vessel containing what seems to be a pair of human lungs.

The magus or scientist stares out of the painting with a wild look and an expansive gesture of his arms as if to welcome the spectator to a new world. It is not at all clear whether the bird is to live or die, and this dramatic tableau does nothing to resolve the matter. It is a moment of maximum intensity, conveyed by the chiaroscuro that models the human figures. Joseph Priestley, a member of the Lunar Society and well known to Wright, argued in a public lecture at Warrington that ‘real history resembles experiments by the air pump, condensing engine and electrical machine which exhibit the operation of nature and the God of nature himself’. It is not clear, however, whether this is a study in the inevitability of death or, if the stopcock is released, in the blessings of God’s air. Wright himself suffered from severe asthma, perhaps as a result of nervous melancholia, and his condition lends significance to the pair of human lungs under glass. The despair of his desire for air, and the rapture of relief, give the painting its air of intensity and foreboding.

The air pump of the painting is, however, a curious anomaly. Its design is taken from Sir Robert Boyle’s early ‘pneumatic engines’ first used by him in the late 1650s. By the time of the painting’s composition the glass receiver had been replaced by a leather ‘plate’ on which a bell-jar rested. But Wright retained the then anachronistic glass globe. It was for him an emblem more important than the claims of scientific accuracy. The empty globe, the bubble, was in his period a profound symbol of transitoriness and deceit. Glass balls, empty globes and soap bubbles were the familiar language of vanitas painting. That is why Wright felt moved to create a hybrid machine, with the double-barrelled pumping mechanism of the eighteenth century and the glass globe in use a century before. Pictorial, scientific and religious connotations reinforce one another.

We may put as its companion piece another painting, completed two years before, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun, where another travelling lecturer is demonstrating the mechanical contrivance used to mark the movements of the sun and the planets. A concealed light casts illumination on the faces of the principal spectators while leaving the room in darkness; the spherical bands of the scientific instrument are viewed in all their internal geometry, while the intent faces gazing at the experiment are like planets caught in the radiance of a fleeting sun. It is one of the most arresting depictions of the light of knowledge, and the fire of invention, that came from the mid-eighteenth century.

A subsequent series of five paintings from the early 1770s, including A Blacksmith’s Shop and An Iron Forge Viewed from Without, have been classified as ‘night pieces’ largely as a consequence of Wright’s continued employment of chiaroscuro to celebrate the quality of light. But they might easily qualify as industrial pieces because of the intensity of their focus on industrial labour and industriousness itself. Servitude to work is now celebrated as a spark of the divine.

In An Iron Forge Viewed from Without Wright paints the new machinery of the ironworks in the light of the eighteenth-century sublime. The iron worker may be seen as a modern Vulcan, the god of fire who was often portrayed with a smith’s hammer; the white-hot ingot, created in a shed or manger-like structure, can be seen as an image of the Christ Child or Robert Southwell’s ‘The Burning Babe’ in the paintings of the Nativity. The light is holy. We may take as its text some words from William Beckford’s Fragments of an English Tour, published in 1779. ‘The hollow wind in the woods mixing with the rushing of waters, whilst the forges thundered in my ear. To the left, a black quaking bridge leading to other wilds. Within, a glowing furnace, machines hammering huge bars of red-hot iron, which at intervals cast a bright light and innumerable sparks through the gloom.’ The tone and sentiment of early nineteenth-century Romanticism are beginning to emerge. It had an early apotheosis in France.

28

The red bonnet

In the summer of 1788 the political order seemed secure. The first minister, William Pitt, had the full confidence of George III, and their congenial partnership promised a long period of stability. In the phrase of the time Pitt was ‘the king’s friend’. He had cause to be. He had helped to mend the finances of the administration by producing budget surpluses and cutting the national debt; he reduced smuggling, and managed to raise the revenues. He repaired the fleet and, by means of a triple alliance with Holland and Prussia, he restored the country’s standing in Europe and elsewhere. When Spain attempted to seize British trading vessels off the western coast of Canada, she was forced to yield and return the ships; her ally, France, had been in no position to help her. So England was known for her domination of the sea.

Yet in the autumn of the year all was changed. There was something wrong with the king. Pitt received a note from the king’s physician that his patient was in a state ‘nearly bordering on delirium’. He had always spoken rapidly and with decision, but now he became chattering and incoherent. It is widely accepted that his were the symptoms of porphyria, which is not a sign of madness or mental disorder but rather a physical condition that affects the toxins of the nervous system and thus the brain. It is believed that he had inherited the condition by indirect means from the Stuart line. It might be called the royal disease. None of this was known at the time, of course, and the king had all the appearance of a howling lunatic.

The dilemma was for Pitt acute. It was not a situation any first minister had ever been forced to confront. The king was completely incapacitated, and his future sanity in doubt; the prince of Wales would be his successor, but the prince was on very bad terms both with the king and with the king’s ministers. The prince was, in addition, close to Fox and to the Whig cause. He was Pitt’s worst enemy. It was in Pitt’s interests therefore, to postpone any regency for as long as he could. He believed that the security and peace of the country would otherwise be jeopardized.

He presented his proposals to Prince George on 30 December. The regent would be granted no powers to create peers or to bestow places for life; the regent would have no share in managing the king’s estate; the queen would be responsible for all household matters. The prince was not impressed. He had in effect been deprived of any powers of patronage, which was the lifeblood of rule.

He was too eager for his own good; he insulted his father and quarrelled with his mother, all the time anticipating with infinite satisfaction his acquisition of the throne. His supporters were no less indiscreet. Fox in particular declared that the prince had an inherent right to become monarch, thus contradicting or disowning his Whig preference for parliamentary privilege. Pitt was heard to say that he would ‘unwhig’ Fox for life. Fox then peremptorily removed himself to Bath, where he was treated for dysentery. His fellow Whig, Edmund Burke, was no more subtle or restrained; he dilated on the problems of insanity, and the possibility of a relapse. When he stated that he ‘had visited the dreadful mansions where the insane are confined’, even some of his party were horrified at his presumption and lack of tact.

Prince George was not himself a model of royal deportment. His life had been guided by pleasure rather than by principle and his politics were fashioned on the basis of convivial companions rather than settled convictions. He was accused, justifiably, of greed and drunkenness, compounded by gambling and sexual profligacy. It was also widely believed that he had contracted a forbidden marriage with Maria Fitzherbert, a Roman Catholic; she was a woman of some charm and authority so that, in the phrase of the time, she was a ‘whapper’. But as a Catholic she was not eligible to be the prince’s wife, and so she became the cause of lies and prevarications and ambiguities that did nothing to recommend the prince to the public. Prince George himself seemed to forget about the clandestine marriage and soon attached himself to Caroline of Brunswick, this time his wife by legal marriage, but with equally disastrous consequences.

Pitt put himself forward as the champion of George III and of constitutional monarchy, a position all the more satisfying as it became evident that the king was beginning slowly to recover his mental powers. Pitt’s decision to delay any sudden intervention by the prince or his supporters now proved eminently successful; by the time a Regency Bill was about to pass, the king’s recovery was declared by his doctors to be complete. The vessel, as contemporaries said, had righted itself. On 23 February 1789 the king, in full possession of his wits, wrote: ‘I am anxious to see Mr Pitt any hour that may suit him tomorrow morning, as his constant attachment to my interest and that of the public, which are inseparable, must ever place him in the most advantageous light.’ The illuminations and bonfires, on the news of the king’s return to health, stretched from Hampstead to Kensington. Pitt himself was also the hero of the hour. The king’s son, however, was now lampooned for his heartlessness and ambition. The opposition Whigs were believed, at the very least, to have wanted judgement. The reign of Prince George was postponed for thirty-one years.

The king’s disorder was prognostic of a great convulsion in the European order. In the early summer of 1789 a commotion troubled France. The country was almost bankrupt as a result of its support for the American insurgents, and a series of bad harvests and freezing weather brought low its population. The English already had the upper hand in commerce as a result of their naval supremacy. There seemed to be no other place for the French to turn, except to some general reformation.

At a meeting of the States General at Versailles the commons, or third estate, prevailed over the nobility and the clergy; in the middle of June the deputies declared themselves to be the National Assembly. Louis XVI announced that their meetings were suspended, whereupon they assembled at an indoor tennis court nearby where they swore a solemn oath that they would remain in permanent session ‘until the constitution of the kingdom is established’. ‘We are here by the power of the people’, the comte de Mirabeau stated, ‘and nothing but the power of bayonets shall drive us away.’ This was the defiance that inspired many of those who would become revolutionaries in the months that followed; the National Assembly represented the people, and the people were supreme. Patriotic societies and revolutionary clubs flourished in Paris and elsewhere.

On 14 July the citizens, with the help of the French guards, stormed and captured the Bastille; the head of its governor was carried in celebration through the streets. The crowd had triumphed, and the old regime could not survive the combined will of a populace intent upon change. Another lamentable harvest created the conditions of famine in the capital, and the people were lean and hungry; they were dangerous. It was said that a fourth of the population had been driven to sell everything they owned in order to buy bread, and so a desperate people sought for revenge as well as sustenance. The tax collectors of the state and the seigneurial courts were the villains of the day who were subject to very rough justice. The conditions in the rest of the country were no better. There were continual outbreaks of violence and insurrection. Several French cities followed the example of Paris, and in the surrounding countryside the peasants armed themselves against their former masters.

The king had sensed the overwhelming necessity of change and, in an attempt to placate his subjects, put on the tricoloured cockade and pledged to help in the formation of a new government. Yet it was rumoured that his protestations were not sincere; it was suspected that all the while he was plotting to overthrow the new order and its ‘liberty’. Liberty was the keyword; it could be uttered in support of violence and of murder. It was born in flames. Yet it also had a more benign aspect. In August the newly composed National Assembly issued a ‘declaration of the rights of man’, the first three provisions of which determined that men ‘are born and remain free and equal in rights’ and that these rights included ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression’; the third article confirmed that ‘the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’, and not in any single person.

On 5 October many thousands of men and women armed themselves and assembled with the cry ‘To Versailles!’ The citizen militia joined them in attacking the royal palace, at the conclusion of which Louis and the royal family were taken in triumph to Paris. The heads of many of the king’s supporters, impaled on pikes, decorated the path to the city where the king was once more obliged to accede to a new constitution. The ties of history and tradition had been cut through; the sanctions of custom and time were abandoned. This was an ideology based upon rational principle, the reification of ‘the people’ and a fervent devotion to ‘la patrie’ or the fatherland. The clergy were now aliens, and the nobles beyond help; any aristocrats who wished to survive became leaders of the citizens or the citizen militia. It was a new order governed by a commitment to ideals, no less potent for being wholly vague; a vision of reality became more important than the reality itself, and the twin shibboleths of liberty and equality left power in the hands of those who were most ruthless and most determined. Only the perceived will of the nation now mattered.

The news of the events in France astonished the English, who had not anticipated the virtual collapse of the monarchy and the insurgency of the people. Some viewed the events with suspicion and alarm, but many welcomed the apparent defeat of despotism and the restoration of liberty. It was thought to resemble the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when the Stuart king, James II, was deposed. It was also widely believed that the French would be too distracted by inner turmoil to pose any threat to English interests and English commerce.

William Pitt remained cautious and maintained a policy of cool neutrality; he wanted peace at all costs in order to sustain prosperity and to curb government expenditure. Bishop Porteous recorded in his diary for July 1789 that ‘This day Mr Pitt dined with me in Fulham. He had just received news of the French Revolution and spoke of it as an event highly favourable to us and indicates a long peace with France. It was a very pleasant day.’ Pitt himself remarked that ‘our neighbours in France seem coming to actual extremes’, a situation which rendered ‘that country an object of compassion even to a rival’. So there was an element of self-satisfaction in the face of the tumult across the Channel.

Charles James Fox, ever the libertarian and for the time being bearer of the Whig standard, reacted very differently. He declared: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!’ He confirmed his joy when he stated in the Commons that the new constitution of France was ‘the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty’. Nothing was to be feared from this newly free country; it would do no more than spread liberty. His enthusiasm was largely shared by the dissenters and nonconformists of England who believed that the king, courtiers and clergy of France were little better than limbs of the devil.

In the New Annual Register for 1789 William Godwin wrote that ‘from hence we are to date a long series of years, in which France and the whole human race are to enter into possession of their liberties’. William Blake composed ‘A Song of Liberty’ to conclude The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–3): ‘Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! … Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying: Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.’ In those days, as Lord Cockburn recalled, ‘everything, not this thing or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event’. The consequences for England itself could not be anticipated in anything but the most general and overoptimistic terms. It was not clear even to the far-sighted, for example, that the revolution would engage the nation in a war that would last a generation, and would fundamentally change the state of domestic politics. France itself passed from monarchy to representative democracy, from arbitrary dictatorship in the name of the people to the basic components of a military state.

The exhilaration survived for a few months yet. On 9 November 1789, a number of politicians met at the London Tavern under the name of ‘The Revolution Society’ where they drew up a congratulatory address to the National Assembly in Paris with the hope that the late events might ‘encourage other nations to assert the inalienable rights of mankind, and thereby introduce a general reformation in the governments of Europe’. There were of course many who did not share these sentiments, and considered them to be pernicious talk of reform for reform’s sake; such sceptics believed that the ancient constitution of England, albeit unwritten, was a greater stay against the dark.

This was the intuitive reaction of Edmund Burke, the Whig statesman who had become more and more alarmed by the revolutionary sentiments of such colleagues as Fox and Sheridan who outbid each other in their fervour for the new order in France. Burke had at first been uncertain. In a letter of 9 August 1789, he described ‘England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or applaud!’ But in February 1790, he disparaged in the chamber of the Commons ‘the spirit of innovation’ as one ‘well calculated to overturn states, but perfectly unfit to amend them’. This was followed in the same year by a treatise, Reflections on the Revolution in France, that was taken up by all those who feared and distrusted the event.

It was a majestic polemic in which Burke excoriated ‘those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent to pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution’. His animus was directed not only against the Jacobins and the radicals, but also some of the members of his own party. He declared that no nation or movement can rely upon the private stock of reason of any one individual, but must trust the ‘general bank and capital of nations and of ages’. He despised the ‘men of theory’, the intellectuals who thought to lead a revolution with their first principles and rational calculations. He put his faith in historical experience, practical utility and the fund of common knowledge transmitted from generation to generation. He put no faith in a ‘sick man’s dream of government’. He remarked that:

because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

George III came up to Burke at a reception and told him that ‘you have been of use to us all, it is a general opinion’.

Thomas Paine, who had already made his mark on behalf of the Americans with Common Sense was now moved to compose a rejoinder to Burke in which he would celebrate the virtues of the revolution. The first part of The Rights of Man was published in pamphlet form in February 1791 with great popular success; it was hailed by the reform societies as an enduring testament to their convictions. Paine himself wrote at a later date that ‘it had the greatest run of any work ever published in the English language. The number of copies circulated in England, Scotland and Ireland, besides translations into foreign languages, was between four and five hundred thousand.’

It had arrived at the opportune time. It provided an explanation and a defence for the great movement of the age. The revolution produced the harsh and strange music, while Paine composed the libretto. He loathed aristocrats and traditional aristocratical government; he characterized Burke’s appeal to custom and history as no more than ‘contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’; Burke had commiserated with the sufferings of the quondam rulers of France, and in so doing ‘he pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird’. Had he no notion of the millions of starving workers and peasants for whom there was no room in the world? Government should be conducted for ‘the common interest of society, and the common rights of man’. In England, that boasted land of liberty, it had become clear that ‘taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes’. This was a fundamental hit against William Pitt’s financial and military regime; Paine was asserting that war was part of the system of government. This opened men’s eyes, in a phrase of the period, and immeasurably helped in the popularity of the treatise. At a later date President Andrew Jackson declared that The Rights of Man ‘would be more enduring than all the piles of marble and granite man can erect’.

It soon became clear that most parliamentarians, including the largest number of Whigs, were supporting the arguments of Burke rather than those of Charles James Fox and Thomas Paine. There was a singular confrontation between the two parliamentary protagonists in May 1792; both Burke and Fox were debating the constitutional rights of Canada in the Commons when they began to stray into the dangerous territory of France. Fox was still an ardent supporter of the revolution but Burke now stood up. ‘Fly from the French constitution’, he said.

Fox whispered to him that ‘there is no loss of friends’.

‘Yes,’ Burke replied, ‘there is a loss of friends. I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.’ At this point, according to those in the chamber, Fox broke down and wept. It was a private example of the divisions within the country itself.

The people of England were now taking sides; the dissenters and reformers in favour of the French revolutionaries were largely opposed by those who supported ‘Church and King’. If we may use Burke’s analogy the grasshoppers were largely outnumbered by the cows, but that was not at all clear at the time. A Catholic Relief Bill was passed in 1791, removing certain legal restrictions from those who practised that faith; it was believed that Catholics, after the anti-clerical terror of the revolution, were now firmly on the government side. Panics about popular insurrection were still commonplace, however, and were in large part responses to the growth and development of ‘reform societies’ who took their inspiration from the revolution in France, from the war for independence in America and from the recent popular agitation associated with ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ These men could be shopkeepers or artisans, merchants or schoolteachers, dissenting ministers or dissenting businessmen, booksellers or attorneys. Among these ‘middling classes’ there was a vast desire for change.

Their grievances included a demand for parliamentary reform, at a time when only 17 per cent of constituencies were contested and more than 60 per cent were controlled by the patronage of a neighbouring grandee. As Paine stated in The Rights of Man:

The county of Yorkshire, which contains near a million of souls, sends two country members; and so does the county of Rutland, which contains not a hundredth part of that number. The town of old Sarum, which contains not three houses, sends two members; and the town of Manchester, which contains upwards of sixty thousand souls, is not admitted to send any. Is there any principle in these things? Is there anything by which you can trace the marks of freedom, or discover those of wisdom?

He was also directly attacking Edmund Burke’s deference to the traditional order. For many that order was nothing but old corruption writ large.

The first popular reform society, the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, was established in 1791; with a predominant membership of cutlers and metal craftsmen it emphasized the connection between the new industrialism and radical discontent. That is why the Sheffield society reprinted 1,600 copies of The Rights of Man. The London Society for Constitutional Information was instituted at the end of the year.

There had already been a sharp and salutary warning, however, for those who believed that reform was inevitable. On 14 July 1791, a ‘Bastille dinner’ was held in Birmingham, at a hotel in Temple Row, in order to celebrate the achievements of the revolution. A hostile crowd, largely made up of labourers and artisans from Birmingham, gathered outside the tavern in threatening numbers; after the diners had precipitately left, the crowd ransacked the premises. They then moved on to the houses and workshops of the most prominent dissenters in the town, notably the library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley. Priestley was one of the eminent members of the Lunar Society who included among their number nonconformists and free-thinkers whose doctrines were beyond the comprehension of the loyalist supporters of ‘Church and King’. Priestley was forced to flee Birmingham and eventually to take refuge in America; the king himself observed that ‘Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled’.

So in the early months of 1792 the country was in an unsettled state, pursued by vague fears and unknown horrors precipitated by the French Revolution. In February the second part of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man was published, with its radical notions of social welfare; he suggested that £4 a year be granted to every child under the age of fourteen for the purposes of schooling, and that a remission of taxes should be given to the poor. He also proposed a scheme of old age pensions ‘not of the nature of a charity but of a right’. This was too much for the authorities, who could never conceive such a state of affairs, and three months later a royal proclamation against seditious publications was issued with particular attention paid to Paine.

This was no impediment to the growth of popular reform movements that were committed to promoting their aims by peaceful and constitutional means. The London Society for Constitutional Information, animated by the examples of Sheffield, Manchester, Norwich and Middlesex, proposed a motion denouncing Burke and celebrating the doctrines of Paine. These nascent bodies were organized by John Horne Tooke, an early disciple of John Wilkes as well as a philologist and perpetual activist, to give the impression of a nationwide movement; their membership probably ran into thousands rather than tens of thousands. But they were by no means revolutionaries; their members, who were obliged to pay a subscription, were composed of country gentlemen, peers, MPs and merchants who were intent upon constitutional liberty and an extension of the franchise.

In January 1792 a Piccadilly shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, called a meeting of radical colleagues at the Bell Tavern in Exeter Street, off the Strand, where he proposed a society with a wider provenance and a subscription of a penny a week. It was resolved by the members of this London Corresponding Society that their number and composition be ‘unlimited’. It was soon composed of what Hardy called ‘tradesmen, mechanicks and shopkeepers’; these were butchers and bakers, bricklayers and cordwainers, who had played no previous part in any political movement. At the same time it expressed ‘its abhorrence of tumult and violence’ with its emphasis on reform rather than revolution or anarchy. Its members campaigned for manhood suffrage, annual parliaments and cheaper legal costs.

The politicians at Westminster were not about to let this singular method of association go unchallenged and, in March 1792, a group of young Whig members of parliament established an Association of the Friends of the People which would be concerned with the possibilities of parliamentary reform. They in fact provoked embarrassment among their Whig colleagues who believed that the growing agitation for parliamentary reform was misdirected and even dangerous; yet at the same time the young men alienated the more radical reformers by refusing to subscribe to universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. They were marooned in the middle and, having provoked the suspicions and antipathies of both sides, were devoid of influence.

It was a hot spring – the temperature had reached 82 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of March – and in that unseasonable warmth there was a kind of fever or madness in the air. The wheat crop was not successful, and the torrential rains of August and September spelled more trouble for the farmers. The state of the land always had a direct effect upon the state of the nation; in a sense it was the nation in living and visible form. The general prosperity of the previous few years now seemed in jeopardy, and there was fear of economic collapse.

This was exacerbated by news of European turmoil. It was reported in July that the forces of Prussia and Austria were advancing on Paris under the command of the duke of Brunswick; this was meant to be the counter-revolution of the older European artistocracies. The men and youths of France were called out, many of them streaming into the capital, and on 10 August the National Assembly determined on the deposition of the king on the grounds that he had been collaborating with the enemy. When important fortresses on the French frontier were surrendered to the invading armies, the panic and suspicion were redoubled. No one was safe. In the events known as the ‘September massacres’, the priests and aristocrats – many already herded into prisons – were murdered. The Jacobins now ruled Paris and, under the command of rulers such as Robespierre and Marat, thousands of other citizens were thrown into prison before being judicially murdered. The guillotine was the new king.

The invasion of the duke of Brunswick and his forces was not necessarily welcomed by William Pitt and his colleagues. A revolutionary France, albeit one not under immediate control, would be preferable to a country in the grip of Austria and of Prussia. The French were in any case provoked to fury, and the violent republicans of a newly established National Convention now pressed for immediate war.

It was considered that the well-trained forces of the duke of Brunswick would make short work of the ill-disciplined and badly armed citizens of the revolution. But with all the fury of their revolutionary zeal the citoyens resisted; they would not surrender to the enemies of their goddess liberty and, with newfound inspiration, the national defences were prepared and organized. At Valmy in north-eastern France, on 20 September, the armies of the Austrians and Prussians were thwarted. There had been no set battle. In truth the duke of Brunswick had lost his nerve; he was faced with thousands of French soldiers, albeit in not very prosperous condition, chanting the ‘Marseillaise’ and screaming ‘Vive le nation!’ It was not an army he had ever faced before, and he ordered his troops to retire. Valmy was not a very significant encounter in the history of warfare but, in the history of the world, it was one of the most notable. The well-trained and well-equipped forces of the old wars had given way to – what? A rabble? A group of amateur soldiers? Goethe was at the time in the Prussian camp and predicted that ‘from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world’. A Prussian colonel offered similar sentiments. ‘We have lost more than a battle. Our credibility is gone. The 20th of September has given the world a new shape. It is the most important day of the century.’ On the following day the first French republic was proclaimed, and Valmy itself was the harbinger of a war that lasted for a generation.

The enthusiasm and joy of victory were palpable throughout France. Now was the time to press forward in pursuit of the dream of a universal republic in which all the people of Europe would be free. The French said that they had come to remove tyrants and pull down palaces, to extirpate the power of the clergy, to confiscate the property of Church and State in order to reduce the taxes on the poor. By the beginning of November the French army had entered Mons and Brussels; Savoy and Nice had been annexed, Italy and Spain threatened. ‘We must break with all the cabinets of Europe’, said the revolutionary Brissot. ‘We must set fire to the four corners of Europe.’ A new order of things was being born.

Pitt and his colleagues were now thoroughly alarmed by the miraculous resurgence of France. If the French should incorporate the Austrian Netherlands [Belgium] and should stir the United Provinces [the Netherlands] against the house of Orange, they would at once become a mighty sea power threatening the very frontiers of England.

The resurgent calls for liberty after the duke of Brunswick’s retreat excited the political reformers in England to the extent that The Times in October wrote that ‘the police should look to those Revolution mongers who are pasting up bills with a view to incite a mob to rise’. Yet Pitt’s ministry seemed strangely enervated and cautious. It was considered that the military did not have the strength to quell any uprising in the towns and cities. The government seemed also unwilling to declare war against France itself, for fear that the people would not tolerate such a conflict against the new republic. By November warnings were reaching the Home Office from all parts of the country; it was reported that the ‘lower orders’ were in active cabal and that weapons were being furnished and concealed in certain quarters. When the ministry did determine to call out the militia in certain parts of the country, Fox and his colleagues were furious. ‘I fairly own’, Fox wrote, ‘that if they have done this I shall grow savage and not think a French Lanterne too bad for them.’ The lamp-post was used to string up the victims of the Terror. In December Thomas Paine was convicted in his absence of seditious libel for the publication of the second part of The Rights of Man.

Fox had said that the ministry was helping to revive the memories of civil war, and indeed the country ran the risk of serious division. Where there were reformers there were also loyalists, who could be subtly encouraged by magistrates and police to assert themselves. In November 1792, for example, a meeting at the Crown & Anchor Tavern in London established an ‘Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers’. The most arresting incidents were those of ‘Paine burning’ where an effigy of the author was consumed in flames. In November a crowd of loyalists burned his image in Chelmsford, Essex, where a local newspaper reported:

[T]he effigy of that infamous incendiary, Tom Paine, was exhibited in this town, seated in a chair, and borne on four men’s shoulders – in one hand he had ‘The Rights of Man’ and under the other arm he bore a pair of stays [in recognition of his former employment as a corset-maker]; upon his head a mock resemblance of the Cap of Liberty, and a halter round his neck. On a banner carried before him, was written: ‘Behold a Traitor! Who, for the base purposes of Envy, Interest and Ambition, would have deluged this Happy Country in BLOOD!’

It is reported that there were over 400 such conflagrations in all parts of the country.

The temperature was raised in the same month when the National Convention in Paris declared that the French government and people pledged ‘fraternity’ to all ‘subject peoples’ with the declaration that ‘all governments are our enemies, all people our friends’. This was an open invitation to reformers or democrats to rise in all of the European countries, most notably in England and her allies. Pitt began to make cautious preparations. The militia were moved closer to London, and the Tower was more safely secured. Radical clubs were more closely watched, and foreigners supervised under the aegis of an ‘Aliens Office’ staffed by graduates from Christ Church, Oxford. The secret service of Francis Walsingham, in the reign of Elizabeth, and of John Thurloe, under the rule of Cromwell, was becoming more professional.

The harshest news came with the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793; when his head came off, 80,000 armed men erupted in cheers, and curious bystanders closer to the event dipped their fingers or handkerchiefs in his blood. ‘It is well salted!’ one called out. Gouverneur Morris, the American minister in Paris, predicted to Thomas Jefferson that ‘the English will be wound up to a pitch of enthusiastic horror against France which their cool and steady temper seems to be scarcely susceptible of’. The London theatres were closed, and all who could afford black went into mourning. Even Fox, the born Francophile, declared it to be a ‘revolting act of cruelty and injustice’. The escalating accounts of murders and outrages were shouted out on every street corner; when the English king drove out, he was surrounded by cries of ‘War with France!’ It was reported that Paris was ruled by tigers.

The wish was father to the deed. On 1 February 1793 the National Convention declared war on England; war was also to be waged against Holland, and an immediate invasion of that country was ordered. Pitt entered the conflict with strictly limited aims, and he believed that any struggle would be a short one. His purpose was to finance his allies in the European theatre while his own navy could concentrate on stripping France of its colonial possessions; it was widely believed that Pitt’s purpose was to annex the French West Indies. By the summer of 1793 the first minister was sending funds to Russia, Austria, Prussia, Sardinia and other interested parties. It was important that no one country should dominate the continent, so he ringed northern France with a circle of arms and men. This might be called ‘the balance of power’. Hessian mercenaries were recruited into the English forces, but the national dislike of a standing army limited their deployment. Yet the question of national purpose remained. Was Pitt intent upon subjugating France in Europe, or upon stripping that country of its overseas wealth? Nobody seemed to be sure.

The costs of the war, including the subvention of allies, were already provoking consternation, and in the early months of 1793 a sudden collapse of credit was the consequence. There was a run on the banks by those who wished to put their money in safer keeping, and the number of bankruptcies doubled in a year. One industrialist, Stephen Barber of Walsall, asked for a bill to be speedily paid in ready money ‘as we are so circumstanced in this country [county] we have not cash to go on with’. Coincidentally, perhaps, Pitt was believed to be drinking more heavily than usual.

Yet his political situation was now more than ever assured. The more moderate, or less radical, Whigs felt obliged to part company with Charles James Fox and his particularly vociferous support of the French cause. It was deemed to be unpatriotic at time of war. At the beginning of 1793 one of the Whig grandees, William Windham, announced the formation of a ‘third party’ that might find a middle path between Pitt and Fox while supporting the war against France. It was no coincidence that the rise of a ‘political middle’ comprising what the Cambridge Intelligencer called ‘the middle ranks of men cooperating with the declared and active advocates of moderate reform’ should be accompanied by praise of a new ‘middle class’ or ‘middle rank’.

The war seemed to be going well. The Austrian Netherlands were released from threat of French invasion, largely by the strength of the Hessian mercenaries, and the English navy retained its control of the seas and was even then planning to move against the French colonies. In the summer of 1793 a group of counter-revolutionaries based in Toulon captured the port and handed it over to the English. But the sheer stamina and ferocity of the French had been underestimated. Toulon was back in their hands by the end of the year, while Holland and Belgium were still under threat. Even the naval expedition to the French West Indies was crippled by dysentery and epidemic disease. The French technique of levée en masse, when the whole population might be thrown at the enemy, signalled a new form of warfare. The French hurled their men forward, however terrible the casualties, and lived off the land rather than maintaining supply lines; they were more flexible and far more fierce. The English and their allies seemed close to victory on many occasions but then in the face of the enemy began a protracted and sometimes wearying retreat. That could have been their catchphrase: not defeat, but retreat. At the battle of Hondschoote in September 1793 the duke of York attempted the siege of Dunkirk; but he was heavily outnumbered and his men were constantly assailed by a reviving enemy. He was eventually forced to withdraw, but the French were in no position to strike at his demoralized army. It might be an emblem of the continental war itself.

Parliament reassembled on 21 January 1794 and the ministers accentuated the positive. Dunkirk had not been taken by the duke of York but the Austrian Netherlands were still free. The West Indies had not been occupied but Tobago had been captured. Sardinia and Spain were cooperating. The British navy was still in control of the seas, and French trading vessels were constantly under attack. Austria and Prussia were not providing all the military resources expected of them and they were, in any case, in a constant state of mutual suspicion. Still, this was for the future.

The members turned their attention to domestic affairs. On 12 May Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and twelve others were arrested and tried for high treason; Hardy had first organized the London Corresponding Society in the Bell Tavern, while Tooke had helped to organize the radical societies in a national movement. Hardy was taken at his shoemaker’s shop in Piccadilly, while all the papers of the various London reform societies were seized. A report by a new Committee for Secrecy, established by parliament, concluded on 16 May that all such parties ‘must be considered as a Traitorous Conspiracy for the Subversion of the established Laws and Constitution, and the Introduction of that System of Anarchy and Confusion which has fatally prevailed in France’. Two days later the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended so that political prisoners could be held without trial. The measure was excused on the grounds that it would prevent outrages similar to those of Paris.

The trial of Hardy and others for high treason began on 25 September at the Old Bailey, with much technical discussion on the nature of the charge. Hardy was the first to be acquitted for absence of evidence, and was carried in triumph by a cheering throng from the court. The proceedings were followed by great crowds outside in the street, and by excited spectators within. Tooke was the next in the dock, and was acquitted after eight minutes. John Thelwall, one of the most radical orators and lecturers, was the third to be found not guilty. The government then dropped the other cases, to the joy of the multitude who still filled the London streets; the accused had been found innocent of treason simply because there was not enough evidence to support a high crime that merited hanging.

Despite the failure of the prosecution, some of the spirit left the supporters of reform. The war with France, now of course deemed to be the enemy, and the sanguinary events in Paris helped to diminish the enthusiasm for the cause. The threat of treason, although lifted, was still potent. The Society for Constitutional Information no longer met in London, for example, and Horne Tooke withdrew from political activity.

The period has been described as the beginning of Pitt’s ‘reign of terror’, culminating four years later with many more arrests of reformers, and has sometimes been compared with that unleashed on Paris by Marat and Robespierre; yet, if it were so, it was singularly weak in inspiration and execution. It is true that the prolonged series of assaults upon the members of the societies had effectively silenced some of them. But it has been estimated that there were only 200 prosecutions over ten years and some, like those of Tooke and Thelwall, ended in acquittal. This does not sound like a revolutionary situation.

The temper of the nation was better expressed on the occasion of the defeat of the French fleet in the Atlantic by Admiral Howe in the early summer of 1794, which became known as the ‘Glorious First of June’. When news of the victory reached London the performance at the Opera House was suspended, while the auditorium rang with ‘Rule Britannia’ and the national anthem. The city was illuminated and the king travelled to Portsmouth with his consort to greet the returning ships.

In the following month the more conservative and loyalist Whigs, having already abandoned the leadership of Fox and Sheridan, agreed to join the administration of ‘Pitt the patriot’ as he was sometimes known. He never called himself a Tory but always an ‘independent Whig’; nevertheless here were the makings of the nineteenth-century Tory Party. At this stage, however, it might be described as a powerful administration for national unity, its cohesion materially increased by a coup d’état in Paris on 27 July when Robespierre and the instigators of the Jacobin ‘terror’ were summarily dispatched by ‘Madame Guillotine’ or ‘The National Razor’. This by no means implied that the military threat from France was arrested. Brigadier-General Buonaparte was already considered to be indispensable for the disposition of the war.

That conflict had already entered a stage of frustration and indecision when it became clear that England and its allies on land were not so capable as England on the high seas. The English forces were themselves overstretched, and their supposed allies had begun to plot one against another. The Prussians mistrusted the Austrians while the English berated the Dutch even as the French army approached the borders of Holland. While the allies had the habit of dispersing their armies to confront various contingencies, the French forces just grew bigger; it could be said that they were winning through size of numbers rather than revolutionary fervour.

In England itself dearth was causing unprecedented misery. This was the largest cause of unrest. Thomas Fuller had already published his Gnomologia in which he recorded contemporary proverbs. ‘Where bad’s the best, bad must be the choice.’ ‘All’s good in a famine.’ ‘Hunger finds no fault with the cookery.’ ‘Hungry dogs will eat dirty puddings.’ Hungry men, women and children will of course eat almost anything. By the end of 1795 prices had risen some 30 per cent from 1790.

An attempt to ameliorate the harshest conditions, and also to divert the rage of the people, was attempted by the magistrates of Speenhamland at a meeting held in the Pelican Inn near Newbury in Berkshire. It was concluded that, if the price of bread rose above a certain level, the poor would receive a special subsidy from the parish funds. It seemed a remarkably efficient system of benefit and was adopted by other counties where it became known as the ‘Speenhamland system’. It was soon, to all intents and purposes, a national system from Dorset to Yorkshire. Yet it had its critics, who believed that it kept wages artificially low; the farmers felt no need to pay their workers more if the parish was about to supplement their incomes. It was deemed by some to be demoralizing, and there were complaints that some labourers threatened the parish overseers for insufficient aid. So began the argument over ‘welfare dependency’ that continues to this day.

Even the most liberal provisions were not enough to stay the rising tide of anger from reform societies that had weathered the storm of Pitt’s ‘terror’. In late June a crowd of many thousand, organized by the London Corresponding Society, met in St George’s Fields south of the Thames where they demanded the end of war and a reduction in the price of food; the old demands of manhood suffrage and annual parliaments were made, but the principal cry was for ‘Bread! Bread!’ Baskets of biscuits were distributed stamped with the legend ‘freedom and plenty, or slavery and want’. This was not the Jacobin activism of the previous year but a more potent domestic combination of rage, frustration and hunger. Bread riots also erupted in Birmingham and Coventry, Nottingham and Sussex. In July some demonstrators broke a window of Pitt’s residence in Downing Street; he described it ironically to his mother as ‘a single pebble’. In the following month the Sheffield Constitutional Society held an open-air meeting on Crooke’s Moor where it was pleaded, in imitation of Luke’s gospel, that ‘when we ask for bread, let not the father of his people give us a stone’.

When the new session of parliament opened on 29 October 1795, the price of bread had reached its highest level. Pitt’s carriage was surrounded by a jeering crowd shouting ‘No Pitt! No War! Bread! Bread! Peace! Peace!’ The king’s own carriage was mobbed by ill-wishers and at one point a stone, or bullet, pierced its window. A ballad-seller, hawking Paine’s The Rights of Man for a penny, was arrested; he was promptly rescued by the crowd and chaired in triumph. Pitt took advantage of the situation by bringing forward a bill for ‘better securing the king’s person’. This was accompanied by the ‘Two Acts’ or ‘Gagging Acts’ that were designed to curtail the right of assembly and to widen the scope of high treason. All public meetings comprising more than fifty people were to be supervised and controlled by local magistrates; prior notice of, and specific details about, any meeting or public lecture had to be given in writing. As for the bill against treason, the death penalty could be applied to people who advised the death or imprisonment of the king and, more significantly, who attempted to change his counsels or opinions. Pitt also summoned more militia to London, and told William Wilberforce that ‘my head would be off in six months were I to resign’. Wilberforce commented, with a hint of understatement, ‘I see that he expects a civil broil.’ A physician whom Pitt consulted, Walter Farquhar, also reported that the functions of ‘his stomach are greatly impaired and the bowels very irregular’ which he attributed to ‘the excess of public business and the unremitting attention upon subjects of anxiety and interest’. So Pitt was in deadly earnest; he feared revolution.

It is an open question whether he was right in his judgement. Despite the apparent severity of the ‘Two Acts’ they were rarely enforced with rigour, and the usual process of muddling through seems to have been paramount. When in November a further protest meeting was held at Copenhagen Fields a contemporary noted that

You may have seen in the papers of prodigious numbers being at the meeting. This is not true in the sense such accounts would be understood. In the course of the day many thousands were doubtless in the field, but never at one time. I was there between two and three and I don’t believe there were five hundred in the field, and I saw it at the fullest time so far as I can understand.

This was nothing like the march on Versailles.

There was undoubtedly a revolutionary fringe hoping to take advantage of the general misery; some of them were from Ireland, some from France, and some of them home-grown revolutionaries. Reports reached the Home Office of secret meetings and plottings, but nothing ever came of them. This poses the larger question of England’s apparent immunity from the revolutionary disorders that had swept France. A number of explanations present themselves, all with a modicum of truth. The fact that England was at war with France did of course much to dampen any enthusiasm for republican ideals; it would have been like sleeping with the enemy. The sceptical attitude hardened what can essentially be viewed as the conservative cast of the English people, accustomed to an established order and to the traditions of historical existence. Edmund Burke himself, as we have observed, appealed in his speeches and pamphlets to the significance of precedent and continuity in the life of the nation, a contract between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.

The role of the Churches should not be underestimated. There was a broad and wide church polity that softened religious unrest and division. It was an advantage, of course, that the major religions all took for granted the nature of human inequality; Anglicans and Methodists were united in their assertion of the virtues of loyalty and obedience. It has often been suggested that in England the ‘lower orders’ have never risen without an impulse from above to rouse them; the circumstances of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811 may be exceptions to this argument but certainly, in the 1790s, there was no disaffected aristocracy to lead the charge as there was in Paris.

More subtle explanations for the absence of revolutionary enthusiasm may be adduced. The English had always been known as a practical and pragmatic race. That is why they had taken the lead in the progress of the Industrial Revolution. The French, on the other hand were known to be speculative and enthusiastic; they followed their theories and ideas like ignes fatui wherever they might lead them. This was, at least, the caricature. Whether a stubborn paysan would concur is another matter.

Nevertheless it was believed by many English contemporaries that the revolution had simply got out of hand, that it had been so driven by first principles that it had strayed from its proper path. The more ardent French revolutionaries saw the events that surrounded them as a miracle play in which they took on the most important roles. They identified themselves with the people; they identified themselves with the national will; they identified themselves with la patrie. William Pitt observed that it was ‘a species of tyranny which adds insult to the wretchedness of its subjects, by styling its own arbitrary decrees the voice of the people, and sanctioning its acts of oppression and cruelty under the pretence of the national will’.

One other national myth was at work on the other side of the Channel. Ever since the time of the Glorious Revolution, and perhaps earlier, the English were accustomed to believe themselves to live in a land of liberty. There are traces of this conviction in the thirteenth century, and in the sixteenth century; perhaps it has always been an aspect of national consciousness. The fact that this had never really been the case did not deter its exponents, many of whom would declare the danger to ‘English liberties’ at any opportunity. Such was the profound sense of many of the English people. They were not likely to follow Danton or Robespierre or even Buonaparte. They were still predominantly in support of George III and William Pitt, king and nation in harmony, even though the king was mad and the nation in distress.

29

The mad kings

David Garrick first played the part of King Lear at the Goodman’s Field Theatre in Whitechapel, in the spring of 1742; he was twentyfive years old, a relatively youthful age that suggests both precocity and ambition. Two friends watched his performance from the pit, and suggested alterations. He listened carefully and took notes. He came back in the same part six weeks later and caused a sensation. This was Lear as raw nature, full of fear and trembling, moving from pathos to anger, from despair to grief, keeping ‘the audiences in a tumult of continuous passion … his performance was interrupted by open sobs and weeping’. Tears were an important element of the social world. Thomas Gray was told that readers had wept over every line of his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750). The members of parliament often broke down and had to be led out of the chamber, weeping after a quarrel. It was reported that one parliamentarian, George Tierney, ‘sobbed so, he was unable to talk; I never saw a more affecting scene’.

Horace Walpole recorded how two executioners fought over the rope used to hang a notorious highwayman, ‘and the one who lost it cried’. Anna Seward, a celebrated poet of the period known as ‘the Swan of Lichfield’, returned to her childhood haunts and ‘could not restrain the gushing tears, through almost the whole of the five hours I passed in that dear village’. She was a champion weeper.

The words of a contemporary, observing the role of Garrick as Lear, emphasize the new sensibilities of the eighteenth century. The members of the audience ‘seemed to shrink away and cower’ when he cursed his daughters’ ingratitude. When they erupted in vehement applause, as Garrick hit upon a brilliant stroke of art, he whispered to one of the other actors onstage, Tom King, ‘Damn me, Tom, it’ll do.’

It was said that Garrick ‘speaks tragedy truly and natural’. That was the key response: this was nature rather than art. This was the language of real feeling. It was the wholly new art of whisper, and gesture, and unstudied enunciation. It does not matter that it would now seem absurdly stylized. All versions of what is natural or realistic change and decay. When Garrick played Macbeth he turned to the first murderer and said, ‘There’s blood upon thy face.’ The line was not in the play. The actor started back, and put a hand to his cheek. ‘Is there, by God?’ He had heard a fellow actor speak as a human being, and he was surprised to the point of consternation. The neoclassical stage had been established upon decorum, declamation and dignity. Its successor, which may perhaps be called Romantic, relied upon expressiveness, activity and more realistic detail.

Garrick did not really play Lear as conceived by William Shakespeare. The original was deemed, in the eighteenth century, to be too crude and wayward. It did not preserve the unities. It was, in many respects, tasteless. Its ending was unsatisfactory. The play Garrick performed was that rewritten by Nahum Tate in 1681. It was considered to be the proper Lear, the acceptable Lear, purged of all its absurdities and obscenities. Tate himself regarded the scenes of Shakespeare’s ‘old honest play’ to be ‘heaps of jewels unstrung and unpolished’.

In Tate’s play the Fool is removed altogether, since tragedy and farce were not deemed to be compatible. In this version, too, Cordelia falls in love with Edgar to provide a more gentle diversion. There is a less strenuous ending in which Lear, Edgar and Cordelia are reunited to live happily ever after. As one critic of the time suggested, Lear as amended by Tate ‘will always be more agreeable to an audience’. The love affair itself ‘can never fail to produce those gushing tears, which are swelled and ennobled by a virtuous joy’. The prevailing sentiments of the day are here revealed. One critic, Thomas Cooke, preferred Tate ‘because almost every character … is an instance of virtue being rewarded and vice punished’. He added: ‘I have read many sermons, but remember none that contains so fine a lesson of morality as this play.’ This was all that needed to be said. Ethics, and not aesthetics, was the test of true art.

The audience of the time could not have endured the tragedy and horror of Shakespeare’s play. If it was reduced to storms of tears by Garrick’s performance, how could it have coped with Lear’s death? Gloucester’s blinding takes place discreetly offstage. Even Shakespeare’s stern editor, Samuel Johnson, could not bring himself to reread the last scenes of the play until it became his duty to do so. It seems almost as if he and his contemporaries were afraid of madness and deep feeling. In many respects it was not an age of confidence or of stability at all. It was one that needed comforting. It needed consolation.

Garrick played the part of the mad king for the rest of his career. He cut and modified the text for his various performances, sometimes reintroducing more of the Shakespearian original. People stood for hours outside the theatre where he was playing, waiting for tickets. When again he took on the part in 1774 the writer, Hannah More, said: ‘I thought I should have been suffocated with grief: it was not like the superficial sorrow one feels at a well-acted play, but the deep, substantial grief of real trouble.’ Garrick’s Lear concluded with a performance in June 1776 thirty-four years after his first entry in the theatre at Whitechapel and one month before his retirement from the stage. He had begun a farewell tour, screwing up the emotions of the audience to an unprecedented pitch. Sir Joshua Reynolds, after seeing him, was prostrate for three days. Garrick furnished new scenery for this last year of Lear, and provided more resplendent historical costumes. It was agreed that the applause was ‘beyond description’. Whenever he came upon, or retired from, the stage he was wildly applauded.

The centre of all feeling lay in the ‘mad scene’ when the insane old king rages on the heath. It was painted by Benjamin Wilson, a friend of the actor, in 1762 as a study of the magical or the sacred. Garrick stands at full length wearing a shirt, breeches and a robe of scarlet trimmed with ermine. This was the costume of royalty, however dimmed. He raises his right arm towards the storm-tossed sky, from which a shaft of light drenches him in radiance. The gesticulation became part of a repertoire of theatrical images; it was reproduced in prints and on porcelain. It became the token of madness, and was re-employed in many other works.

A more accomplished artist, Benjamin West, painted the same storm scene sixteen years later as a Gothic nightmare in the style of Henry Fuseli or even William Blake. It is in certain aspects close to Wilson’s vision of the king, but the dramatic figures and expressive style suggest a sea-change in sensibility; this is no longer the world of neoclassical restraint but of Romantic wildness. In Wilson’s study Lear is very much an eighteenth-century figure addicted to sentiment; in West’s version, the king is beside himself with sorrow. He points up at the storm as if claiming a place there, and his expression is one of longing as well as of fear. The painting was approximately 12 feet by 9 feet, so that it positively towered above its spectators; it was part of the ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ established in the spring of 1789 by Alderman John Boydell in Pall Mall as a tribute to the national genius and as an example of a new taste for the passionate sublime. It was also naturally related to the passionate intensity with which, a generation before, the Methodist preachers dominated their congregations. Garrick himself was described as introducing ‘a new religion’. The age of reason and satire was also the age of rapture.

We may note the strange coincidence that in the year of West’s composition, 1788, the real king became mad. George III began to talk rapidly and continuously, passing in and out of delirium. Benjamin West, by this time, knew him well. King George had in 1772 appointed him to be historical painter to the court, and West completed two portraits of his royal patron. He had observed him closely for some years, and it is not hard to believe that some elements of George appear in the frenzied figure of King Lear. In the autumn of 1788 West had shown his sovereign his new landscape of Windsor Castle in which a lion, for some reason, had been placed. The king insisted that it looked more like a dog and immediately scored marks over the image before drawing his own. He did it with tremendous energy accompanied by a great flurry of words. All was not well.

It was in any case an age much possessed by madness. Insanity was known as ‘the English disease’ together with its companion, melancholy. It was attributed to the natural sensitivity and imaginative nature of the English confined to an island of ghosts and spirits. Garrick himself is said to have visited Bedlam in order to study the words and postures of the insane. He wished to introduce a touch of nature to the requirements of art. One critic, on seeing his performance, noted that ‘as madness is defined to be right reasoning on wrong principles there is consistency in the words and actions of a madman’. Garrick provided this. Yet also, according to a different observer, ‘Garrick had displayed all the force of quick transition from one passion to another: he had, from the most violent rage, descended to sedate calmness’. On studying West’s painting the critic George Cumberland suggested that the king’s ‘loss of reason has arisen from the tender rather than the inflammatory passions; or there is a majestic sensibility mixed with the wildness of his distraction’.

Controversies arose over the origin of Lear’s madness. Was it the shock of losing his throne? Or was it anger at his daughters’ ingratitude? The polite classes of the eighteenth century were aficionados of insanity.

Henry Fuseli stated that one medical man who visited Bedlam believed that the larger part of its inmates were women unhappy in love, while the second category in terms of numbers were ‘hackney and stage coachmen’, whose constant shaking in their vehicles disturbed the pineal gland. But Garrick did not visit Bedlam only. He had a case study closer to home. A certain gentleman and friend of the actor lived in a house in Leman Street, Goodman’s Fields, where he had been playing with his two-year-old daughter near an open window. Accidentally he dropped her onto the paved area below, whereupon the young girl was instantly killed. The man lost his senses and ‘remained at the window, screaming in agonies of grief’. For the rest of his life he would go over to the window and play with an invisible girl, drop her, and fill the house ‘with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish’. Then he would fall into silent melancholy, and slowly look round at the fateful scene, ‘his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him as if to implore compassion’. Garrick stated that it was there ‘I learned to imitate madness’. According to one who watched his performance, ‘he had no sudden starts, no violent gesticulation; his movements were slow and feeble; misery was depicted in his countenance; he moved his head in the most deliberate manner; his eyes were fixed or, if they turned to any one near him he made a pause, and fixed his look on the person after much delay …’.

Since madness was considered to be curable, many treatments were prescribed. George III was given what was called ‘mad physic’ which caused inflammation, eruptions and violent disorders. The famous Dr Jenner treated his mad patients by ‘keeping them sick with tartar emetic’ and camphor water. Some spas were considered to be healthful. A madwoman, Mrs Jessop, was cured by the waters at Buxton; the 1st earl of Egmont reported that ‘she is now very orderly behaved and has got a lover’.

George III had a naturally hurried and impulsive manner which the pressing affairs of state could only intensify. He also spoke of ‘the anxiety I have for the success of my endeavours to fit my children for the various stations they may fill, and that they may be useful and a credit to their family’. He had broken down completely in the autumn of 1788 and it was reported that ‘his case must be hopeless’.

The king seized his eldest son by the throat and threw him against a wall, demanding who it was that had forbidden him to whisper. Captain Jack Payne, comptroller of the prince of Wales’s household, let it be known that the monarch awoke in his bed ‘with all the gestures and ravings of the most confirmed maniac’; he howled like a dog and spoke distractedly about matters of religion. Fanny Burney met him by chance in Kew Gardens in February 1789; he had been taken for the air, and she reported that he lost control of his speech repeating the word ‘No!’ a hundred times. He talked about Handel and tried to sing the composer’s oratorios ‘in a voice so dreadfully hoarse that the sound was terrible’. Eventually he was locked in his room and tied to his bed at night. By the end of the year he had become so violent that he was confined to a straitjacket. He was also on occasions beaten with sticks, no doubt according to the much earlier belief that the ‘devils’ within him could be expelled by rods and violence. Yet after this treatment of enforced restraint, he seemed to make a full recovery. He relapsed at the beginning of 1801 but was soon considered to be fit for rule again even though he was on many occasions irritable and agitated.

For George III, as for Lear, much attention was paid to the concept of the king’s ‘two bodies’. One was the ‘body natural’ as opposed to the ‘body politic’. The natural body was susceptible to all the infirmities of the human condition, but the body politic was free from all defects or weakness and could not be affected by the natural body. It was the sovereign will of the nation incarnate. That is why Garrick felt able to project royal dignity into the role even while enacting all the symptoms of mental distress.

Charity asylums were established in the eighteenth century with the purpose of healing the deranged. The rich in particular were happy to consign their mad relations to private care so that those out of mind could also be kept out of sight. The inmates were essentially trapped in a prison where chains, manacles, leg-locks and handcuffs could be employed with impunity. It was believed that the untamed maniac was not susceptible to bodily disease so that Thomas Willis, in his Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, could recommend ‘severe government and discipline’ without considering the physical consequences.

This could of course be the stuff of entertainment, and until 1770 Bedlam, the most famous of all asylums, was open to casual visitors. In the following year the hero of that quintessentially eighteenth-century text, Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling, observed: ‘I think it an inhuman practice to expose the greatest misery with which our nature is afflicted to every idle visitant who can afford a trifling perquisite to the keeper.’

The madness of King George of course brought back a reign of tears. When the lord chancellor, Thurlow, visited the mad monarch ‘the tears rolled down his cheeks, and his feet had difficulty to support him’. The queen was drowned in tears, and the members of the royal household ‘all cried, even bitterly, as they looked on’. It was no better when he recovered. Fanny Burney, on hearing the good news, confided to a friend that ‘I assure you, I cried twenty times in the day’.

In the autumn of 1810, after the death of a favourite daughter, the king once more slid into mania and his condition became irreparable. He had now become at times ‘so violent that correction had been necessary and he is confined’. One of his doctors, Sir Henry Halford, concluded that George III was ‘totally lost as to mind, conversing with imaginary personages’. One member of the court reported that the king ‘was no longer treated as a human being. His body was immediately encased in a machine which left no liberty of motion. He was sometimes chained to a stake. He was frequently beaten and starved, and at best he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language.’ Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king? He had been the great English monarch of the latter part of the eighteenth century. An engraving of him, with long beard and long hair, bears an uncanny resemblance to the images of King Lear by Benjamin Wilson and Benjamin West.

30

The beast and the whore

William Pitt the younger was the minister most concerned with, and identified by, the war against newly revolutionary France. He did not believe in boards and committees; he was the sole agent. One bureaucrat of the Admiralty noted that ‘Mr Pitt does all the material business at his own house, signs the papers, and then two other Lords sign them of course’. Pitt himself claimed that ‘there can be no rivalry or division of power. That power must rest in the person generally called the First Minister’; he added that the first minister ought to be in charge of finances as well as strategy. This management worked well in practice and the tremulous king found few instances of what he called ‘anything unpleasant’ between himself and the administration.

The war of 1795 consisted of stalemate followed by disappointment. The situation on land was muddled and confused by the claims and counter-claims of England and its allies; the Austrians, the Dutch, the Prussians and the others failed to press their advantage home. The Prussians were the first to sign a peace treaty with the French. The Dutch were the first to surrender to the French, ceding the left bank of the Rhine to their erstwhile enemy; Holland followed a month later. In the following year, Spain also changed sides. It was imperative, therefore, that Austria remained in the war on the British side; Russia hardly counted. The prospect before Pitt was of a lonely landlocked war with the maritime power of England unable to sway the balance of Europe. In any case France now had three navies, its own as well as those of Holland and of Spain. The world was turned upside down.

In 1796 Napoleon, perhaps best known at this time for the capture of Toulon from British forces, surprised the world still further with his lightning Italian campaign, urging his troops ever further north and closer to the principal enemy of Austria. ‘Soldiers!’ he told his troops at Nice near the frontier with Piedmont. ‘You are almost naked, half starved; the government owes you much and can give you nothing. Your patience and courage in the midst of these rocks are admirable; but they reflect no splendour on your arms. I am about to conduct you into the most fertile plains on earth; fertile provinces, opulent cities, will soon be in your power; there you will find rich harvests, honour, and glory … Will you fail in courage?’ This is the language of Buonaparte, at once curt and magniloquent.

He conquered Piedmont, setting up the municipal republic of Alba in the process, before crossing the Adda, a tributary of the River Po, and scattering the Austrian army at Lodi in Lombardy. This victory was a singular event in Napoleon’s career and he said it was the moment when he first dreamed of world glory; it came as an annunciation.

Dangers pressed upon England from every direction. At the end of 1796 the French had launched an invasion force upon Bantry Bay in support of the United Irishmen. These were the men who hoped and believed that they could bring under one banner the Irish dissenters and the Catholics, equally oppressed by the members of the Protestant Ascendancy, who might then become a revolutionary force under French leadership. The invaders had even brought French military uniforms for their Irish allies to wear on their anticipated march to Dublin. Great storms and treacherous seas dispelled any hope of success. Yet the fact that the French had sailed so far, and had in the process broken through an English naval blockade, had alerted Pitt and his colleagues to further French adventures. On 25 February 1797, news reached London that some French troops had landed at Fishguard Bay in Pembrokeshire; it was in truth a forlorn hope, the soldiers having surrendered to the local militia.

The incursions bred rumour, and rumour created fear, and fear easily degenerated into panic. Napoleon was on his way! A run on the banks proved fatal, since they did not hold enough bullion to meet their commitments; the Bank of England was obliged to suspend cash payments and issue notes of £1 and £2 as legal tender. A rhyme passed through the streets:

So of Pitt and of England

Men say without vapour

How he found it of gold

And left it of paper.

The possibility of French intervention once more ignited the hopes of the United Irishmen, who began to arm and to drill the peasantry. But there were dangers of insurrection even closer to home. A naval mutiny began at Spithead in the middle of April; the sailors’ grievances included low pay and prolonged periods at sea. Within a week their undoubtedly legitimate demands were met, and the admiral of the fleet was rowed from ship to ship with the king’s free pardon in his hand. In the following month the sailors of the north fleet, no doubt emboldened by the actions of their colleagues, mutinied at the Nore. A fighting address was read to the delegates from the different ships, in which it was stated that ‘the Age of Reason has at length revolved. Long have we been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such.’

They were perhaps more determined and more dangerous than the sailors of Spithead, and at one stage managed to blockade the Thames; but their revolt was suppressed and their leader, Richard Parker, hanged on board his ship. Parker blamed his own men for their fickleness and divided opinions, calling them ‘cowardly, selfish and ungrateful’. Reports circulated that they had in fact been instigated by members of the United Irishmen and of other revolutionary groups, but no solid evidence has ever been offered.

Meanwhile Napoleon Buonaparte had advanced onto the soil of Austria. At the beginning of April 1797, he marched his army north until they reached the town of Leoben, just 90 miles from Vienna, where an armistice was quickly followed by a preliminary peace treaty between France and the Holy Roman Empire (now dominated by Austria and Prussia) in which each side agreed not to interfere in the domestic affairs of the other. Certain secret clauses surrendered Austrian possessions in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, as well as the Austrian Netherlands, while Buonaparte magnanimously gave Venice to the Austrian emperor, thus blotting out the watery city’s thousand years of independent existence. ‘La Serenissima’ never recovered from the blow.

It was the peace that the French people had craved. Unfortunately it left England alone on the stage of the world. There were attempts by Pitt and his ministers to reach some form of treaty with Paris, but their efforts were rebuffed. The first coalition against Napoleon had failed.

The personal success of Buonaparte, from his first days as a corporal, had by no means been guaranteed. Yet the combination of skill, luck and fortitude led him forward. He was in particular an inspired strategist and tactician. It is well known that he relied upon artillery rather than infantry and muskets; a massive and deafening bombardment would be followed by rapid sorties, which were in turn succeeded by the assaults of cavalry and infantry. It was not simply the manpower that won the victories, it was the spirit of the French army that under the leadership of Buonaparte became a highly flexible and responsive machine for warfare. The Austrians and Prussians, under different styles of leadership, seemed to be woefully old fashioned.

Buonaparte had a few simple rules. The lines of supply and communication must always be clear. Always attack. Never remain on the defensive. Timing was all important. He had a master plan in his head for each battle that he conceived in precise detail. He tried to leave nothing to chance, but he was able to improvise at dangerous moments. He was a bold man, none bolder, but he was also an opportunist who acted decisively when circumstances were favourable. ‘Accident, hazard, chance, call it what you may,’ he once said, ‘a mystery to ordinary minds, becomes a reality to superior men.’ He knew himself to be one of those ‘superior men’ who can bend the world to their will; he worked tirelessly, and his decisiveness was combined with determination. One conquest or one battle was only a preliminary to the next; he was always advancing in order to extend his dominion. He told his soldiers that ‘our task is not to defend our frontiers, but to invade the territory of our foes’. It was to be war forever.

His large grey eyes were almost expressionless but an old French general confessed: ‘I tremble like a child when I approach him.’ Most significantly he had the ferocious desire to win which he was able to impart to his soldiers. ‘You must speak to the soul’, he said. Hegel glimpsed Napoleon riding through the streets of the city of Jena just before the battle of that region and observed that he had seen ‘the world-soul … astride a horse’.

Away from Buonaparte’s campaigns on land, Britain made gains at sea. In February 1797 the French and Spanish fleets were defeated off Cape St Vincent by Sir John Jervis while nine months later Admiral Duncan defeated the Dutch at the battle of Camperdown. After two peace missions under the leadership of Lord Malmesbury were rejected by the French, serious proposals were made to abandon the land campaign and to extend the mastery of the sea by picking up colonial treasure and colonial possessions wherever they offered themselves. But that smacked of defeatism. There was still a widespread desire to continue the struggle, and when Pitt sat down after a spirited speech to rouse the nation the Commons rose and sang ‘Britons, strike home!’ Pitt also declared, in words that would have cheered Edmund Burke, that neither truces nor treaties could curb France’s ‘unrelenting spirit’ in ‘the subversion of every state into which, either by force or fraud, their arms could penetrate’.

So unabated war continued. This aggressive and uncompromising spirit dismayed those liberal Whigs who still saw some good in the revolution and the revolutionary spirit. They decided simply to secede or, more accurately, to walk away. They got up from their benches and left, with the simple understanding that nothing they could say or do would change the course of the administration. Now that Pitt had acquired the support of the ‘moderate’ Whigs, in return, he was for all practical purposes unassailable. So why should the ‘liberals’ go to the trouble of travelling to Westminster where their voices would not be heard? It was perhaps a sensible solution but it did not endear Fox and his friends to the political world; they were accused of lacking political courage, let alone loyalty, and putting their own interests above the proper working of government. Some of them did not stay away indefinitely and Fox himself spoke three or four times in the next couple of years, but their absence was a great blow to the national cause of reform.

War required money, of course, and all Pitt’s efforts were bent on providing revenue. He had already taxed bricks and sugar, spirits and tea, but now he hit upon the bold solution of dividing all taxpayers into three categories in accordance with their ability to pay; the measure became known as the Triple Assessment, and was based upon what was called ‘consumed property’ such as watches, carriages and windows (an earlier window tax had been introduced in 1696). This was a tax on expenditure but there was another prospect which intrigued him with its possibilities. He hinted at it in the Triple Assessment where it was agreed that a person might choose instead to pay a tax on his income. In the following year he introduced a graduated tax on incomes of over £60 per year and, despite the expected storm of outrage over the threatened liberties of the people, it was accepted. Yet it endured only as long as the war, after which all the records of the tax office were destroyed. Such was the depth of feeling about the action of ‘spying’ into the financial affairs of the people.

The shadow of Buonaparte was never very far away. He was the reason why the taxes were being imposed. In the winter of 1797 his forces took up position along the French coastline with the clear purpose of invasion. In response the administration called upon local officials to question every eligible male about his ability and willingness to take up arms. In the spring of 1798, in what had now become a predictable response, certain members of the English radical societies were taken up and detained. Five men were arrested at Margate just as they were about to embark for France. William Blake wrote in the margin of a book, ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life. The Beast and the Whore rule without control.’ The fear of invasion lasted throughout the spring and summer of the year, until at last it became clear that Buonaparte had another destination in mind.

The atmosphere of extreme peril encouraged the United Irishmen to attempt rebellion once again in the spring of 1798. It acquired the name of ‘the great rebellion’ but in truth it was a badly organized and somewhat incoherent affair that was quickly put down. But the revolutionary inclinations of certain Irishmen, and the deep dissatisfaction of many others, led the English administration to believe that the best solution to the continuing problem was a union between the two countries. Fraught with difficulties though it was, and regarded with deep suspicion both by the king and by the Dublin parliament, it was pushed and pulled through the legislatures of Westminster and Dublin for two years with much argument, threats, rhetoric and money. The act of union with Scotland in 1707 had been purchased by bribes to the Scots, now the union with Ireland was expedited by bribes to the Irish; it could be said that the United Kingdom had been conceived in a pot of gold. The new union was not welcomed by all participants. Henry Grattan, the great Irish moderate, said of his nation: ‘I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead – though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty.’

Buonaparte had meanwhile sailed into another sea of troubles. By the early spring of 1798 he had abandoned his apparent attempt at invasion and sailed towards Egypt. It turned out to be a rash decision but, on the face of it, that province of the Ottoman Empire was tempting; it might provide a land route to India, the reputed home of treasure, and immeasurably increase the amount of French trade. ‘Soldiers!’ Napoleon told his army as it sailed from Toulon. ‘The eyes of Europe are upon you! You have great destinies to fulfil.’

Admiral Nelson, who now enters this history for the first time with a predictable flourish, chased after him. He had a sense of destiny, and a flair for self-projection, equal to that of Napoleon; he crossed and recrossed parts of the Mediterranean looking for his quarry. Buonaparte had taken Malta, but had then gone eastward. Nelson sailed to Alexandria but found no sign of him; he scoured the Levant and then sailed west to Sicily. There was still no sign. Finally, after weeks, of searching, he found Napoleon’s ships at Aboukir Bay beside Alexandria to which the French had secretly returned. The signal was given for battle. ‘Before this time tomorrow,’ Nelson said in his usual vain and magnificent manner, ‘I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’

In the subsequent battle of the Nile, at the beginning of August, the French fleet was overwhelmed; only four ships escaped Nelson’s onslaught. Three and a half thousand French sailors were taken prisoner, and 2,000 were killed. No British ships were destroyed. Napoleon himself was now stranded in Egypt without a fleet, without reinforcements and without supplies. The British navy was once more in charge of the Mediterranean, and the victory at Aboukir prompted Turkey to enter the war against France. The news was greeted in England with predictable jubilation. A British official, George Pretyman, wrote to his wife: ‘Mr Pitt is confident that Buonaparte must be destroyed. Oh my Love, what joy!’

An uneasy peace held for eighteen months until the forces against Buonaparte entered what was called a second coalition, a band of armies that included those of Russia and Austria as well as England. The British under the grand old duke of York arrived in Holland in the late summer of 1799, marched about a bit, and then returned home in November. Their allies did not fare any better. The Austrians and the Russians were embroiled in internal conflicts, and the tsar left the coalition in October. The Austrians were defeated decisively in the following year. Much of the French success may be credited to Napoleon who, abandoning his army in Egypt, made his way back to Paris and named himself First Consul. To the stranded army in Egypt it seemed like an act of betrayal. One of his generals, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, told his colleagues: ‘That bastard has left us with his breeches full of shit. We will go back to Europe and rub them in his face.’ But for Buonaparte matters of private honour and fidelity were of no consequence in his relentless pursuit of victory and glory.

If war was to be sustained by England against him, it required the maintenance of discipline at home. In the summer of 1799 William Pitt introduced the Workmen’s Combination Bill which forbade any working men to come together for the purpose of seeking higher wages or shorter hours, with a minimum penalty of three months’ imprisonment or two months of hard labour. ‘Combination’ was already illegal, but it was believed necessary to suppress anything that resembled political agitation. It might compromise the war effort.

It is significant that these prohibitions were maintained against workmen in general and not against any particular craft or trade; this added to the sense of injustice and oppression experienced primarily in the manufacturing areas. ‘Secret’ unions sprang up, however, among workers in cotton and wool which played some part in the outbreak of the Luddite protests of the next century. As early as 1799 the shearmen of Wiltshire sent threatening letters to those who were intent upon harnessing new machinery. ‘We shall keep some people to watch you about with loaded blunderbuss or pistol.’ Yet as always the practical implementation of the Combination Act was muddled and uncertain, with magistrates of the different regions varying greatly in their response. Like much legislation from Westminster, it probably made very little difference in the end.

The spirit of unrest was stirred further by another season of dearth. In the spring of 1800 an official wrote to the Home Office from Birmingham that ‘many thousands, especially children, are all but starved’. It was recognized that conditions near to famine would gravely destabilize the nation already at war. Pitt wrote in the autumn that ‘the question of peace or war is not in itself half so formidable as the scarcity with which it is necessarily combined, and for the evils and growing dangers of which I see no adequate remedy’. He wrote at a time of riot. In September 1800, the corn exchange in Mark Lane, London, was stormed after some handbills were posted on the Monument, proclaiming that ‘Bread will be sixpence the quarter if the people will assemble at the corn market on Monday.’ On the following day some bakers’ shops in Whitechapel were attacked by a mob; on the day after that, a handbill was addressed to ‘starved fellow creatures’ asking them to meet on St George’s Fields ‘to defend your rights. Never mind the bloodthirsty soldiers. We shall put them to flight …’ Riots erupted in all parts of the country, and Matthew Boulton said that there were so many soldiers in Birmingham that it resembled an armed camp.

The policy of the administration itself was in disarray. The coalition against Napoleon was not holding; Prussia and Russia, Russia and Austria, Austria and Prussia, were all quarrelling over control of various parts of the continent. England itself could not be attacked, but neither could it strike. Some members of the cabinet preferred a return of the Bourbon dynasty in Paris, a policy which seemed to hold out little chance of success; others believed that there was no point in negotiating with Buonaparte, while certain colleagues argued that negotiation was the only way forward. Disagreements arose also about the role of the allies in any peace talks; should they be allowed to participate or should Britain stand on its own?

The general sentiment, however, was in favour of peace. This seems to have been the overwhelming desire of the people who were thoroughly weary of a war that had already endured for more than seven years. This desire was further intensified by the resurgence of the enemy. It was Buonaparte who took his armies over the Alps, in the spring of 1800, and defeated the Austrians at Marengo. At the subsequent treaty of Lunéville on 9 February 1801, he gained the German districts on the left bank of the Rhine, Belgium and Luxemburg as well as large swathes of Italy. Buonaparte had not conquered the enemy, one strategist wrote, but rendered it harmless. Britain was once more on its own.

This was the moment when William Pitt decided to resign his office, just five days before the signing of the treaty. His departure came as a surprise to the political world, however, and was for a while considered as suspicious – as a ‘juggle’ somehow to further Pitt’s interest. It was said that he did not want to be the legislator who would be forced to broker a peace with Napoleon. It was surmised that he was exhausted; he was in bad health; he was unnerved by the scale of famine and of riot; he was tired of holding the balance between opposing interests. But in truth it had nothing to do with the war or famine. It had to do with Ireland.

In his negotiations over the Act of Union – during which Henry Grattan had lamented the sleeping beauty of his country – Pitt suggested, or intimated, or let it be known, that the emancipation of the majority Catholic population would duly follow and that they would be able to hold legal and political office. But he had not reckoned with the king, who regarded any such concession to be against the spirit and letter of his coronation oath in which he had pledged to defend the Church of England. He could not countenance a country in which there was more than one established religion. George III could be stubborn as well as principled, and on this matter he was adamant. He went over to one of Pitt’s allies, Henry Dundas, at a royal levee and questioned him in a voice loud enough to be overheard by many of those present. ‘What is the question you are all about to force on me? What is this Catholic emancipation … I will tell you that I shall look on every man as my personal enemy who proposes that question to me. I hope all my friends will not desert me.’

Pitt was aware of the exchange within a matter of minutes. He, who treasured his reputation more than anything else, then felt obliged to resign. The king, knowing that he had an alternative administration in waiting, accepted the first minister’s wish. Pitt left office and gave way for Henry Addington, who was what might be called a ‘solid’ choice, dependable, hard-working and honest. He also had the advantage, for the king, of being opposed to Catholic emancipation. Unfortunately none of these qualities was enough in itself to guarantee pre-eminence and in a cruel rhyme spread by a young minister, George Canning, it was said that ‘Pitt is to Addington what London is to Paddington’. The new prime minister was also known as ‘the Doctor’, since he had practised for some years as a physician for the wealthier and unhealthier portion of society. His father had also been an eminent physician who in fact had numbered Pitt’s father, the earl of Chatham, among his patients. The Doctor was no great orator and found it difficult to exert his authority over the Commons, let alone the nation.

The king, in a state of excitement close to hysteria, now began to suffer once more from his old malady – or, as some put it, his old madness. He himself blamed Pitt and the Catholic question for his relapse, and Pitt had felt obliged to promise him that he would never raise the matter again. Within a month the king recovered. Pitt had fallen, but no party had gone with him. He was but one man, and many of his ministers agreed to serve under Addington. A few chairs had been arranged in a different fashion, but nothing further. Yet there was one significant change that would affect the political world in succeeding years. Without Pitt’s personal hegemony the various parties that had comprised his administration now began to fall apart. Pitt sat on the treasury benches but at a distance from the members of the new administration; he did nothing, however, to oppose it. He felt it his duty, in fact to support it as the visible representative of the king’s wishes.

It became clear enough that Addington desired peace at almost any price. The nation desired it. The finances of the country required it. It no longer seemed to be a symbolic clash of ideologies but, rather, a more familiar contest over the balance of power on the continent. By the beginning of October the government announced the preliminary terms of a treaty. The depth of public approval became evident when a London crowd dragged the coach of the French envoy through the streets crying out ‘Long live Buonaparte!’

But the governing class was not so happy. It was believed that Addington, weak as he was, had purchased peace at too high a price. All Britain’s wartime conquests in the Mediterranean and outside Europe were to be returned; the acquisitions in the East Indies, the West Indies and South America (with the exception of Ceylon and Trinidad) would all be relinquished. The French would retain control of the Netherlands, Switzerland and parts of northern Italy. The treaty, when it was eventually signed at Amiens in the spring of 1802, confirmed that France had been allowed to expand to what it termed its ‘natural frontiers’ without making any parallel concessions of its own. Addington declared that ‘this is no ordinary peace but a genuine reconciliation between the two first nations of the world’. Others were not so sure. Food was still dear; commerce was in disarray; the dreadful income tax was not abolished.

Some considered it to be the best of bad alternatives. The Morning Chronicle, which spoke for Fox and his liberal Whig allies, stated that ‘the country has been degraded by the peace, though it is necessary’. Some of Pitt’s old ministers, who had left office with him, were less ambiguous. William Windham said that ‘the country has received its death blow’; George Grenville stated that ‘all confidence in the present government is completely and irretrievably destroyed’. Henry Dundas was more circumspect, telling Pitt that ‘the only wise and friendly thing I can do is to impose upon myself silence’. Pitt himself, despite private reservations, continued publicly to support the government. The treaty of Amiens was widely regarded as a truce, a time to recuperate so that the two countries might be able to resume the fight at a later date. Buonaparte was himself already busy with the plans for new wars, eager to gain mastery over the entire continent. In the autumn of 1802 he marched his armies into Switzerland, to which blatant abrogation of the treaty Addington made only the mildest of protests. The era known as that of the ‘Napoleonic wars’ had truly begun.

31

A Romantic tale

On 5 June 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘did not keep to the high road, but leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field, by which he cut off an angle’. So William Wordsworth recalled one of the first meetings between himself and the fellow poet who together with him would help to change the language of expression and inaugurate what would become known as the ‘Romantic movement’ in poetry. They already had much in common. They were both engaged in blank verse tragedies, but Coleridge’s Osorio and Wordsworth’s The Borderers did not find favour with theatrical managers. Each man had written two slim volumes of poetry – Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were published in 1793, while Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects and Poems were presented to the world in 1796 and 1797. But they had already encountered one another at the house of a sugar merchant in Bristol. Coleridge had been impressed by what he called Wordsworth’s ‘novel imagery’ and ‘vivid colouring’, and in turn Wordsworth remarked that Coleridge’s ‘talent appears to me very great’. Wordsworth was twenty-seven, and Coleridge three years his junior.

Eight years before, at a most impressionable age, they had woken up in Year One of the French Revolution. They had celebrated the death of tyranny, the breaking of the idols of Church and King, of tradition and authority. Anything was possible. Everything was possible. Coleridge, still at school, composed a celebratory poem called ‘The Destruction of the Bastille’. Wordsworth had gone to France, tasted some of the excitement, and then retreated, leaving an illegitimate daughter behind. He still mingled with what were known as ‘the friends of liberty’, however, and in the early months of 1793 wrote an open or public letter, never published, in which he refers to himself as ‘a republican’; in the following year he wrote to a friend that ‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats’.

Yet the Terror in the late months of 1793 and the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798 had a chastening effect upon the erstwhile enthusiasts of revolution. Coleridge had vowed to put down ‘my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition’, and gone back to the springs of Unitarian theology where ‘Truth is Christ’. Wordsworth went on a walking tour before settling with his sister in Dorset. The flame of the revolution was now only flickering as he was vouchsafed glimpses of the pantheistic vision that would support his later poetry.

They already shared an enthusiasm, even reverence, for a poet of Bristol. William Wordsworth had been introduced to Thomas Chatterton’s Miscellanies by his schoolmaster; in 1802, in ‘Resolution and Independence’ he referred to Chatterton as the ‘marvellous Boy’. Coleridge wrote and rewrote a ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ from the age of thirteen to the time of his own death. Thomas Chatterton was the Romantic avatar in an age of false taste, a status which his early demise had only confirmed. It was believed that at the age of seventeen he had committed suicide by arsenic poison in his little garret on Brooke Street in Holborn; it was widely surmised that he had died of poverty and starvation in the unequal stuggle to find an audience for his fervid poetry which had conjured up the spirit of an antique age. His verses were supposed to be the work of a medieval monk, Thomas Rowley, who had chronicled the heroic and martial world of the Middle Ages. The verses opened up a world of wonder and delight. They stirred the two young men like a trumpet. Here was a genuine entry into a lost world of imagination, of supernatural event and superhuman courage. The fact that they were fakes mattered not at all; they were still authentic.

Chatterton’s apparent suicide was then considered to be the sublime death of a genius cast aside by the world; in the words of Keats, another avid devotee, a ‘dear child of sorrow – son of misery!’ In due course his life, and his death as depicted in a painting by Henry Wallis, became the paradigm of the Romantic sensibility. Chattterton’s ‘solemn agony’, in the phrase of Shelley, was the first intimation of Romantic suffering which in the early decades of the nineteenth century became the sensibility of Europe. Chatterton was the solitary genius in excelsis.

But solitariness and genius were not then vital principles for Wordsworth and Coleridge. By 1797 they were unsettled and undecided about their futures, in need of money or of patrons. What is more, they seemed to need one another. They engaged in long walks through the countryside of Somerset in which they had both eventually settled, Coleridge with his wife and son and Wordsworth with his sister. Wordsworth walked in a straight line, while Coleridge was divagatory. They considered an epic poem entitled ‘The Wanderings of Cain’, but it came to nothing. Two weeks after that failure, on a walking tour along the Bristol Channel in November, they devised the plan of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But even as they started work upon the joint project Wordsworth realized that their writing was incompatible and that he could only be a ‘clog’ on Coleridge’s vividly realized narrative. As he said, ‘we pulled different ways’. Dorothy Wordsworth was the catalyst between them. Her watchful interest in, and enthusiasm for, the workings of the natural world helped to recreate the landscape in which they walked together; the intimate simplicity of her journals, begun on 20 January 1798, was a token of the world of feeling in which the young poets flourished.

Coleridge’s fluency and vivacity had in any case an inspiring effect upon his colleague. Wordsworth wrote much between November 1797 and June 1798, with the peak of his powers manifest between March and May. The poems he composed concerned the plight of the poor and the progress of the poet’s mind. In April 1798, he wrote to a prospective publisher that ‘I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry.’ This was to include many of the poems that eventually found their place in Lyrical Ballads (1798). At a later date in Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge explained that in their conversation on the proposed new volume they determined upon poetry of two sorts. In the first ‘the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural’. Thus the inclusion of ‘The Ancient Mariner’. But for the second sort ‘subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity’. The egalitarian fury of the revolution had subsided but their feelings for equality and democracy, for shared human experience and shared human values, had found a safer haven.

They had found it, in part, in language. If the intention was to choose incidents and situations ‘from common life’, the instinctive medium had to be ‘a selection of language really used by men’. The tone could be discursive and colloquial but, equally, it could partake of the street ballads and Scottish ballads that were popular; on no account, however, could it seem to be artificial. Poetic diction and periphrasis were the ornaments of sheer habit and custom. They were the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that Blake condemned.

With the chastened language came new meanings. The ‘Advertisement’ of the book promised ‘a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents’. This was not necessarily a new experiment or daring innovation; the poetry of the 1790s had sought a ballad-like simplicity in tales of mad mothers or idiot boys. What was new (and understood by some as such) was the vividness of tone and feeling. The key was simplicity, not of a naïve or unconsidered kind but well pondered and conceived so that it became more powerfully evocative of the belief in ‘a motion and a spirit’ which ‘rolls through all things’. There is even a tone of inward uncertainty that deepens the language, rendering it a vehicle for associations and preocccupations that are more powerful than the ostensible subject. The two poets were relocating dignity in the commonplace, restoring grace and simplicity to ordinary lives where saints and sinners walked unannounced and unknown. This was real liberty, equality and fraternity. That is why Francis Jeffrey, in an acerbic notice in the Edinburgh Review, compared Lyrical Ballads with Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man.

So in the autumn of 1798 appeared a volume of 210 pages at the price of 5 shillings. Of the twenty-four poems, nineteen were composed by Wordsworth. But his fellow poet had opened the collection with ‘The Ancient Mariner’, a decision which Wordsworth later deemed to be a mistake. Yet Coleridge considered the poems to be ‘one work, in kind, tho’ not in degree’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ itself could in fact be conceived of as an example of the Wordsworthian sublime, for example, concerned with the intrinsic power of human sympathy in an uncaring world; the old mariner himself was obliged to live for ever as an outcast, the solitary wanderer of the Romantic vision, but the aspiration of the poem is towards benevolence and human community.

Lyrical Ballads concluded with ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’, a powerful meditation in blank verse that opened the way to the great poems of Wordsworth’s maturity such as The Prelude and The Excursion. ‘Tintern Abbey’ in particular helped to change the understanding of landscape and of nature which, for many, took on the sacred vesture of natural religion. They had once been considered picturesque but now they conveyed a spiritual or supernatural force. By means of Wordsworth’s poetry nature was granted religious significance as the nurse of piety and wisdom. It was a moral agent, an agent for good and benevolent change in the human heart. Coleridge and Wordsworth were described as representing ‘the modern school of poets’ and when Wordsworth eventually moved to the Lake District in 1799 they were known as ‘the Lake school’. Pilgrims began to travel to that neighbourhood and Wordsworth wrote a guidebook for these new spiritual travellers.

So even if the little book was not a popular success on its first appearance, it had an abiding significance. Over the course of years it became the source and fountain of what became known as the Romantic sensibility of the early nineteenth century in England, part of a movement of taste which stretched across France and Germany, Russia and Italy and Spain.

Yet a strange light appeared on the fringes of the distant clouds. By the late nineteenth century the imperatives of the Romantic movement had been transformed into an appeal for state ‘benevolence’ and ‘human community’ to oppose the tyranny of laissez-faire. That is material for another volume.

32

Pleasures of peace

In the summer of 1802 Napoleon had been appointed as ‘first consul for life’ after a national referendum that apparently gave him 99 per cent of the vote. The ideals of the revolution were now effectively dead; the tree of liberty had been torn from its roots, and equality was now honoured only in name. Jacobin republicanism of the English variety had lost its purpose. ‘Jacobinism is killed and gone,’ Sheridan said, ‘and by whom? By him who can no longer be called the child and champion of Jacobinism – by Buonaparte … he gave it a true fraternal hug and strangled it.’ The days of the champions of liberty and democracy were over, and in 1801 William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and himself once a fervent Jacobin, noted that ‘even the starving labourer in the alehouse is become a champion of aristocracy’.

The parlous state of Jacobinism was revealed in an inept conspiracy of certain so-called revolutionaries led by Colonel Despard. He and his associates had formed a secret society which migrated from tavern to tavern in London, from The Two Bells in Whitechapel to The Bleeding Heart in Holborn, with the express purpose of ‘an equalization of civic, political and religious rights’; the authorities, alerted by informers and police spies, arrested Despard. Forty of his followers were seized at The Oakley Arms in Lambeth. At the subsequent trial it was alleged that they had conspired in a coup d’état in which the Bank of England and the Tower would be captured, the prisons thrown open, and the king killed or taken prisoner. Despard was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn.

The drift to war continued at an ever-accelerating speed, as soon as it became clear that Napoleon had no intention of abiding by the principles of the treaty of Amiens. Yet Britain was also at fault; it had not evacuated Malta and returned it to the Knights of St John, as it had agreed to do in the treaty. At a reception in the Tuileries on 13 March 1803, Buonaparte admonished the English ambassador, Lord Whitworth, in front of other diplomats. ‘It is you who are determined to make war against us; you want to drive me to it.’ Buonaparte was not the one to shirk any challenge and told Whitworth that ‘you will be the first to draw the sword; I shall be the last to sheathe it. Woe to those who show no respect for treaties!’ The last sword was not put back in its scabbard for thirteen more years.

The first consul had already made preparations for conflict. French ships in the Mediterranean had embarked men, and French troops in Belgium had been moved towards Dunkirk and Le Havre. A message from George III to parliament urged the need for action; more men were to be enlisted in the fleet by means of bounties and, if further persuasion were needed, a ‘hot press’ was to be instituted in the streets and taverns of London.

It soon became clear that Henry Addington was not equal to the task of first minister imposed upon him. His acceptance of what was considered to be an ignominious and ill-considered treaty did not help his reputation, but he was in any case believed to be too weak and indecisive; his preferred policy in the face of Napoleonic threat was inaction. The man about to become home secretary, Charles Yorke, told his brother that Addington ‘is not equal to the crisis in which we stand. In truth I think there is but one man among us who is; I mean Pitt.’ Yet Pitt was not ready to replace his successor; he believed Addington to be ‘a stupider fellow than he had thought him’ but he was not ready to defy the king’s wishes.

The current administration’s position was rendered more precarious by its ill-considered and ill-managed attempt to call up volunteers for the army to confront Napoleon. The response was very encouraging but it soon became clear that there were no instructors to train them and no arms to furnish them; the local officials were obliged to give orders to discourage further recruitment and then to abandon it altogether. Any central authority was thrown into doubt. Where Buonaparte had the will and genius to create a force armée, the English equivalent was in disarray.

On 16 May 1803 George III ordered the seizure of all French shipping and, on 18 May, war between France and England was formally declared. The British fleet under the command of Cornwallis sailed towards Brest, and a force was dispatched against the French in San Domingo. Buonaparte in turn was now making active preparations for the invasion of England. An armed camp was set up at Boulogne, as close to the coast of England as possible, and it had been calculated that a flotilla of small ships would be able to cross the Channel in a single night. An atmosphere close to panic now descended upon England; despite the early discouragement in organizing volunteers, it was estimated that approximately half a million men were now under arms. The south coast was fortified with beacons and the new Martello towers. Yet in fact the French fleet did nothing at all. Its flotilla of boats would not be able to master the English navy and, for the time being, Buonaparte lost all interest in an invasion.

On the day that war was formally declared, Pitt finally took over office from Addington. But he was weaker now, in body and in spirit, and he was forced to patch together an administration from several different elements. He had become more erratic and less businesslike, refusing to write letters or to deal with affairs after dinner; he also had a greater tendency to weep in public, which did not endear him to his less tender colleagues who were already cultivating a mid-nineteenth-century gravitas and sobriety.

At the end of 1804 Buonaparte was graciously pleased to allow himself to be crowned emperor of the French as Napoleon I. As emperor, rather than king, he was outflanking the Bourbon dynasty and claiming for himself the mantle of Charlemagne as absolute ruler of Europe in the west. Pope Pius VII had been invited to Paris in order to preside over the official coronation, but Napoleon took the crown from the pontiff’s hands and placed it on his own head. The Prussians, the Russians and the Austrians looked on with disquiet.

On 2 January 1805, the new emperor addressed an apparently fraternal letter to George III in which he outlined the pleasures of peace. Was there no way of coming to an agreement after seven years of war? ‘Should this moment be lost, what limits can be set to a war that all my efforts could not bring to an end?’ The letter was such a breach of protocol that it could not be answered – George considered it to be ‘much below my attention’ – but the message itself was received with some interest. The perfidy and self-interest of Buonaparte, who believed all treaties and concordats to be so many pieces of paper, may have dictated its content; but it was perhaps also an intimation that the French did not fully believe that they could stand against any future ‘confederacy’ of Europe or the financial and naval power of the British. To the Commons Pitt quoted a speech by Cicero to the Roman senate in condemnation of Mark Antony. ‘Why therefore do I refuse peace? Because it is ignoble, because it is dangerous and because it cannot be.’ He might have added, however, Cicero’s caution that ‘the sinews of war are infinite money’.

The task for Pitt was therefore to confront the emperor on as broad a basis as ever, and he set about constructing a new coalition of allies who were united in their fear of Napoleon rather than upon any overall continental policy. In April 1805, Austria and Russia joined forces; when in the following month Napoleon was crowned king of Italy, with Genoa and Savoy as the immediate spoils, they formed a new alliance with England. The third coalition comprised England, Austria, Russia, Sweden and, finally, Prussia; but like its predecessors it was not destined to endure. Within a year it had been broken apart by the emperor of the French.

While creating the alliance Pitt decided to engage in sudden strikes that would deter Buonaparte from his threatened invasion of England and, in the autumn of the year, the English commander seized the bullion carried by a Spanish convoy and sank the ships. It was an open provocation to Spain to declare war, but Pitt already knew that the Spaniards had taken the side of France; he was only helping himself to a little of their gold.

In the course of these preparations the two great protagonists of sea and land, Admiral Nelson and Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley, soon to become Viscount Wellington and, later, duke, met accidentally in an ante-room at the Colonial Office in Whitehall. Wellington later recalled that ‘he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and in, really, a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody.’ Nelson left the room for a moment, to ascertain the identity of his unwilling companion. When he returned ‘all that I thought a charlatan style had vanished and he talked … with a good sense and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; he talked like an officer and a statesman’.

Here we have a convincing portrait of the mercurial admiral, often vain and silly, but also informed and persuasive. He was ambitious but he was also determined. Wellington shared his determination and decisiveness but he was less flamboyant; he had been trained in the hard school of India, and was reserved to the point of reticence. Yet both of them knew how to outwit Napoleon.

The central purpose of the third coalition was to drive Buonaparte behind the frontiers of France as they had existed in 1791; this meant that its members had to expel France from Hanover, Holland, northern Germany, Switzerland, Naples and northern Italy. This mighty undertaking was not helped by the different purposes and sensibilities of the participants. England was simply opposed to Buonaparte’s aspirations, while Austria deemed him and his ‘empire’ to be a shocking affront to its imperial presence. Tsar Alexander seems to have been motivated by simple jealousy of his rival, but of course private feelings can change in different circumstances.

The war on land did not go well for those opposing the French. Napoleon had decided to destroy the Austrian army before its Russian allies had time to reach it; so he made a rapid advance with almost 200,000 troops from the Rhine to the Danube, where they surrounded the Austrian forces who surrendered at Ulm on 20 October 1805. The speed and efficiency of the grande armée were confirmed when Napoleon led them up the valley of the Danube before capturing Vienna. Its ‘great turn’, when it wheeled right from the Rhine to the Danube, was one of the outstanding military movements of the war.

This French victory was, at least in English eyes, overshadowed by the news at sea. Nelson in the Victory had joined his fleet outside Cadiz at the end of September, where his excitement and enthusiasm reduced some of his officers to tears. He wished to achieve ‘not victory, but annihilation’. He planned to lure the French out of Cadiz towards Gibraltar, with the steep cliffs of Cape Trafalgar to the east. On 21 October, he relayed his final orders with the famous phrase ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’ He gave one other order just as the firing began. ‘Engage more closely!’ The French were in a loose crescent line while the English came up in two columns, Nelson to the left in the Victory and Collingwood to the right in the Royal Sovereign. Thick clouds of smoke drifted across the scene of war, but the English ships sailed straight against the French and broke their line apart.

One by one the French vessels surrendered, but the losses were not all one side. Nelson himself was struck by a stray bullet and fell mortally wounded onto the deck. He is supposed to have said ‘They have done for me at last.’ He lingered for more than two hours, until three in the afternoon, and by five the battle was concluded with the blowing-up of a French ship of the line, the Achille. The superior skills of the British crews, and the superior acumen of the British commanders, had prevailed.

Seventeen of the French and Spanish vessels, out of a total of thirty-three, were captured or destroyed. No British ship had been lost. The victory confirmed the naval supremacy of the British, and from this time forward there was no talk of a French invasion across the Channel. At the Lord Mayor’s banquet in the following month, Pitt was toasted as the ‘saviour of Europe’. He replied, modestly enough, that ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’

The victory of Trafalgar was soon glorified in national memory and naval legend. Napoleon, deep in Europe, did not learn of the outcome for some days; on hearing the result he is said to have leaped up from the table exclaiming, ‘I cannot be everywhere!’ He was in any case about to launch a final and mortal attack upon the Russian and Austrian armies. On 13 November he entered Vienna, where he began to reorganize the affairs of the archduchy, but by the end of the month he was advancing against the combined forces of the enemy. He moved swiftly and at nine in the morning on 2 December confronted them between the towns of Brno and Austerlitz, where in a series of manoeuvres he succeeded in cutting the allied armies in two. ‘One sharp blow,’ he said, ‘and the war is over.’ He had feigned indecision to lure them forwards and, when they counter-attacked, he sent forward reinforcements concealed in fog. Several cavalry charges, in which 10,000 horse were involved, guaranteed French victory.

It has been called ‘The Battle of the Three Emperors’ and on this occasion Tsar Alexander I of Russia and the last Holy Roman emperor, Francis II, left the field in confusion and dismay. Their forces fled. One observer declared that ‘there were no longer regiments or army corps, there were only disorderly bands of marauders’. The Austrians and Russians lost approximately 26,000 men, while the French army forfeited 7,000. Alexander agreed to withdraw his forces behind his frontier, while Francis was obliged to accept humiliating terms of peace. Napoleon was finally the master of Europe.

It was said that the news of Austerlitz effectively killed Pitt. For days and weeks after he wore what was called an ‘Austerlitz face’ of deep sorrow. One Whig peer, Lord Auckland, said that the event involved ‘not only the well-being but the very existence of the British Empire’. The joy over Trafalgar now seemed premature.

Napoleon returned in triumph to Paris after Austerlitz. He made one of his brothers, Joseph, king of Naples; another brother, Louis, was announced as king of Holland. His old adversary, William Pitt, was now facing death. Pitt’s private secretary, Dacre Adams, wrote later that his eyes were ‘almost lifeless’ and his voice was ‘hollow’; he could not eat without vomiting, and survived on raw egg mixed with brandy. He told his doctor, Sir Walter Farquhar, that ‘when in conversation with persons upon important business, I felt suddenly as if I had been cut in two’. It might have been his liver, his kidneys, or his stomach.

When he lay on his deathbed in the first month of 1806 he sometimes muttered ‘Hear! Hear!’, as if he were listening to a debate in the Commons; then on the night of 22 January he called out, according to different reports, ‘How I love my country’ or ‘How I leave my country’. He died early on the following morning at the age of forty-six. For twentyfive years he had been the guiding star of Westminster. Now the star had faded and there was, according to Fox, ‘something missing in the world’.

The group of politicians, known as ‘Mr Pitt’s friends’, had been in a state of some confusion; all were competent but none was pre-eminent, and when the king asked the surviving ministers if they could continue under a new leader they declined the opportunity. They could not agree to raise any one man above the others. When the king realized that they would not be able to form an administration he had turned to William Grenville as a possible successor; Grenville’s father had been first minister, and he himself had been foreign secretary as well as a first cousin of Pitt’s. He was a pillar of the political world but he was by no means, in the jargon of the day, a ‘Pittite’ or anything close to Pitt himself.

He in turn reached out towards Charles James Fox and his Whig supporters. The eventual administration was known, perhaps sarcastically, as ‘The Ministry of All the Talents’, and it included Fox as foreign secretary. What were then known as Grenvillites, Foxites, Windhamites, Lansdownites, Sidmouthites and Addingtonians had also joined the ministry, an indication that Whig policies had largely given way to personalities in the great Westminster game. Grenville himself had decided to adopt the role of chairman of the board, exhorting and guiding various independent managers. It was not the most stable of positions, and the government itself lasted for little more than a year. One ardent Whig, John Cam Hobhouse, wrote that ‘the odium affixed to that coalition survived their short-lived power’. They were accused of nepotism and corruption which came under the all-encompassing description of ‘jobbing’. It was not a good year for the Whigs.

Fox himself had now to expedite negotiations with Buonaparte and his agents. It had been Fox who had celebrated the revolution with fervour and had embraced the French cause long after other devotees had abandoned it. But he was now in the uncomfortable position of realizing that his erstwhile hero, Napoleon Buonaparte, was as perfidious and as dangerous as any ordinary politician. His abortive negotiations with the French minister, Talleyrand, convinced him that peace was not to be achieved at any reasonable cost. The French were still bent upon aggression and territorial conquest. Fox noted to his nephew, Lord Holland, ‘the shuffling, insincere way in which they act, that shows me they are playing a false game’. Yet some believed that Fox, once the ardent francophile, would conclude a peace on whatever terms; the young Palmerston wrote that ‘I cannot see how at present peace can bring us anything but dishonour and defeat’. Fox did not have to bear his own dismay and disillusion for very long, as he died in the autumn of the year.

Napoleon’s recalcitrance had been well founded. At the beginning of August 1806, several principalities and kingdoms of south Germany formally seceded from the Holy Roman Empire, which now came to its long-awaited end, and accepted Buonaparte’s protection as head of their new confederation. In the month after Fox’s death, October 1806, the French army met the Prussian forces at Jena and inflicted a resounding defeat. The Prussian army had once been feared for its military skills and redoubtable leadership but its chain of command had become arthritic and its mobility therefore weakened. The legacy of Frederick the Great had been broken. Hegel considered the battle to mark ‘the end of history’, by which he meant that he foresaw the end of nation-states in the wake of Napoleon’s imperial ambitions.

As if on cue the French armies invaded Prussia, taking Berlin in their path, and the king Frederick William III fled east with his family to enjoy the protection of the tsar. Mirabeau, one of the early revolutionaries, had said that ‘the Prussian monarchy is so constituted that it could not bear up under any calamity’. And so it proved. Napoleon’s thoughts, too, were turning east with territorial longings greater than ever before. The victory over Prussia provoked jubilation in France where one French minister of state, Pasquier, remarked that ‘nothing could have appeared so incredible’. Yet the joy of the French was tempered by the desire for the palpable fruits of victory, the greatest of which was peace.

But Napoleon was not in a peaceful mood. Ensconced in the newly captured city of Berlin, according to Pasquier, he ‘affected the language and attitude of a sovereign who commands his subjects’. The Prussians were no longer the enemy but a band of rebels, and the nobles of that country were no more than petty courtiers to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. His preoccupation now was with Russia, and he began to march further east into Poland which might once have sufficed as a barrier state between France and Russia; he occupied Warsaw and then rested, having driven the Russians 50 miles east of that city. He came in the apparent role of liberator, since that country had been partitioned over the years by Russia, Prussia and Austria. He said that ‘it is a dead body to which life must be restored before anything can be made of it’. So some Poles welcomed him as a deliverer. He even created an independent state, to be known as the duchy of Warsaw, but it did not survive.

While in Berlin his thoughts had turned again to his old enemy. If he could not assault Britain by sea or land, he could attack her by means of commerce. Trade was the key to Britain’s success; if that could be cut off or curtailed then the country would greatly suffer. If she were reduced to commercial isolation, then she might be induced to surrender. That at least was his intention.

The Berlin Decrees, issued from that city in November 1806, declared that the British Isles were subject to total blockade; no country should trade with Britain, and no foreign ports should be open to her. All her foreign markets were forthwith to be closed. It sounds like a draconian decree but in truth the Continental System, as it became known, had no permanent effect. Britain was too rich, and too productive, to be permanently cowed; the continent of Europe could not command enough resources to survive. Even Napoleon’s soldiers were clothed with textiles made in northern England. There was a crisis in trade in 1808, and then again in 1811, and there was for a time the phantom of famine, but the economic order soon stabilized. The regulations were either ignored or thwarted across vast swathes of Napoleon’s empire, and a black market in prohibited goods was established. It became clear that Napoleon had to fight more battles, and plan more campaigns, to ensure that the Continental System was being obeyed.

In retaliation the British issued Orders in Council at the beginning of 1807 which were designed to mount a blockade against France; no neutral ships were permitted to enter French ports, and the greater efficiency of the British navy ensured that this barrier was not one to be crossed with impunity. Coffee, tobacco and other commodities became rare in the French capital.

In the winter of 1806 Napoleon was still on the march. The weather was terrible, the winds sharp and the snow treacherous, but ‘impossible’ was not a word to utter to the emperor. With the hostile forces of Russia, Prussia and Sweden about him, and Austria threatening in the rear, his army moved eastward; it was checked at Eylau, in a particularly bloody and inconclusive battle, but then advanced still further until it crushed the Russian army at the battle of Friedland. By the summer of 1807 the tsar was forced to come to terms with the emperor on a raft in the middle of the River Neman at Tilsit. A separate treaty with Prussia was signed two days later, by the terms of which that country was effectively dismembered. It had now been confirmed to all the protagonists that Napoleon was the undisputed master of Europe and, with Russia by his side, he might hope eventually to destroy an isolated Britain. The Russian commander noted that ‘the two emperors have shaken hands. Europe has cause to tremble.’ George III himself was convinced that some kind of accommodation would have to be made with Napoleon.

What was everyone really talking about in the autumn of 1807? Lady Bessborough, lover of Sheridan and mother to Lady Caroline Lamb, wrote to the British envoy in St Petersburg about the news of the day. ‘War with Russia? Nothing like it. America? Still less. What can occasion such a ferment in every house, in every street, in every shop, in every garret about London? It is the Light and Heat company … That strong light that has lit up Pall Mall for this year past has all at once blaz’d up like a comet.’ The streets of London were now illuminated by gas, and seemed to any stranger to be paved with gold.

The unfortunate Ministry of All the Talents had already resigned, in the spring of the year. William Grenville had fallen not so much as a result of Napoleon’s victories but from the continuing struggle between the king and his ministers over Ireland; the government wished to make concessions to the majority Catholic population, but the king demurred. When George insisted that all the members of the cabinet should sign a pledge to renounce any further attempt at Catholic emancipation, they resigned in protest. Gillray published a cartoon entitled ‘The Pigs Possessed or the Broad bottom’d Litter running headlong into ye Sea of Perdition’. George, portrayed as a farmer, denounces the pigs as they jump over the cliff: ‘Oh you cursed ungrateful brutes!’ ‘Broad bottom’ was the name given to a cross-party administration.

The Ministry of All the Talents had achieved one notable feat, however, in the abolition of the slave trade. Its moment had come. In the spring of 1807 the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade passed the Commons by a majority of 283 votes to 16 votes, a victory that surprised even William Wilberforce who ascribed it to Providence. Slavery itself, as opposed to the trade, was not abolished until twenty-six years later.

Another pig popped up, in the shape of the duke of Portland, as all the talents sank beneath the waves. When Grenville was obliged to resign, therefore, he was replaced by a sixty-nine-year-old man who was crippled with bad health and with an addiction to laudanum; the duke of Portland could not have controlled a crèche let alone a cabinet. He was soon incapable of political business, unable either to read long dispatches or engage in lengthy conversations. The stone consigned him to long periods of continual pain, and it was said that he was generally asleep or silent. This left him essentially as a figurehead, supposedly controlling a cabinet that contained rival personalities and principles. The conglomeration of them, plotting and planning against each other, became known as ‘The Ins and Outs’.

This was not perhaps the best administration to continue the fight against Napoleon. At the opening of parliament, on 28 January 1808, George III readied the people for the struggle yet to come. In an official ‘Note’ published in the Moniteur twelve days later Buonaparte pledged that peace would come only after England had been stripped of her overseas possessions which were ‘the principal source of her wealth’.

The war had in any case assumed a different aspect when Napoleon was obliged to look to his southern flank. The Iberian peninsula had become dangerous. In the spring of 1808 the emperor had decreed that his older brother, Joseph, should assume the monarchy of Spain as part of the French imperium; the Spanish were not willing to have a foreign ruler imposed upon them and fomented a nationalist rebellion. Six delegates from Asturias sailed to England and, having arrived at Falmouth, beseeched aid from the British government. The response could not have been more enthusiastic. Here was the opportunity to open another front against the French, with a line of command and communication that relied upon the sea. Nothing could have been more promising. Ten thousand men were dispatched to the peninsula under the command of Sir Arthur Wellesley.

Portugal was also in rebellion against the French who had occupied Lisbon the year before. Napoleon had decided that his blockade of Britain would have a better chance of success if all the Portuguese ports were closed, a decision in which the Portuguese themselves did not concur. The emperor believed that it would be relatively easy to dominate the Iberian peninsula with an army, but he mistook the nature of the terrain and the spirit of the inhabitants. The people, most notably the peasants and the clergy, rose up against the foreign oppressors and created havoc with guerrilla attacks, shooting and banditry which could be neither anticipated nor controlled. Local forces, in this and other contests, were more than a match for a foreign army.

Wellesley landed in the early summer of 1808 at Oporto, where his army was enlarged by reinforcements and by Portuguese troops. At the battle of Vimeiro, in the middle of August, the French forces were heavily defeated. But the British negotiators, under the command of Sir Hew Dalrymple, conceded too much; the French were obliged to leave the country but they were permitted to take with them all their arms and equipment. When news of the treaty reached London there was disgust and dismay at such an inadequate response. George III was said to be ‘extremely angry’, and a special Gazette reported that ‘the public indignation this day is at its height … the people seem quite wild’. The British had bungled a great opportunity. It was widely believed and asserted that the expedition to Portugal had turned from triumph into disaster. A court of inquiry was held later in the year. Wellesley was exonerated, but Dalrymple never held another command.

The French, however, were no more successful in Spain than in Portugal; after a particularly galling defeat at Bailen, where 20,000 French soldiers were obliged to surrender to a Spanish army, Buonaparte decided that his presence was necessary on the ground. The British had sent Sir John Moore to parry the imperial thrust, and by the winter of 1808 Moore was close to Salamanca, but at this point the emperor burst through Spanish defences and occupied Madrid; Moore could not complete his mission but he was able to divert the attention of Buonaparte by marching northwest through the mountains of Galicia towards the port at Corunna where, with heroic and indeed fatal rearguard action, he managed to embark the majority of his men. He had significantly delayed Napoleon, who lost the opportunity of recapturing Portugal or finally of subduing Spain, and this interruption helped eventually to determine the struggle for the Iberian peninsula. It was to prove a costly adventure, both in men and money, for the emperor who found himself distracted by this second front which he had no realistic possibility of overcoming. It had become an open pit, swallowing up arms and armies. The day after the battle of Corunna – 17 January 1809 – Napoleon left Spain, never to return.

Yet the British came back; if for Napoleon the Iberian peninsula was at first a peripheral issue, in comparison with his great plans for European dominion, it was for his enemy a vital component of the armed struggle which provided a direct link to the European continent through the ports of Lisbon and Oporto. Its dominance in the region also gave Britain a more powerful voice in later negotiations. Wellesley returned to the peninsula in the spring of 1809 and, as commander of the allied forces, defeated the French in two significant battles. As the victor in the battle of Talavera, southwest of Madrid, he was created Viscount Wellington.

Napoleon had finally committed 350,000 troops to Spain, but they were not enough. They were diverted and dispersed by the guerrillas, and slowly worn down by Wellington in his methodical and practical logistics. He would often conceal his troops in suitable terrain before unleashing them on the unsuspecting enemy in a ‘long red wall’. Buonaparte always underestimated him, calling him merely a ‘sepoy general’ as a consequence of his service in India, but Wellington, more than any other general, brought down the French army.

The war news further north was not so good. At the beginning of 1809 a ‘fifth coalition’, that between England and Austria, had been made ready to engage Buonaparte. A victory by Archduke Charles of Austria in the battle of Aspern delivered a fatal blow to the myth of Buonaparte’s invincibility, but the subsequent defeat of the Austrians at Wagram tempered any false optimism.

On 28 July, three weeks after the battle of Wagram, the British sent an expedition to destroy the French naval base at Antwerp. This was the port where Napoleon was assembling a new fleet. It was a welcome opportunity for the British navy to crush an incipient maritime threat. A fleet was assembled off the coast of the South Downs and sailed to Walcheren, an island in the mouth of the Scheldt estuary within reach of the port of Antwerp. Yet here they met an enemy as deadly as it was unexpected. The island was full of malaria, and the English very quickly succumbed; 4,000 died, and 12,000 were unable to fight. By the end of the year ‘Walcheren fever’ had incapacitated half the British troops, and on 23 December the remnant sailed home. The campaign had become a disaster, to a universal chorus of indignation at home. It had resulted in a wanton loss of men and a vast waste of money.

The failure further unsettled an already weak administration. The betrayal at Sintra in the previous summer, when the French were allowed to leave Portugal with their arms intact, had begun the process of breaking an administration where quarrels and dissensions in the cabinet were already wounding its effectiveness. By the spring of 1809 Portland’s health had deteriorated so badly that the chance for a successor looked promising. George Canning, the foreign secretary, aspired to the office but he saw a rival in Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of state for war and the colonies. Canning pressed for his dismissal, citing his supposed incompetence in the management of the war, and reached a secret pact with Portland that Castlereagh would be removed from his post as soon as practicable. Castlereagh, however, became aware of these negotiations, and rightly sensed betrayal. In the autumn of the year he challenged Canning to a duel on Putney Heath. Castlereagh was a good shot, but Canning had never used a pistol before in his life; when Canning was wounded in the thigh, both men felt obliged to resign from the high posts which their juvenile or old-fashioned behaviour had damaged. Lord Portland, with a broken cabinet, left office soon after.

The surviving ministers looked at one another with a wild surmise, and soon proceeded with what Canning called ‘constant meetings and co-jobberations’. Canning himself still held ambitions for the highest office, even though his recent conduct had effectively disqualified him; he wrote that he was ‘still not wholly out, yet not altogether in office’. The other members of the cabinet in any case considered it bad form on his part to enter into a secret pact with Portland against a colleague.

The king chose as the safest option the chancellor of the exchequer, Spencer Perceval; Perceval was a devout evangelical who had gathered an informal network of friends and families advocating moral and social reform. A man of the old stamp, Perceval was solid, reliable and principled. Henry Grattan, the Irish campaigner and parliamentarian, surmised that ‘he is not a ship of the line, but he carries many guns, is tight built, and is out in all weathers’. He was small, spare and energetic. He took office just three weeks before the death of Portland himself.

It was not at first considered to be a viable administration. We may continue with the naval metaphors that were so popular in this era. When the Honourable Frederick Robinson turned down the relative minor post of an undersecretary he wrote that ‘by embarking in a crazy vessel, I may chance to go to the bottom with the rest’. Yet it defied the odds, and sailed on.

There were, however, storm conditions ahead. The British people seem to have become weary of a war against Napoleon that had lasted, with infrequent intervals, for seven years. The discontent was exacerbated by the economic conditions of 1808 and 1809 when wartime privations led to a deterioration in export trade and, eventually, a general ‘slump’. By 1811 many county banks were forced to close, tightening even more the lines of credit that sustained the country. The cotton spinners of Manchester, and the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire, were among the groups who demanded a return to peace and prosperity.

The measure of discontent may be seen in the sporadic but intense rioting that unbalanced the capital. When in 1810 Sir Francis Burdett wrote to his constituents of Westminster – in a letter published by William Cobbett’s radical Political Register – against an alleged breach of privilege by the House of Commons, his letter was deemed to be libellous and worthy of imprisonment in the Tower. When the warrant for his arrest had been issued the crowds of London arose and virtually took control of the city. Burdett refused to leave his house in Piccadilly and the centre of London became a cockpit for the mobs and the militia. Burdett was finally confined, but Wellington wrote that ‘the government and country are going to the Devil as far as possible; and I expect every day to hear that the mob of London are masters of the country’. Burdett himself was celebrated as a national hero standing up against the ‘rats of the nation’.

Such was the hot temper of the capital that another riot had already taken place over the relatively innocuous question of the price of tickets to the Covent Garden Theatre. When in the autumn of 1809 the theatre reopened after a fire, the managers had increased the price of tickets and constructed more private boxes. This was considered as an affront to the ordinary citizens, and a dedicated group of protests disrupted performances nightly and managed to close the theatre for ten days at the end of September.

This was the inflamed atmosphere when in the autumn of 1810 the king succumbed once more to the babbling condition, akin to madness, induced by porphyria. On this occasion there would be no recovery. He held imaginary conversations with dead friends, and reviewed imaginary troops.

At the beginning of the following year the prince of Wales was declared to be prince regent whose powers would be curtailed for one year in case his father suddenly grew well again. But George III was for long periods strapped in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened room. The regent was king in all but name. It had been confidently believed that he would turn to his old Whig friends to form an administration but, as he had grown older, he had grown more conservative. He liked Spencer Perceval, perhaps because the strict sabbatarian was of so opposite a character; we admire those whom we cannot hope to emulate. Perceval was opposed to Catholic emancipation, as was the regent, and he was bold and resolute in matters of war. When confirmed in office, he would have to be equally resolute in matters domestic.

The great comet that streaked across the night sky in 1811 might have been considered to be a harbinger of more woe; the bad winters of 1811 and 1812 contributed to Napoleon’s blockade and resulted in acute shortages of food. Over 45,000 inhabitants of Spitalfields petitioned to be allowed into the workhouses for want of bread. This was the prelude to protest on a much larger scale against what was known as ‘The Thing’ or ‘Old Corruption’, a movement encouraged by radical periodicals such as Pig’s Meat, Black Dwarf and Axe to the Root. The cotton weavers of Bolton declared in February 1811: ‘Oh misery and wretchedness when will ye cease to torment the industrious artisan?’ A petition for help came from 40,000 Mancunians.

The most serious and sustained threat came from those who became known as ‘Luddites’. In the spring of 1811 the framework knitters of Nottinghamshire were in dispute with their employers over low wages and the use of unskilled workers. The breaking of frames then became part of their industrial tactics, and their example was followed in parts of Derbyshire and Leicestershire. Over a period of eleven months 1,000 frames were destroyed as a result of approximately a hundred incidents. An army captain, Francis Raynes, explained that ‘the Luddites attained a military style of operation, and held their meetings upon commons and moors for the purpose of drilling etcetera’.

When the disturbances spread to Yorkshire with arson and attempted assassination as part of their operation, the militia was called out and the assizes began their work. Seventeen of the operatives were hanged. The employers also fought back, opening fire on any protesters who threatened their factories. Two hundred protesters marched through Bolton with ‘a man of straw’ at their head – the name of Jack Straw, the rebel leader of the late fourteenth century, may not have been forgotten – representing as the Leeds Mercury said ‘the renowned General Ludd’. What had started as industrial action, therefore, had burgeoned into social and political protest. In 1813, 30,000 people in Lancashire and Yorkshire signed a petition for parliamentary reform. Industrial and political unrest could not in this period be cleanly divided.

There never was a ‘Ned Ludd’ or ‘Captain Ludd’ or ‘General Ludd’. The protesters did not need any titular hero. They were led by solid grievances over the price of provisions, over the conditions of employment, over the breaking-up of traditional practices and over the unpopularity of war. The movement could only be countered with state force. A mass trial was held at York in which sixty defendants were sentenced to hanging or to penal transportation, and when a parliamentary bill was passed to render frame-breaking a capital crime, Lord Byron, in his maiden speech, was moved to declare that ‘when a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporize and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences’.

At the height of the disturbances, in May 1812, Spencer Perceval was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by a deranged merchant called Bellingham. His death was seen by the Luddites and strikers as a great victory of liberty against an oppressive administration. A local newspaper reported that in the Potteries ‘a man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat around his head, and shouting with frantic joy: “Perceval is shot, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!”’

Whatever the jubilation outside Westminister, anxiety and consternation reigned within. Once more the question of suitable leadership arose. It was thought that Wellington’s brother, Henry Wellesley, might be the candidate for first minister; but several ministers refused to serve under him. Eventually the chalice, golden or poisoned according to taste, was passed to Lord Liverpool. He was a practical leader, cautiously moving forward when opportunity allowed, and his administration was to last until his death fifteen years later. The final victory over Napoleon, and the success of the European allies, sealed his ascendancy.

The French emperor was now actively and seriously considering the invasion of Russia. The tsar, Alexander I, had withdrawn from Napoleon’s blockade of Britain; Buonaparte’s purpose seems to have been to engage the Russian army in one climactic battle and force the Russians to accede to his demands. He had also hoped for a short campaign, perhaps just within the borders of the invaded country. He probably never imagined a deep penetration of the icy and wintry realm, but the grand duchy of Muscovy led him ineluctably forward. It was his date with doom.

With an army of approximately 600,000 men he crossed the River Neman in the early summer of 1812; it was reported to be the largest army ever assembled but, in the words of the emperor himself, ‘a man like me troubles himself little about the lives of a million men’. All seemed to be going well as the huge force made its way through western Russia, but its supply lines were growing steadily weaker. Buonaparte’s troops were thwarted on their advance to St Petersburg and all their power was now directed upon Moscow. At the battle of Borodino, on 7 September, the two sides fought themselves into deadlock; the French took the battlefield, but the Russian army had not been defeated. The Russians could always muster fresh recruits, but the French were on their own. A week later Napoleon entered Moscow, to find scorched earth and forced evacuation. There was nowhere to go, a hazard enhanced by the possibility of epidemic sickness. The winter was closing in, with the threat of blizzards and swollen rivers impossible to cross. Frost, and ice, and falling snow, became the enemy.

Napoleon ordered his army to retreat to Smolensk on 17 October before crossing the River Berezina towards the end of November. One observer reported that ‘it looked like a caravan, a wandering nation’. The food had all gone. The cold was intense, disease rampant, the horses slipped and died on the ice; the Russian peasantry took their own vengeance on the departing enemy, burning or burying them alive, or beating out their brains with hoes and shovels. Typhus and dysentery helped to complete their work. An army that had numbered many hundreds of thousands was now reduced to less than 30,000. At Smorgoni, on 5 December, the emperor left his army with the plea that he had to be in Paris to fight his other enemies there. He left in disguise with only a small escort. It had been a total, humiliating disaster. When he returned to Paris, he ordered a round of balls and masquerades but everybody knew that his adventure was coming to an end.

Jubilation among the British at the humiliating conclusion of the emperor’s Russian expedition was heightened by the fact that Viscount Wellington had successfully entered Madrid in the summer of 1812 and had ousted the emperor’s brother from the imperial throne. At the subsequent battle of Vittoria, in the summer of the following year, he chased the French out of Spain altogether. It was a signal moment in European history, when the balance of power finally shifted against the French. A Te Deum was sung in the cathedral of St Petersburg, and Beethoven composed Wellington’s Victory in honour of the event.

A temporary truce in the summer of 1813 lasted only from June to August, and it seemed inevitable that there would be one last battle between France and its multiple enemies, including Prussia, Russia, England, Sweden and Austria. That is why it became known as ‘the battle of the nations’ or, perhaps more accurately, the battle of Leipzig. Over the course of four days Napoleon was roundly defeated, and emerged from the mayhem with only 80,000 troops. He had lost the military war. Lord Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, that ‘the deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand’. It seemed that ‘the ogre’ had finally been smashed and the defeat inflicted infinite damage upon Napoleon’s military reputation; he was no longer invincible on the battlefield. The news of Leipzig had thoroughly alarmed the French and the prefect of police in Paris, Étienne-Denis Pasquier, wrote that ‘there was no longer any hope in anything: every illusion had been destroyed’.

In the early days of 1814 Napoleon was on the defensive but once again his audacity, cunning and strategic skills renewed his confidence. In February he launched what became known as the ‘six day campaign’ in which he brilliantly outmanoeuvred the opposing forces and with an army of only 30,000 men achieved a number of small victories. They were not enough, in the face of the overwhelming numbers of his enemies. In a treaty signed at the beginning of March the allies strengthened their purpose by agreeing to a formal alliance. Austria, Russia, Prussia and Great Britain were now recognized to be the four ‘great powers’ of Europe, a political and geographical fact that changed the face of the continent.

Napoleon, in the face of rebellion at home and defeat abroad, saw the end of days coming. At the close of March the armies of Russia and Prussia reached the outskirts of Paris, and on 31 March the French surrendered. No foreign army had entered the capital for 400 years. Napoleon, struggling to reach the beleaguered city, was two days too late. He had no wish to sign a treaty of surrender, but his marshals forced the issue. ‘The army will obey me’, he told them. To which came the answer that ‘the army will obey its chiefs’. The game was up.

On 6 April 1814 the emperor signed the document of abdication in which he stated that ‘the emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy’. Three weeks later he went on board HMS Undaunted and sailed to Elba under escort. A few days later Louis XVIII entered Paris, to no very warm reception. Yet peace was infectious and the capital had become, in the words of Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, ‘a great, vast, beautiful madhouse’. Every sovereign and politician in Europe seemed to be participating in an endless round of balls, assemblies and receptions. It was here, at the end of May, that a further treaty reduced the territory of France to its borders of November 1792, before the newly revolutionized citizen army had poured over Europe.

All was then detailed, finely divided and eventually drawn up, at a congress held in Vienna in September 1814. The globe was carved up by the participants in a series of negotiations that continued from that early autumn to June 1815; it was one of the most significant conferences in modern history, mapping out the nation-states that were to survive for a century while all the time recognizing the authority of the ‘four great powers’. Mistrust, fear, intrigue and suspicion were of course the dominant motifs, as each ‘power’ tried to ensure that it was not being outmanoeuvred by the others. Castlereagh sought what he called a ‘just equilibrium’ between the various parties which, by subtly negotiating the demands of the participants, he eventually achieved. Austria and Prussia agreed to a loose confederation of German states, while the territorial ambitions of Tsar Alexander were reined back. The nations pledged to maintain a general peace and make no attempt, as Buonaparte had done, to dominate the continent. France remained a strong nation, but it had lost its commanding position for ever.

But then all seemed in peril. A telegraph reached Louis XVIII on 4 March 1815; he opened the envelope, read the message and sat with his head in his hands. ‘Do you know what this telegraph contains?’ he asked a minister.

‘No, sir, I do not.’

‘Well, I will tell you. It is revolution once more. Buonaparte has landed on the coast of Provence.’

Napoleon had escaped from the island of Elba to which he had been consigned by the victors. The ogre was back, and at once assumed an air of natural command. He told his small retinue: ‘I will arrive in Paris without firing a shot.’ And so it proved. On his slow trek to the capital by way of the Alpes Basses, any sign of opposition disappeared with cries of ‘Vive l’empereur!’ Louis XVIII fled to the Belgian border and, on 20 March, Napoleon entered Paris to wild acclamation. The great powers at once denounced him as an outlaw and prepared for a necessary and inevitable war to extirpate him. Napoleon was not for a moment daunted.

Yet all was not as it seemed. This was not the same man who had dominated Europe only a short time before. One of his supporters, Paul Thiébault, noted that his visage ‘had lost all expression and all its forcible character … everything about him seemed to have lost its nature and to be broken up; the ordinary pallor of his skin was replaced by a strongly pronounced greenish tinge’. He had not been defeated by any army; he had brought his misfortunes upon himself. He had ceased to be the leader of the forces of liberty, dispatched by the revolution, but another conqueror of independent peoples. His energy and almost manic certainty had begun to desert him; he now craved sleep and often seemed curiously tardy even in the hours before battle.

But his will was indomitable. He started north to Belgium with the intention of confronting the two armies now raised against him; the army under Wellington consisting of British, Dutch and Germans, and the Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, must not be allowed to combine into a single fighting force. He must get between them and destroy each one in turn. A series of errors by Napoleon and his commanders, however, permitted the British and Prussian armies to retreat towards Brussels along two parallel roads that led to Waterloo and Wavre. At a distance of one mile from Waterloo, Wellington, sensing the strength of the terrain, turned to confront the enemy. A prominent ridge known as the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment gave cover, while the large farmhouse or château of Hougoumont as well as a hamlet in the area could be fortified and garrisoned.

Napoleon drew up his forces along the Brussels road but he could not see the extent of Wellington’s army concealed by the prominent ridge. The French army attacked Hougoumont without making great advances, and then the cavalry of both sides engaged in charge and counter-charge in a series of attacks which became, for the survivors, the most prominent aspect of the battle. By the evening Blücher’s troops had arrived from Wavre, and began to attack the French troops. Buonaparte thought that he saw a weakness in Wellington’s centre and sent forward his imperial guard to take advantage of the opening; but the guards, repulsed with artillery and with bayonets, wavered, collapsed and began to retreat. The cry went up that ‘La garde recule. Sauve qui peut.’ Wellington then took off his hat and waved it into the air, signalling a general attack upon the French whose lines were now disintegrating. The battle had been won. It was, as Wellington wrote to his brother, ‘a damned nice [finely balanced] thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. The Prussians always believed that they, not Wellington and the British, had won the battle of Waterloo.

Wellington and Blücher now regrouped and began the final march upon Paris. On 22 June Napoleon abdicated for the second time, and on 15 July he surrendered to the British at Rochefort by going aboard HMS Bellerophon. He had thought, before his surrender, that he might make his new home in the United States; but no such haven was permitted to him. He was taken instead to the island of St Helena, and spent the rest of his life on the volcanic rock in the South Atlantic. It had been the most expensive war in English history, and the most protracted since the ‘Hundred Years War’ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Every word was now of peace, a peace guaranteed by the quadruple alliance of the great powers. And indeed there was to be no more serious strife on the continent until the time of Crimea in 1853. ‘It is impossible not to perceive’, Castlereagh wrote, ‘a great moral change coming on in Europe, and that the principles of freedom are in full operation.’ He might have added that Britain now considered itself to be the great moral leader in the struggle for freedom and against tyranny. It was clearly now the foremost power in terms of territory, and its empire included Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Australia and the Caribbean. It ruled, therefore, a large proportion of the earth’s surface.

Yet there was no triumphalism and little sense of success. After the long war, weariness and hardship were as ever part of daily life. The problems of Ireland, the difficulties of empire itself, the clamour for parliamentary reform, the decay in trade, and the rise in industrial violence, were the shadows that victory cast. It was not at all clear, in 1815, that such problems could be resolved.

Footnote

1 A new and an old style of dating, the Gregorian and the Julian, were in use independently on the continent and in England, with a difference of ten days in their computations. The Julian style in England was not superseded until 1751, and I have therefore used it up to this date. In the seventeenth century the new year was celebrated on 25 March but I have followed the more familiar precedent of 1 January.

Further reading

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of those books the author found most useful in the preparation of this fourth volume.

GENERAL HISTORIES

Ashley, M.: England in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1952)

Aubrey, W. H. S.: The National and Domestic History of England (London, 1878)

Baxter, S. B.: England’s Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763 (London, 1983)

Black, J.: Britain in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke, 1984)

——— British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (Basingstoke, 1990)

Christie, I. R.: Crisis of Empire: Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1754–1783 (London, 1966)

——— Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760–1815 (London, 1982)

Clark, J. C. D.: English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985)

Coward, B.: A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003)

Dickinson, H. T.: A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2002)

Harlow, V. T.: The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793 (London, 1952–64)

Harris, B.: Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2002)

Harris, R. W.: England in the Eighteenth Century, 1689–1793: A Balanced Constitution and New Horizons (London, 1963)

Harvey, A. D.: Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1978)

Hill, C.: 1530–1780: Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1969)

Holmes, Geoffrey S.: The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain 1660–1722 (London, 1993)

Holmes, Geoffrey S. (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1714 (London, 1969)

Holmes, Geoffrey S. and Szechi, D.: The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-industrial Britain 1722–1783 (London, 1993)

Hoppit, J.: A Land of Liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000)

Jensen, M.: The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York & Oxford, 1968)

Jones, J. R.: Country and Court: England, 1658–1714 (London, 1978)

Lecky, W. E. H.: A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1892)

Levack, B. P.: The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford, 1987)

Lingard, J. and Belloc, H.: The History of England (London, 1915)

Macaulay, T. B.: History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1906)

Marshall, D.: Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1974)

McLynn, F.: The Jacobites (London, 1985)

Michael, W., MacGregor, A. and MacGregor, G. E.: England under George I (London, 1936–39)

Namier, L. B.: England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1963)

O’Gorman, F.: The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688–1832 (London, 1997)

Owen, J. B.: The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (London, 1974)

Plumb, J. H.: England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1953)

——— The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1968)

Pocock, J. G. A.: Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980)

Prest, W. R.: Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660–1815 (Oxford, 1998)

Ranke, L. von: A History of England, Principally in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1875)

Schama, S.: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989)

Smollett, T.: The History of England: From Revolution in 1688, to the Death of George II (London, 1822)

Speck, W. A.: Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (London, 1977)

Stone, L. (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994)

Szechi, D.: The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester, 1994)

Trevelyan, G. M.: England under Queen Anne (London, 1965)

——— England under the Stuarts (New York, 1938)

Watson, J. S.: The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (Oxford, 1960)

Williams, B.: The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (Oxford, 1952)

CULTURE, SOCIETY & RELIGION

Allen, R. C.: Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992)

Archer, J. E.: Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 2000)

Ashton, J.: Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne (London, 1882)

Beckett, J. V.: The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986)

Beljame, A.: Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660–1744 (London, 1897)

Bennett, G. V.: The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975)

Borsay, P.: The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989)

Brewer, J.: The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997)

Cannon, J.: Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984)

Carter, P.: Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001)

Chadwick, W. The Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (London, 1859)

Chalklin, C. W.: The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process, 1740–1820 (London, 1974)

Christie, I. R.: Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984)

Clark, J. C. D.: Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986)

Cockayne, E.: Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600–1770 (New Haven & London, 2007)

Corfield, P. J.: The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982)

Defoe, D.: A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, By a Gentleman (London, 1742)

Earle, P.: The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989)

Elioseff, L. A.: The Cultural Milieu of Addison’s Literary Criticism (Austin, 1963)

Ford, B. (ed.), The Cambridge Cultural History of Britain, Vol. 5, Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1992)

Foss, M.: The Age of Patronage: The Arts in Society, 1660–1750 (London, 1971)

Gatrell, V.: City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006)

George, M. D.: England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1931)

George, M. D.: London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1925)

Guillery, P., Donald, A. and Kendall, D.: The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2004)

Hay, D. and Rogers, N.: Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997)

Hill, B.: Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989)

Hilton, B.: A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006)

Holmes, Geoffrey S.: Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982)

Jenkins, P.: The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983)

Kirby, P.: Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (London, 2003)

Langford, P.: A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989)

——— Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798: The Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford 1990 (Oxford, 1991)

Lees, L. H.: The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998)

Linebaugh, P.: The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)

Mackay, C.: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London, 1852)

Malcolmson, R. W.: Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981)

O’Toole, F.: A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1997)

Palliser, D. M., Clark, P. and Daunton, M. J.: The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2000)

Porter, R.: English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991)

Rivers, I.: Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982)

Rogers, P.: The Augustan Vision (London, 1974)

Rule, J.: Albion’s People: English Society, 1714–1815 (London, 1992)

Rupp, E.: Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford, 1986)

Sambrook, J.: The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1700–1789 (London, 1986)

Scull, A.: The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700–1900 (New Haven & London, 1993)

Seed, J.: Dissenting Histories: Religious Division and the Politics of Memory in Eighteenth-Century England (Edinburgh, 2008)

Sharpe, P.: Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914 (London, 1998)

Simmons, J. R. (ed.), Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, Ont. & Plymouth, 2007)

Snell, K. D. M.: Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985)

Sykes, N.: From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660–1768 (Cambridge, 1959)

Uglow, J. S.: Hogarth: A Life and a World (London, 1997)

——— The Lunar Men: The Friends who made the Future, 1730–1810 (London, 2002)

Vicinus, M.: The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British WorkingClass Literature (London, 1974)

Vickery, A.: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 2009)

Warburg, J.: The Industrial Muse: The Industrial Revolution in English Poetry (London & New York, 1958)

White, T. H.: The Age of Scandal: An Excursion through a Minor Period (London, 1950)

Williams, D.: The Triumph of Culture: 18th Century Perspectives (Toronto, 1972)

Wilson, K.: The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995)

MILITARY HISTORY

Black, J.: War for America: The Fight for Independence, 1775–1783 (Stroud, 1991)

Blanning, T. C. W.: The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802 (London, 1996)

Brewer, J.: The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989)

Chandler, D. G.: The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 2002)

Conway, S.: The War of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London, 1995)

Esdaile, C. J.: Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803–1815 (London, 2007)

Gash, N. (ed.), Wellington: Studies in the Military and Political Career of the first Duke of Wellington (Manchester, 1990)

Gates, D.: The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815 (London, 2003)

McLynn, F.: 1759: The Year Britain became Master of the World (London, 2004)

——— Napoleon: A Biography (London, 1997)

Muir, R. Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815 (New Haven and London, 1996)

Schneid, F. C.: Napoleonic Wars (Washington, 2010)

Southey, R.: The Life of Nelson (London, 1941)

Zamoyski, A. Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London, 2007)

MONARCHS AND COURTS

Beattie, J. M.: The English Court in the Reign of George I (London, 1967)

Black, J.: George II: Puppet of the Politicians? (Exeter, 2007)

——— George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, 2006)

Bucholz, R. O.: The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, 1993)

Clark, G. N.: The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714 (Oxford, 1949)

Field, O.: The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London, 2002)

Gregg, E.: Queen Anne (London, 1984)

Hatton, R. M.: George I (New Haven, 2001)

Kenyon, J. P.: The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London, 1977)

Miller, J.: The Stuarts (London, 2004)

Pares, R.: King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1967)

Smith, H.: Georgian Monarchy: Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006)

Somerset, A.: Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London, 2012)

Thompson, A. C.: George II: King and Elector (New Haven and London, 2011)

ECONOMIC HISTORY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Alexander, D.: Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (London, 1970)

Ashton, T. S.: An Eighteenth-Century Industrialist: Peter Stubs of Warrington, 1756–1806 (Manchester, 1939)

——— An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (London, 1955)

——— Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot, 1993)

Berg, M.: The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain (London, 1994)

Broadberry, S. N. and O’Rourke, K. H.: The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2012)

Brown, R.: Society and Economy in Modern Britain, 1700–1850 (London, 1991)

Chapman, S. J.: The Cotton Industry and Trade (London, 1905)

Cipolla, C. M.: Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (London, 1976)

Coleman, D. C.: Myth, History, and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1992)

Court, W. H. B.: The Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600–1838 (Oxford, 1953)

Crafts, N. F. R.: British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985)

Daunton, M. J.: Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1995)

Dickinson, H. W.: James Watt: Craftsman and Engineer (Cambridge, 1935)

Dickson, P. G. M.: The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967)

Fitton, R. S. and Wadsworth, A. P.: The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830 (Matlock, 2012)

Flinn, M. W.: Men of Iron: The Crowleys in the Early Iron Industry (Edinburgh, 1962)

——— The Origins of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1966)

——— The Industrial Revolution, The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1984)

Floud, R.: The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2014)

Floud, R. and McCloskey, D. N.: The Economic History of Britain Since 1700 (Cambridge, 1981)

Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, B. B.: The Rise of Modern Industry (London, 1937)

Harris, J. R.: The British Iron Industry, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke, 1988)

Hartwell, R. M.: The Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1965)

——— The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1967)

——— The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (London, 1971)

Hartwell, R. M. (ed.): The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1970)

Holderness, B. A.: Pre-industrial England: Economy and Society, 1500–1750 (London, 1976)

Hopkins, E.: The Rise of the Manufacturing Town: Birmingham and the Industrial Revolution (Stroud, 1998)

King, S. and Timmins, G.: Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 2001)

Kussmaul, A.: A General View of the Rural Economy of England 1538–1840 (Cambridge, 1990)

MacLeod, C.: Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 1988)

Mantoux, P.: The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England (Chicago, 1983)

Mathias, P.: The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London, 1969)

——— The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2011)

McKendrick, N. and Plumb, J. H.: The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1983)

Minchinton, W. E.: The Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1969)

Moffit, L. W.: England on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: A Study of Economic and Social Conditions from 1740–1760, with Special Reference to Lancashire (London, 1925)

Mokyr, J.: The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York, 1990)

——— The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1850 (London, 2011)

Mui, Hoh-Cheung and Mui, L. H.: Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, Ont., 1989)

O’Brien, P. and Quinault, R. E.: The Industrial Revolution and British Society (Cambridge, 1993)

Osborne, J. W.: The Silent Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in England as a Source of Cultural Change (New York, 1970)

Plumb, J. H.: The Commercialisation of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (Reading, 1973)

Quickenden, K., Baggott, S. and Dick, M.: Matthew Boulton: Enterprising Industrialist of the Enlightenment (Farnham, 2013)

Radcliffe, W.: Origin of the New System of Manufacture Commonly Called Power-Loom Weaving (Clifton, 1974)

Randall, A.: Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge, 1991)

Reilly, R.: Josiah Wedgwood, 1730–1795 (London, 1992)

Richards, J. M. and De Maré, E. S.: The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings (London, 1958)

Rule, J.: The Vital Century: England’s Developing Economy 1714–1815 (London, 1992)

Toynbee, A.: The Industrial Revolution (Boston, 1956)

Unwin, G. and Hulme, A.: Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: The Industrial Revolution at Stockport and Marple (Manchester, 1924)

Weatherill, L.: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London and New Haven, 1996)

Wilson, R. G.: Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830 (Manchester, 1971)

Wrigley, E. A.: Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988)

——— Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010)

POLITICAL HISTORY

Black, J.: Pitt the Elder (Cambridge, 1992)

——— The Politics of Britain, 1688–1800 (Manchester, 1993)

Brewer, J.: Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976)

Browning, R.: The Duke of Newcastle (New Haven, 1975)

Butterfield, H.: George III, Lord North, and the People, 1779–80 (London, 1949)

Cannon, J.: The Fox–North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782–4 (Cambridge, 1969)

——— The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London, 1981)

Colley, L.: In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982)

Derry, J. W.: Politics in the Age of Fox, Pitt and Liverpool: Continuity and Transformation (Basingstoke, 1990)

Dickinson, H. T.: The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 1994)

Dickinson, H. T.: Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London, 1973)

Ehrman, J.: The Younger Pitt (London, 1969–1996)

Field, O.: The Kit-Cat Club (London, 2009)

Goodwin, A.: The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979)

Gray, D.: Spencer Perceval, the Evangelical Prime Minister, 1762–1812 (Manchester, 1963)

Harris, T.: Politics Under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society, 1660–1715 (London, 1993)

Hill, B. W.: British Parliamentary Parties, 1742–1832: From the Fall of Walpole to the First Reform Act (London, 1985)

——— The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689–1742 (London, 1976)

Holmes, Geoffrey S.: British Politics in the Age of Anne (London, 1967)

Jones, C.: Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680–1750: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes (London, 1987)

Kenyon, J. P.: Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977)

Lawson, P.: George Grenville: A Political Life (Oxford, 1984)

Linklater, A.: Why Spencer Perceval had to Die: The Assassination of a British Prime Minister (London, 2012)

Marshall, A.: The Age of Faction: Court Politics, 1660–1702 (Manchester, 1999)

Middleton, R.: The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War 1757–1762 (Cambridge, 1985)

Namier, L. B.: The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1957)

O’Gorman, F.: The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, 1967)

——— Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London, 1973)

——— The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–82 (London, 1975)

——— Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989)

Owen, J. B.: The Rise of the Pelhams (London, 1957)

Pearce, E.: The Great Man: Scoundrel, Genius and Britain’s First Prime Minister (London, 2007)

Perry, K.: British Politics and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, 1990)

Peters, M.: Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford, 1980)

Pincus, S. C. A.: 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009)

Plumb, J. H.: Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London, 1956)

Reilly, R.: William Pitt the Younger (New York, 1979)

Rogers, N.: Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989)

Rudé, G. F. E.: Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study (London, 1983)

Tomkins, S.: William Wilberforce: A Biography (Oxford, 2007)

Western, J. R.: Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (London, 1985)

Williams, E. N. (ed.): The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688–1815: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1960)

Index

Aberdeen, Charles ref1

Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th earl of ref1

Aboukir Bay, battle of (1798) ref1

Adams, Dacre ref1

Adams, John ref1

Addington, Henry (1st viscount Sidmouth) ref1, ref2

Addison, Joseph: on trade and traders ref1; on London ref1; political writings ref1; co-edits Spectator ref1, ref2; opposes Scriblerus ref1; club membership ref1; describes prostitute ref1; on theatregoers ref1