History of England 1-6

Adventurer (journal) ref1

advertisements ref1

agriculture: improvements and social effects ref1, ref2; farm sizes increase ref1

Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (1748) ref1, ref2

Albemarle, Arnold Joosty van, 1st earl of ref1

Albion Mill, London ref1

alehouses ref1

Alexander I, tsar of Russia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Alison, Archibald: Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste ref1

Almack’s club ref1

America see North America

American War of Independence (1775–83) ref1, ref2

Amiens, treaty of (1802) ref1

‘Ancients’ and ‘Moderns’ dispute ref1, ref2

Anderson, Adam: An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce ref1

Anglican church see Church, the

Anne, queen of England, Scotland and Ireland: claim to throne ref1, ref2, ref3; Protestantism ref1; touches for king’s evil ref1; dependence on duchess of Marlborough ref1; accession ref1; appearance and character ref1; religious convictions ref1; on Marlborough’s Blenheim victory ref1; political impartiality ref1; and union with Scotland ref1; declines Marlborough’s request to be appointed captain-general for life ref1; and battle of Malplaquet ref1; bids for peace ref1; dismisses Marlborough ref1; creates new peers (1712) ref1; succession question ref1; death and succession ref1, ref2

Annual Register ref1, ref2

Anson, Admiral George, baron ref1

Antwerp ref1

Arbuthnot, John ref1, ref2

architecture ref1

aristocracy: numbers under William III ref1

Arkwright, Richard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

army (standing): resisted ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

art and artists ref1, ref2

Ashmole, Elias ref1

Ashworth, Henry and Edward ref1

asiento (slaving treaty) ref1

Aspern, battle of (1809) ref1

assembly rooms ref1

Association of the Friends of the People ref1

Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers ref1

asylums (charity) ref1

Atterbury, Francis, bishop of Rochester ref1, ref2

Aubrey, John ref1

Auckland, William Eden, 1st baron ref1

Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Dowager Princess of Wales (George III’s mother) ref1, ref2

Austerlitz, battle of (1805) ref1

Austria: alliance with England in War of Spanish Succession ref1; in coalitions against France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9; and post-Napoleon settlement ref1

Austrian Succession, War of the (1739–48) ref1, ref2

Ayton, Richard: Voyage round Great Britain ref1

Babbage, Charles ref1

Bailen, battle of (1808) ref1

Bailey, Nathan: An Universal Etymological Dictionary ref1

Bakewell, Robert ref1, ref2

balloons and ballooning ref1

balls (dancing) ref1

Bank of England: established ref1, ref2; issues paper notes ref1, ref2; investments in ref1

banks and banking ref1

Bantry Bay, Ireland ref1

Baptists ref1

Barber, Stephen ref1

Barnard, Sir John: A Present for an Apprentice ref1

Bath (city) ref1

Beachy Head, battle of (1690) ref1

Beckford, William: Fragments of an English Tour ref1

Bedlam ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Beethoven, Ludwig van ref1

Behn, Aphra ref1

Bell, Andrew ref1

Bellingham, John ref1

Bengal ref1

Bentley, Thomas ref1

Berlin Decrees (1806) ref1

Bessborough, Henrietta Frances, countess of ref1

Bickerstaff, Isaac see Steele, Richard

Bill (earlier Declaration) of Rights (1689) ref1

Birmingham ref1, ref2

Birmingham Mail ref1

Bissett, William: The Modern Fanatic ref1

Blair, Robert: The Grave ref1

Blake, William: on change ref1; and conversation ref1; on London ref1; enters Royal Academy Schools ref1; in Gordon riots ref1; on human effect of industrial revolution ref1; welcomes French Revolution ref1; painting style ref1; and French invasion threat ref1; on poetic diction ref1; ‘Jerusalem’ ref1

Blanqui, Auguste ref1

Blenheim, battle of (1704) ref1, ref2

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire ref1

Blücher, Field Marshal Gebbard Leberecht von ref1

Board of Agriculture: established ref1

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy ref1

Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st viscount ref1

Bolton, Lancashire: disaffection ref1

Booth, Charles ref1

Borodino, battle of (1812) ref1

Boston Gazette ref1

Boston, Mass.: reaction to Stamp Act ref1; ‘Massacre’ (1770) ref1; ‘Tea Party’ ref1

Boston Port Act (1774) ref1

Boswell, James ref1, ref2, ref3

Boulton & Fothergill (manufacturers) ref1

Boulton, Matthew ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Boydell, John ref1

Boyle, Sir Robert ref1

Boyne, battle of the (1690) ref1

bread riots ref1, ref2

brewers and breweries ref1

Bridgewater, Francis Egerton, 3rd duke of ref1

Brissot, Jacques Pierre ref1

Britain see England

British Apollo, The (periodical) ref1

British Empire: recreation ref1; and worldwide trading posts ref1; government and control ref1

British Magazine ref1

British Museum: opened (1759) ref1

Britton, John ref1

Britton, Thomas ref1

Brooks’s club, London ref1

Brunswick, Charles William Ferdinand, duke of ref1

Bunker Hill, battle of (1775) ref1

Buonaparte, Joseph (king of Spain and of Naples) ref1, ref2, ref3

Buonaparte, Louis (king of Holland) ref1

Buonaparte, Napoleon see Napoleon I (Buonaparte), emperor

Burgoyne, General John ref1

Burke, Edmund: on trade and war ref1; on repeal of Stamp Act ref1; on measures against America ref1; on Charles James Fox ref1; impeaches Warren Hastings ref1; on George III’s illness ref1; on French Revolution ref1; Thomas Paine criticizes ref1, ref2; denounced by constitutional societies ref1; on national continuity ref1; Reflections on the Revolution in France ref1

Burke, Richard ref1

Burnet, Gilbert, bishop of Salisbury ref1

Burney, Fanny (Mme d’Arblay) ref1

Bussy, François de ref1

Bute, John Stuart, 3rd earl of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Byng, Admiral John ref1

Byng, John (diarist) ref1, ref2

Cade, Jack ref1

Calvinism ref1

Cambridge Intelligencer ref1

Camden, Charles Pratt, 1st earl ref1

Camden, William ref1

Camperdown, battle of (1797) ref1

Canada: British war against French in ref1, ref2; France loses ref1; Britain retains ref1

canals ref1, ref2

Canning, George ref1, ref2

Cape St Vincent, battle of (1797) ref1

Carlyle, Thomas ref1

Caroline of Ansbach, queen of George II: supports husband in banishment ref1; rebukes Robert Walpole for coarseness ref1; political astuteness ref1; qualities ref1; distaste for son Frederick ref1

Caroline of Brunswick, wife of George Prince of Wales ref1

Carteret, John, 2nd baron (later earl Granville) ref1, ref2, ref3

cartoons and caricatures ref1

Castaing, John ref1

Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, viscount ref1, ref2, ref3

Catholic Relief Bill (1791) ref1

Catholics: status in Ireland ref1; in Durham ref1; hostility to ref1; attacked in Gordon riots ref1; emancipation proposals ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Cavendish, Lord John ref1

Cawdrey, Robert: A Table Alphabeticall ref1

census (population) ref1

Centlivre, Susanna: A Bold Stroke for a Wife (play) ref1

Ceylon (Sri Lanka) ref1

charities and voluntary societies ref1, ref2

Charles, Archduke of Austria ref1

Charles II, king of Spain ref1

Charles VI, Holy Roman emperor ref1

Chartism ref1

Chatterton, Thomas: suicide ref1; Miscellanies ref1

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of: on accession of George I ref1; on Robert Walpole ref1; on return of Pitt the elder ref1; on Britain’s improving fortunes ref1; on Bute ref1; Characters ref1

Cheyne, George: The English Malady ref1

children: drinking ref1; labour ref1, ref2; mortality rates ref1

china see pottery

chronometer ref1

Church, the (Anglican): and toleration of dissenting churches ref1; and land ref1; ethos ref1; and gentry ref1; and Act of Settlement ref1; and trial of Sacheverell ref1; George I and ref1; and Wesley and rise of Methodism ref1; on war with France ref1

Cibber, Colley: on Vanbrugh’s plays ref1; Love Makes a Man ref1

civil service ref1

civility ref1

Clapham Sect ref1

class (social): hierarchy and divisions ref1, ref2, ref3; and polite society ref1; and emulation ref1; see also gentry; middle class; poor, the

Clerk, Sir John (of Penicuik) ref1

Clive, Robert, 1st baron ref1

clubs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14

coaches ref1

coal: in iron manufacture ref1; mining ref1; production ref1; as source of power ref1

Coalbrookdale, Shropshire ref1

Cobbett, William ref1, ref2

Cock Lane ghost ref1

Cockburn, Henry Thomas, Lord ref1

coffee-houses ref1, ref2

coinage: reformed by Newton ref1

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: and Romanticism ref1, ref2; ‘The Ancient Mariner’ ref1; Biographia Literaria ref1; Lyrical Ballads (with Wordsworth) ref1

Collingwood, Admiral Cuthbert, 1st baron ref1

Combination Act (1721) ref1

combinations ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

common sense ref1, ref2

communications: improvements ref1

Compton, Spencer, 1st earl of Wilmington ref1

Concert of Ancient Music (society) ref1

Congregationalists ref1

Congreve, William: political writings ref1; plays ref1, ref2; club membership ref1; popularity ref1; The Double Dealer ref1; Love for Love ref1; The Old Bachelor ref1, ref2

consumer society and goods ref1, ref2

Continental System ref1

Convention (1689) ref1

conversation ref1

Conway, Henry Seymour ref1

Cook, Captain James ref1

Cooke, Thomas ref1

Cornwallis, General Charles, 1st marquess (and 2nd earl) ref1, ref2

Cornwallis, Admiral Sir William ref1

Corunna, battle of (1809) ref1

cottage industry ref1

cotton manufacture ref1, ref2, ref3

Courtauld, Samuel ref1

Cowper, Mary, countess (née Clavering) ref1

Cowper, William, 1st earl ref1

Cowper, William (poet) ref1

Craftsman, The (journal) ref1

crime rates ref1

Cromford, Derbyshire ref1

Crowley, Ambrose ref1

Crowley, Mr (City merchant) ref1

Crown (monarchical authority): relations with parliament ref1

Culloden, battle of (1746) ref1

Cumberland, George ref1

Cumberland, Prince William Augustus, duke of ref1, ref2

Daily Advertiser ref1

Dale, David ref1

Dalrymple, Sir Hew ref1

Darby family ref1

Darby, Abraham, the elder ref1, ref2, ref3

Dartmouth (ship) ref1

Darwin, Erasmus: on Albion Mill ref1; The Economy of Vegetation ref1

Davenant, Charles: Two Discourses on the Public Revenues and Trade of England ref1

Davy, Humphry ref1, ref2

Declaration of Independence (USA) ref1

Dee, Dr John ref1, ref2

Defoe, Daniel: on power of parliament ref1; on social class ref1; literary style ref1; on printed cotton fabrics ref1; on Durham Catholics ref1; on manufacturing enterprises ref1; on domestic manufacturing ref1; on poor roads ref1; on working children ref1; on English prosperity ref1; The Complete English Tradesman ref1; An Essay upon Projects ref1; Moll Flanders ref1; Robinson Crusoe ref1, ref2; A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Defour, Judith ref1

Desaguliers, John Theophilus ref1

Devonshire, Georgiana, duchess of ref1

Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th duke of ref1

Dibdin, Charles: on durability of iron bridge, Shropshire ref1; Musical Tour ref1

Dickens, Charles: Hard Times ref1; The Old Curiosity Shop ref1, ref2; The Pickwick Papers ref1

dictionaries ref1

Diggers (sect) ref1

disease ref1

Disraeli, Benjamin ref1

dissenters (nonconformists): and money ref1; and occasional conformity ref1; Sacheverell attacks ref1; ‘Old’ ref1, ref2; sects ref1; and beginnings of industrialism ref1; as industrialists ref1; in Birmingham ref1; see also Methodism

‘Distilled Spirituous Liquors: The Bane of the Nation’ (pamphlet) ref1

divine right of kings ref1, ref2

Doddridge, Philip ref1

Dodington, George Bubb ref1

Dolben, Sir William ref1

domestic interiors and furnishings ref1

Dominica ref1

Dryden, John ref1

Dumont, Etienne ref1

Duncan, Admiral Adam, viscount ref1

Dundas, Henry (1st viscount Melville) ref1, ref2

Dunkirk: proposed demolition ref1; in war with France (1793) ref1

Dyer, John: ‘The Fleece’ (poem) ref1

earthquakes ref1

East India Company: trade ref1; power ref1, ref2; imports tea into America ref1; government control of ref1, ref2

Eden, William ref1, ref2

Edinburgh Review ref1

education ref1

Edwin, Sir Humphrey ref1

Egmont, John Perceval, 1st earl of ref1, ref2

Egypt: Napoleon’s campaign in ref1

Elba (island): Napoleon exiled to ref1

Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine ref1

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (‘the Winter Queen’) ref1

emotionalism ref1

enclosure (land) ref1

Encyclopaedia Britannica ref1, ref2, ref3

Engels, Friedrich: ‘The Condition of England’ ref1; The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 ref1

England (and Britain): party divisions ref1, ref2, ref3; war with France (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3; financial strength ref1, ref2, ref3; peace treaty with France (1697) ref1; union with Scotland ref1, ref2; peace with France (1711–13) ref1; trade and industry ref1, ref2; in War of Austrian Succession ref1; Seven Years War against France (1756–63) ref1, ref2, ref3; war with Spain (1762) ref1; conditions at end of Seven Years War ref1; taxation ref1; disaffection and riots ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; industrial revolution ref1; and American War of Independence ref1; National Revival movement ref1; urbanization ref1; naval supremacy and domination of sea ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; reaction to French Revolution ref1, ref2; constitutional and parliamentary reform movement ref1, ref2; war with France (1793–8) ref1, ref2, ref3; treason charges fail (1793) ref1; price rises in Napoleonic wars ref1; food shortages ref1, ref2, ref3; popular actions against war ref1; belief in liberty ref1; invasion threat from France ref1, ref2, ref3; war taxes ref1; union with Ireland (1801) ref1, ref2; differences over negotiating with France ref1; peace treaty with France (1802) ref1; army recruitment against Napoleon ref1; resumes war against France (1803) ref1; and Napoleon’s Continental System ref1; and downfall of Napoleon ref1; as great power ref1

Enlightenment, the ref1

enthusiasm (religious) ref1

epidemics ref1

Eton College: party factions ref1

Etruria (pottery) ref1

Evelyn, John (diarist) ref1

Evelyn, Sir John (investor) ref1

Examiner (Swift’s journal) ref1

excise: duties resisted ref1

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds ref1

Eylau, battle of (1807) ref1

factories ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Fairbairn, Sir William ref1

fairs and markets ref1

Farmers’ Journal, The ref1

Farmer’s Magazine, The ref1

farms: size increase ref1

Farquhar, Sir Walter ref1, ref2

fashion ref1

Female Tatler (journal) ref1

Fenton, Lavinia (duchess of Bolton) ref1

Ferdinand, Prince of Brunswick ref1

Ferguson, Adam ref1

Ferriar, Dr (of Manchester) ref1

fiction ref1

Fielding, Henry: on effect of growth of commerce ref1; as playwright ref1; ‘An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers’ ref1, ref2; The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great ref1; Tom Jones ref1

Fiennes, Celia ref1

Firth, Mrs (grocer’s widow) ref1

Fishguard Bay, Pembrokeshire ref1

Fitzherbert, Maria ref1

flower pot plot, the (1692) ref1

Fontainebleau: peace negotiations (1762) ref1

Foote, Samuel: The Nabob ref1

Fordyce, James ref1

Fox, Charles James: gambling ref1; attacks George III over American war ref1; qualities ref1, ref2; arrangement with Lord North ref1; George III’s animosity towards ref1; and control of East India Company ref1; loses 1784 election ref1; opposes Pitt the younger ref1; on governing India ref1; and impeachment of Warren Hastings ref1; supports George Prince of Wales’s right to throne ref1; supports revolutionary France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; condemns execution of Louis XVI ref1; Whigs abandon to support Pitt ref1; withdraws in war with France ref1; and treaty of Amiens (1802) ref1; on death of Pitt the younger ref1; serves as foreign secretary in Ministry of All the Talents ref1

France: war with England (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3; in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2; famine and shortages ref1; peace negotiations and treaty with England (1711–13) ref1; and Jacobite rising (1715) ref1; in War of Austrian Succession ref1; fails to support 1745 Jacobite rising ref1; in Seven Years War with Britain (1756–63) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; invades Hanover (1757) ref1; driven from India ref1; loses Canada ref1; North American territory ref1; revolution (1789) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; supports America in War of Independence ref1, ref2, ref3; and Treaty of Paris (1783) ref1; European wars ref1; urges rising in other European countries ref1; war against England (1793–8) ref1, ref2, ref3; attempts invasion of Ireland and Wales ref1; threatens invasion of England ref1, ref2; peace treaty with England (1802) ref1; resumes war against Britain (1803) ref1; successes in Napoleonic wars ref1, ref2; Britain imposes blockade on ref1; in Peninsular War ref1, ref2; surrenders (1814) ref1; peace settlement (1814) ref1; see also Napoleon I (Buonaparte), emperor

Francis II, Holy Roman emperor ref1

Franklin, Benjamin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Frederick II (the Great), king of Prussia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Frederick, prince of Wales ref1, ref2

Frederick William III, king of Prussia ref1

Freeholder (journal) ref1

French Revolution (1789) see France: revolution

Friedland, battle of (1807) ref1

Fuller, Thomas: Gnomologia ref1

Fuseli, Henry ref1

Gage, General Thomas ref1

gambling ref1

Garraway’s coffee house, London ref1

Garrick, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

gaslight ref1, ref2, ref3

Gay, John: in Scriblerus Club ref1; on commerce ref1; background ref1; The Beggar’s Opera ref1, ref2

Gentleman’s Magazine ref1

gentry (landed) ref1, ref2

George I, king of Great Britain (George Ludwig of Hanover): as claimant to throne ref1, ref2; anger at British withdrawal from war ref1; succeeds to throne ref1; qualities ref1; and Jacobite rising (1715) ref1; hates son George Augustus ref1; returns to Hanover ref1; hold assemblies and public functions ref1, ref2; achievements ref1; death ref1, ref2; statue ref1

George II, king of Great Britain (earlier prince of Wales): hated and restricted by father ref1; relations with Robert Walpole ref1, ref2, ref3; accession ref1, ref2; civil list ref1; thwarts Tories ref1; appearance and qualities ref1; visits to Hanover ref1; opposed by son Frederick ref1; declares Hanover neutral (1741) ref1; death and succession ref1; feud with grandson George III ref1

George III, king of Great Britain: accession ref1; hatred of war and Pitt the elder ref1, ref2; principles ref1; reliance on Bute ref1; relations with political parties ref1; welcomes Pitt the elder’s resignation ref1; illnesses and madness ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; dislikes Grenville ref1, ref2; Wilkes attacks ref1; and American War of Independence ref1, ref2; and end of war with America ref1; popularity ref1; hatred of Fox ref1; supports Pitt the younger ref1, ref2; visits industrial sites ref1; praises Burke for denouncing French Revolution ref1; carriage mobbed in bread riots ref1; resists union with Ireland ref1; opposes Catholic emancipation ref1, ref2; urges measures against Napoleon ref1; considers accommodation with Napoleon ref1; on continuing struggle against Napoleon ref1; anger at French withdrawal from Portugal ref1

George, Prince of Denmark ref1, ref2

George, prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV): enmity towards Pitt the younger ref1; and father’s illness ref1, ref2; hopes for regency ref1; qualities ref1; made regent ref1

Gerverot, Louis Victor ref1

Gibbon, Edward: on Gordon riots ref1; on Sheridan ref1; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ref1

Gibraltar ref1

Gillray, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

gin ref1

Gin Act (1736) ref1

Glorious First of June (1794) ref1

Glorious Revolution (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Godwin, William ref1, ref2

Goethe, J. W. von ref1

Goldsmith, Oliver ref1

Gordon, Lord George: instigates riots (1780) ref1

Gorée (island), Senegal ref1

Grafton, Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd duke of ref1, ref2

Graham, Dr James ref1

Grattan, Henry ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Graves, Richard: Columella ref1

Gray, Thomas: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ ref1

Great Britain: formed ref1; see also England

Grenville, George ref1, ref2, ref3

Grenville, James ref1

Grenville, William ref1, ref2

Guadeloupe ref1

Habeas Corpus Act: suspended (1793) ref1

Habsburg dynasty: and War of Austrian Succession ref1; see also Holy Roman Empire

Haddock, Admiral Nicholas ref1

Hague, The: treaty of (1720) ref1

Halford, Sir Henry ref1

Halifax, Charles Montagu, 1st earl of: financial expertise ref1; establishes Bank of England ref1; currency reform ref1

Halifax, George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd earl of ref1

Halifax, George Savile, marquess of ref1

Handel, George Frideric: Judas Maccabeus ref1

Hanover: George I revisits ref1; George II visits ref1; mercenary troops serve British army ref1; French invade (1757) ref1

Hanoverian succession: effected ref1, ref2, ref3; unpopularity ref1

Harcourt, Simon, 1st viscount ref1

Hardy, Admiral Sir Charles ref1

Hardy, Thomas (shoemaker) ref1, ref2, ref3

Hare, Francis, bishop of Chichester ref1

Hargreaves, James: spinning jenny ref1

Harley, Robert see Oxford, 1st earl of

Harris, Revd John ref1

Harrison, John (chronometer maker) ref1

Harvard university ref1

Hastenbeck, battle of (1757) ref1

Hastings, Warren: impeachment and acquittal ref1

Hawkin and Dunn (coffee merchants) ref1

Hawkins, Sir John ref1

Haydn, Joseph ref1

Hayes, John ref1

Haymarket theatre, London ref1

Healy, Joseph ref1

Hegel, G. W. F. ref1, ref2

Heginbotham, Henry ref1

Hermes Trismegistus ref1

Hervey, John, baron of Ickworth ref1, ref2, ref3

Hess: mercenary troops serve British army ref1, ref2, ref3

Heyrick, Elizabeth ref1

Hobbes, Thomas ref1

Hobhouse, John Cam ref1

Hobsbawm, E. J.: Industry and Empire ref1

Hoffmann, Johann Philipp ref1

Hogarth, William: on line of beauty ref1, ref2; paints scene from The Beggar’s Opera ref1, ref2; depicts London turmoil ref1; background and influence ref1; membership of St Martin’s Lane academy ref1; individuality ref1; caricatures Wilkes ref1; ‘Beer Street’ (print) ref1; Gin Lane (print) ref1, ref2; The Sleeping Congregation (print) ref1

Holland: alliance with England in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2, ref3; French invade (1793) ref1; falls to French (1795) ref1

Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, 3rd baron ref1, ref2

Holme Mill, Bradford ref1

Holy Roman Empire: in William’s coalition against France ref1; Austria and Prussia dominate ref1

Hondschoote, battle of (1793) ref1

Hood, Thomas: The Art of Punning ref1

hospitals ref1

Houghton Hall, Norfolk ref1, ref2

houses and housing ref1, ref2

Howard, Henrietta ref1

Howard, John ref1

Howe, Admiral Sir Richard, earl ref1

Howe, General Sir William, 5th viscount ref1, ref2

Hutton, William ref1, ref2, ref3

‘immortal seven’ ref1

Indemnity Bill (1689) ref1

India: British conquests ref1; and British imperialism ref1; British administration in ref1; cotton manufacture ref1; see also East India Company

industrial revolution: and generation of power ref1, ref2; and domestic manufacture ref1; origins and causes ref1; and art ref1, ref2, ref3; and invention ref1; and increased production ref1; social and labour effects ref1, ref2; and mass production ref1; and Methodism ref1; riots and machine-breaking ref1, ref2, ref3; British lead in ref1; see also factories; steam engines

industrialists ref1

industry: growth ref1; geographical distribution ref1; labour force ref1; minor and specialist ref1; effect on towns ref1

inns ref1

inventions ref1, ref2

Ireland: William III’s campaign in ref1; penal laws ref1; demands independence ref1, ref2; Volunteer Associations ref1; French attempt invasion (1796) ref1; rebellion (1798) ref1; union with England (1801) ref1, ref2; and proposed Catholic emancipation ref1, ref2

iron manufacture ref1, ref2

iron-masters ref1

Italy: Napoleon’s campaign in ref1

Jackson, Andrew ref1

Jacobins (French) ref1, ref2, ref3

Jacobites: celebrate William III’s defeat at Mons ref1; hope for James II’s restoration ref1; and death of Prince William ref1; welcome death of William III ref1; 1715 rising ref1; Walpole’s wariness of ref1, ref2; 1745 rising ref1, ref2

Jamaica ref1

James I, king of England (James VI of Scotland) ref1, ref2

James II, king of England: flight to France and exile ref1, ref2, ref3; Tory support for ref1; campaign in Ireland ref1; followers pardoned by William ref1; plots to restore ref1; orders rising against William ref1; and Peace of Ryswick ref1; death ref1; and exclusion crisis ref1; deposed ref1

Jefferson, Thomas ref1, ref2

Jeffrey, Francis, Lord ref1, ref2

Jena, battle of (1806) ref1

Jenkins, Captain Robert ref1

Jenner, Dr Edward ref1

Jervis, Sir John, earl of St Vincent ref1

Johnson, Samuel: conversation ref1; on impolite man ref1; and clubs ref1; on advertising ref1; investigates Cock Lane ghost ref1; on musicians ref1; background and career ref1; eccentric manner ref1; working method ref1; on Junius ref1; on innovation ref1; edits Shakespeare ref1; A Dictionary of the English Language ref1; The History of Rasselas ref1

Jonathan’s coffee house, London ref1

‘Junius’ (anonymous writer) ref1

‘Junto, the’ ref1

Kames, Henry Home, Lord ref1

Kay, Joseph ref1

Kersey, John: A New English Dictionary ref1

King, Charles: The British Merchant ref1

King, Tom ref1

Kit-Kat Club ref1, ref2

Kléber, General Jean–Baptiste ref1

Kneller, Sir Godfrey ref1

labour: factory conditions ref1, ref2; children ref1; women’s industrial ref1, ref2, ref3; and trade unions ref1, ref2; unity and power ref1; migration ref1; and development of social institutions ref1; class divisions ref1; farm ref1

Lancaster, Joseph ref1

Lancelot, Edward ref1

land: values and ownership ref1

la Roche, Sophie von ref1

Lecky, W. E. H.: on James Watt ref1; History of England in the Eighteenth Century ref1

Leeds ref1

Leicester Sisterhood of Female Handspinners ref1

Leipzig, battle of (‘battle of the nations’, 1813) ref1

Leopold I, Holy Roman emperor ref1, ref2

Lettsom, Dr John Oakley ref1

Levellers (sect) ref1

Licensing Act (1737) ref1, ref2

life expectancy ref1

lighting (public) ref1, ref2, ref3

Limerick, treaty of (1691) ref1

literature: style in early 18th century ref1

Liverpool: commerce ref1; and slave trade ref1

Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of ref1

living standards ref1, ref2

Lobo, Father Jerome: A Voyage to Abyssinia ref1

Locke, John ref1

Lombe, John and Thomas ref1, ref2

London: coffee-houses ref1, ref2; as cultural centre ref1; conditions ref1; earthquakes ref1; superstitiousness ref1; gin drinking ref1; theatres ref1; in Gordon riots ref1; timekeeping ref1; streetlighting ref1; see also clubs

London Chronicle ref1

London Corresponding Society ref1, ref2, ref3

London Courant ref1

London Evening Post ref1

London Journal ref1

London Police Magistrates ref1

London Society for Constitutional Information ref1, ref2

Lord Chamberlain ref1, ref2

lotteries ref1

Louis XIV, king of France: William III’s war against ref1, ref2, ref3; Whigs oppose ref1; declines to invade England ref1; recognizes William III as king ref1, ref2; and Spanish throne ref1; in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2; death ref1

Louis XV, king of France ref1, ref2

Louis XVI, king of France ref1, ref2

Louis XVIII, king of France ref1

Loutherbourg, Philip: Coalbrookdale by Night (painting) ref1

Luddites ref1, ref2, ref3

Lunar Society of Birmingham ref1, ref2, ref3

Lunéville, treaty of (1801) ref1

Luther, Martin: Preface to the Epistle of the Romans ref1, ref2

Lyttelton, George, 1st baron ref1

McAdam, John ref1

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, baron: on William’s campaign in Ireland ref1; criticizes Pitt the elder as war minister ref1; on impeachment of Warren Hastings ref1; on condition of working classes ref1; History of England ref1

MacKenzie, Henry: The Man of Feeling ref1

Macky, John: Remarks on the Characters of the Court of Queen Anne ref1

Macpherson, David: Annals of Commerce ref1

madness ref1

Madrid: Wellington occupies ref1

Maitland, William: The History of London ref1

Malmesbury, James Harris, 1st earl of ref1

Malplaquet, battle of (1709) ref1

Manchester ref1, ref2

manufacturing: beginnings ref1

Mar, John Erskine, 6th or 11th earl of ref1

Marat, Jean Paul ref1, ref2

Marengo, battle of (1800) ref1

Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria ref1

Marine Society ref1

markets see fairs and markets

Marlborough House, London ref1

Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st duke of: shares command in Ireland ref1; plots to restore James II ref1; qualities and background ref1; appointed commander-in-chief ref1, ref2; dukedom ref1; military campaign in War of Spanish Succession ref1, ref2; Whigs support ref1, ref2; requests appointment as captain-general for life ref1; Steele supports ref1; in Lords ref1; accused of bribery and corruption ref1; dismissal and exile abroad ref1; plans defence of Hanover ref1

Marlborough, Sarah, duchess of: ridicules William III ref1; relations with and influence on Queen Anne ref1, ref2; loses favour with Anne ref1

Martin, John ref1

Mary II (Stuart), Queen of England: proclaimed joint sovereign ref1; coronation ref1; death ref1

Maryland: tobacco from ref1

Masham, Abigail ref1

Mather, Joseph ref1

Maton, William George ref1

medicine: satirized by Scriblerus Club ref1

Mehmet (George I’s servant) ref1, ref2

Memoirs of … Martinus Scriblerus, The ref1, ref2

Methodism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Metternich, Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel ref1

Milton, John ref1

Ministry of All the Talents ref1, ref2

Minorca ref1, ref2

Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de ref1, ref2

Molesworth, Squire ref1

Moniteur (journal) ref1

Montagu, Charles see Halifax, 1st earl of

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley ref1

Montcalm, Louis Joseph, marquis de ref1

Moore, Sir John ref1

More, Hannah ref1, ref2

More, Thomas: Utopia ref1

Moritz, Karl Philipp ref1, ref2

Morning Chronicle ref1

Morning Post ref1

Morris, Corbyn ref1, ref2

Morris, Gouverneur ref1

mortality rates ref1

Murray, Fanny ref1

museums and galleries: established ref1

music: concerts ref1

Mustafa (George I’s servant) ref1, ref2

Namur, siege and recapture (1695) ref1, ref2

Napier, Sir William ref1

Napoleon I (Buonaparte), emperor of the French: on religion ref1; and England as ‘nation of shopkeepers’ ref1; rise to command ref1; campaign in Italy ref1; as invasion threat ref1, ref2, ref3; coalitions against ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; as military leader ref1, ref2; expedition to Egypt ref1; territorial gains ref1; ambitions and wars ref1, ref2; appointed first consul for life ref1; resumes belligerency ref1; crowned emperor ref1; proposes peace negotiations to George III ref1; military successes and advance ref1, ref2; told of Trafalgar defeat ref1; aims to conquer Russia ref1, ref2; imposes Continental System (blockade) against Britain ref1, ref2; campaign in Iberian peninsula ref1; threatens to strip Britain of overseas possessions ref1; Leipzig defeat and abdication (1814) ref1; defeat at Waterloo (1815) ref1; escapes from Elba and enters Paris ref1; final exile on St Helena ref1

Nash, Richard (‘Beau’) ref1

Nelson, Admiral Horatio, 1st viscount ref1, ref2, ref3

New Lanark ref1, ref2

New South Wales: as colony and penal settlement ref1

New York Gazette ref1

Newcastle Journal ref1

Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st duke of: qualities ref1; and execution of Byng ref1; coalition with Pitt the elder ref1; and Pitt’s commitment to war ref1, ref2; resigns ref1

Newcastle upon Tyne ref1

Newgate Prison ref1, ref2

newspapers: proliferation ref1

Newton, Sir Isaac ref1, ref2, ref3

Nine Years War (1689–98) ref1

non-jurors ref1

Norris, Admiral John ref1

North America: British war with France in ref1; taxed by British ref1, ref2, ref3; unrest ref1, ref2; Lord North abolishes taxes ref1; tea imports and tax ref1; ‘coercive’ (or ‘intolerable’) acts ref1; independence movement ref1; wins independence (1783) ref1, ref2; see also American War of Independence

North Briton (newspaper) ref1, ref2

North, Frederick, Lord (2nd earl of Guilford): heads government ref1, ref2; qualities ref1; coercive acts against America ref1; pessimism over war with America ref1, ref2; resigns ref1; arrangement with Fox ref1; and control of East India Company ref1

Northumberland, Elizabeth, duchess of (née Seymour) ref1

Nottingham ref1

novels ref1

Oakes (banker of Bury St Edmunds) ref1

Occasional Conformity Bill (1702) ref1

October Club ref1

O’Donoghue, Father ref1

Oldknow, Samuel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Oliphant, Charles ref1

Onslow, Arthur ref1

opera ref1, ref2

Ormonde, James Butler, 2nd duke of ref1, ref2, ref3

Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty–Four ref1

Owen, Robert ref1; A New View of Society ref1

Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st earl of: as Tory leader ref1, ref2; assassination attempt on ref1; and George I’s anger at British withdrawal from war ref1; in Scriblerus Club ref1; imprisoned in Tower ref1

Packwood, James ref1

Paget, Diana ref1

Paine, Thomas: on ‘declaratory act’ ref1; on Pitt the younger ref1; accused of seditious publication ref1; effigy burned ref1; ‘Common Sense’ ref1; The Rights of Man ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

painting ref1

Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd viscount ref1

Paris: peace negotiations at end of American war (1783) ref1

Paris, treaty of (1763) ref1, ref2, ref3

Parker, Richard ref1

parliament: relations with William ref1, ref2; and Act of Settlement determining royal succession ref1; and land ownership ref1; condemns Sacheverell ref1; sovereign status ref1; corruption and bribery ref1; ends war with America (1782) ref1

Parr, Dr Samuel ref1

Pasquier, Étienne-Denis ref1, ref2

Pasteur, Louis ref1

patents ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Payne, Captain Jack ref1

Peasants’ Revolt (1381) ref1, ref2

Pelham, Henry ref1

Peninsular War ref1, ref2

Pepys, Samuel ref1

Perceval, Spencer ref1, ref2

Peterloo (1819) ref1, ref2

Petty, Sir William ref1

Philadelphia: congresses (1774) ref1, ref2

Philanthropic Society ref1

Philip V, king of Spain (earlier duke of Anjou) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

pin-making ref1

Pitt, William the elder (1st earl of Chatham): advocates war with Spain ref1, ref2; eloquence ref1; parliamentary career ref1; qualities ref1; George II’s enmity towards ref1; and prosecution of Seven Years War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and capture of Guadeloupe ref1; George III’s animosity to ref1, ref2, ref3; and George II’s reliance on Bute ref1; resignation and pension ref1; relations with Grenville ref1; earldom ref1; incapacity and decline ref1, ref2; replaces Rockingham as head of government (1766) ref1

Pitt, William the younger: on trade ref1; George III offers government to and supports ref1, ref2; qualities ref1; gains and retains office as head of government ref1; wins 1784 election ref1; administration and policies ref1; financial measures ref1; and administration of India ref1; opposes slave trade ref1; on working children ref1; achievements ref1; and George III’s illness ref1; attitude to French Revolution ref1, ref2; Thomas Paine attacks ref1; alarm at French military actions ref1; and outbreak of 1793 war with France ref1; drinking ref1; ‘reign of terror’ ref1, ref2; and conduct of war against France ref1, ref2, ref3; wartime financial measures ref1; food shortages ref1; resigns (1801) ref1; resumes premiership (1803) ref1; rejects French peace proposals ref1; and Trafalgar victory ref1; health decline and death ref1; reaction to Austerlitz news ref1

Pius VII, pope ref1

Place, Francis: Autobiography ref1, ref2, ref3

plagues: absence ref1

Plassey, battle of (1757) ref1

pleasure gardens ref1

Poland: war of succession (1733–8) ref1; Napoleon in ref1

Political Register (Cobbett’s) ref1

Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de (Madame de Pompadour) ref1

Pontiac’s War (1763–66) ref1

poor, the: numbers and conditions ref1; and industrial work ref1, ref2; children ref1; physical condition ref1

Pope, Alexander: on Harley ref1; political writings ref1; and Scriblerus Club ref1, ref2; literary style ref1; satirizes Walpole ref1; The Dunciad ref1, ref2; An Essay on Criticism ref1; An Essay on Man ref1

population: growth ref1, ref2, ref3; urban ref1, ref2; internal migration ref1

Porson, Richard ref1

Port of London ref1

Porteous, Beilby, bishop of London ref1

porter (drink) ref1

Portland, William Bentinck, 1st earl of ref1

Portland, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 1st duke of ref1, ref2

Porto Bello, Panama ref1, ref2

Portugal: rebels against Napoleon ref1, ref2

Postlethwayt, Malachi: The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce ref1

pottery and china ref1

power: generation of ref1, ref2, ref3

Presbyterians ref1

press: freedom ref1, ref2; power ref1

Preston ref1

Prestonpans, battle of (1745) ref1

Pretyman, George ref1

Price, Richard ref1

prices see wages and prices

Priestley, Joseph ref1, ref2, ref3

prison reform ref1

professions ref1

prose: and plain disourse ref1

prostitutes ref1

Protestant Association ref1

Protestantism: and beginnings of industrialism ref1

Prussia: in coalitions against France ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; peace treaty with France ref1; dominates Holy Roman Empire ref1; Jena defeat ref1; and post-Napoleon settlement ref1; army at Waterloo ref1

Pryme, Abraham de la ref1

Public Advertiser ref1, ref2

Quakers: modesty ref1; industrialists ref1

Quebec ref1, ref2

Quiberon Bay, battle of (1759) ref1

Radcliffe, William: Origin of the New System of Manufacture ref1, ref2

ragged schools ref1

Rambler (journal) ref1

Ramillies, battle of (1706) ref1

Ranelagh Gardens, Chelsea ref1

Raynes, Francis ref1

Reach, Angus ref1

reading and the reading public ref1, ref2, ref3

Reflexions Upon the Moral State of the Nation (anon.) ref1

religion: and toleration ref1, ref2; and social class ref1; and rise of evangelicalism ref1; of industrialists ref1; see also Methodism

Reynolds, Sir Joshua ref1, ref2

Rich, John ref1

Richardson, Samuel: and mail coaches ref1; Clarissa ref1; Pamela ref1

Rigby, Richard ref1

Riot Act (1715) ref1, ref2

riots and agitation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

rivers: improvements ref1, ref2

roads: improvements ref1, ref2

Robespierre, Maximilien ref1, ref2

Robinson, Frederick ref1

Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd marquess of ref1

Roman Catholics see Catholics

Romanticism ref1, ref2, ref3

Rossbach, battle of (1757) ref1

Rowlandson, Thomas ref1

Royal Academy ref1

Royal Humane Society ref1

Royal Navy: supremacy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; unrest ref1

Royal Society: and agricultural improvement ref1, ref2; and clear discourse ref1; and scientific advancement ref1

Royal Society of Arts ref1

Russell, Richard: Dissertation upon the Use of Sea–Bathing ref1

Russia: in coalitions against Napoleon ref1, ref2, ref3; Napoleon aims to conquer ref1; Napoleon invades ref1; and downfall of Napoleon ref1

Ryswick, Peace of (1697) ref1, ref2

Sacheverell, Henry ref1, ref2

Sadler, Michael ref1

St Helena (island) ref1

St James Chronicle ref1

St James’s Weekly Journal ref1

Salte, Samuel ref1

Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury ref1

Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th earl of ref1

Saratoga: British surrender at (1777) ref1, ref2

satire ref1, ref2, ref3

Saussure, César de ref1, ref2

Savery, Thomas ref1

Schomberg, Frederick Herman, duke of ref1

schools ref1

Schroeder, Samuel ref1

Schulenberg, countess Ehrengard Melusina von der, duchess of Kendal ref1

science: opposition to ref1; advances in ref1; popularization ref1

Scotland: favours Stuart succession ref1; union with England ref1, ref2, ref3; and Jacobite risings (1715) ref1; (1745) ref1

Scriblerus Club ref1, ref2

Scriblerus, Martin (imaginary author) ref1, ref2

seaside towns ref1

Sedley, Sir Charles ref1

sentiment ref1

Septennial Bill (and Act 1716) ref1, ref2

servants ref1

Seven Years War (1756–63) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Seward, Anna ref1

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of: Characteristics ref1

Shakespeare, William: characters sing ref1; Pitt the elder’s love of ref1; Jubilee (1769) ref1; performed ref1; King Lear ref1

sheep ref1, ref2

Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information ref1

Shelburne, William Petty, 2nd earl of (later 1st marquess of Lansdowne) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Shelley, Percy Bysshe ref1

Sheppard, Jack ref1

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: content of plays ref1, ref2; reputation ref1; on impeachment of Warren Hastings ref1; welcomes French Revolution ref1; loses party support ref1; on end of Jacobinism ref1; The Critic ref1, ref2; The School for Scandal ref1

shops and shopping ref1

Shrewsbury, Charles Talbot, duke of ref1

Siddons, Sarah ref1

silk mills ref1, ref2, ref3

silver coinage ref1

Simond, Louis ref1

slaves and slavery: and asiento ref1; and sugar consumption ref1; West African ref1; conditions in West Indies ref1; abolition movement ref1; trade ref1; trade abolished (1807) ref1

Sloane, Sir Hans ref1

Smart, Christopher ref1

Smiles, Samuel ref1

Smith, Adam: on union of Scotland and England ref1; on war against Spain ref1; on inventing class ref1; on pin-making ref1; The Wealth of Nations ref1, ref2, ref3

Smollett, Tobias: on South Sea Bubble ref1; plays ref1; The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom ref1; The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle ref1, ref2; The Adventures of Roderick Random ref1, ref2; The Expedition of Humphry Clinker ref1, ref2

societies for the reformation of manners ref1

Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade ref1

Society of Brothers ref1, ref2

Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce ref1

society, polite ref1

Sons of Liberty (North America) ref1

Sophia, electress of Hanover ref1, ref2

Sophia, queen of George I ref1

South Sea Bubble ref1, ref2

South Sea Company: established (1711) ref1; early success ref1; collapse and rescue by Walpole ref1, ref2

Southey, Robert ref1

Southwell, Sir Robert ref1

Southwell, Robert (artist): ‘The Burning Babe’ (painting) ref1

Spain: in William III’s coalition against France ref1; succession question ref1; and War of Austrian Succession (1739–48) ref1, ref2; Pitt the elder calls for war against ref1; Britain declares war on (1762) ref1; joins alliance against Britain (1778) ref1; attempts to seize British ships ref1; changes sides in Napoleonic wars ref1, ref2; in alliance with Napoleon ref1; treasure ships captured ref1; in Peninsular War ref1, ref2

Spanish Netherlands ref1

Spanish Succession, War of (1701–14) ref1, ref2, ref3

spas ref1, ref2, ref3

Spectator, The (journal) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Speenhamland system ref1

Spithead mutiny (1797) ref1

Sprat, William ref1

Stair, John Dalrymple, 2nd earl of ref1

Stamp Act (1765) ref1, ref2

Stamp Act Congress (North America) ref1, ref2

Stanhope, James, 1st earl ref1

Staverton Mill, Totnes ref1

Stead, William Thomas: The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon ref1

steam engines ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

steel manufacture ref1

Steele, Richard (‘Isaac Bickerstaff’): political writings ref1; opposes Scriblerus ref1; in Kit–Kat Club ref1; The Tender Husband ref1

Steenkerque, battle of (1692) ref1

Stephenson, George ref1

Sterne, Laurence: individuality ref1; The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ref1, ref2, ref3

Stock-jobbing ref1

Strutt, Jedediah ref1, ref2, ref3

Stuart dynasty: barred from throne under Act of Settlement ref1; continuing hopes of restoration ref1, ref2; see also Jacobites; James II

Stuart, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (‘The Young Pretender’; ‘Bonny Prince Charlie’) ref1

Stuart, Prince James Francis Edward (‘the Old Pretender’): claim to English throne ref1; failed landing in Scotland (1708) ref1; hopes of succession to Anne ref1, ref2; popular support in England ref1; lands in Scotland in 1715 rising ref1; and South Sea Bubble ref1; Atterbury supports ref1

Stubs, Pete ref1

sugar ref1, ref2

Sunday Monitor ref1

superstitions ref1

Sweden: in coalition against Napoleon ref1

Swift, Jonathan: on Queen Anne ref1; on union with Scotland ref1; political writings ref1, ref2; on Marlborough ref1; and Scriblerus Club ref1; literary style ref1; satirizes Walpole ref1; and Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera ref1; satirizes scientific societies ref1; The Conduct of the Allies ref1, ref2; Gulliver’s Travels ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; The Tale of a Tub ref1

Talavera, battle of (1809) ref1

Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de ref1

Tate, Nahum ref1

Tatler (magazine) ref1

taxation ref1

Taylor, Jasper ref1

tea ref1

Tea Act (1773) ref1, ref2

technology: development ref1

Teignmouth ref1

Telford, Thomas ref1

Temple of Nature, The (anonymous poem) ref1

Temple, Sir William ref1

textile industry ref1

Thackeray, William Makepeace ref1

Theatre Royal, Covent Garden ref1, ref2

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane ref1

theatres: in provinces ref1; restrictions imposed ref1, ref2; popularity and influence ref1; and acting ref1

Thelwall, John ref1

Thiébault, Paul ref1

‘Thing, The’ (or ‘Old Corruption’) ref1

Thurlow, Edward, 1st baron ref1

Tilsit, treaty of (1807) ref1

Times, The (newspaper) ref1

Tofts, Mary ref1

Toleration Act (1689) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Tooke, John Horne ref1, ref2

Tories: differences with Whigs ref1, ref2, ref3; as ‘country party’ ref1; scorn Bank of England ref1; dislike moneyed interests ref1; favour restoration of Stuarts ref1, ref2; gain majority (1702) ref1; oppose Marlborough’s wars ref1, ref2; election victory and government (1710) ref1, ref2; and succession to Anne ref1; George I dislikes and persecutes ref1; view of Walpole ref1

Torrington, Arthur Herbert, 1st earl of ref1

Toulon ref1, ref2

towns ref1, ref2, ref3

Townshend, Charles, 2nd Viscount (‘Turnip’) ref1

Townshend, Charles (chancellor of exchequer) ref1

Toynbee, Arnold ref1, ref2

trade: importance ref1; and the market ref1; at end of Seven Years War ref1; and British Empire ref1; under Pitt ref1

trade unions ref1

Trafalgar, battle of (1805) ref1

transport: improvements ref1

Triple Assessment (tax) ref1

Tucker, Josiah, dean of Gloucester ref1

Tull, Jethro ref1

Turner, Thomas ref1

Turner, James Mallord William: studies at Royal Academy ref1; Limekiln at Coalbrookdale (painting) ref1

Turnham Green ref1

‘Two Acts’ (‘Gagging Acts’, 1795) ref1

United Irishmen ref1, ref2

Ure, Andrew: The Philosophy of Manufactures ref1

Utrecht, treaty of (1713) ref1, ref2

Valmy, battle of (1792) ref1

Vanbrugh, Sir John ref1, ref2, ref3

Vauxhall Gardens, London ref1

Venice ref1

Vernon, Admiral Edward ref1

Vienna: Napoleon captures ref1

Villars, Marshal Claude Louis Hector, duc de ref1, ref2

Vimeiro, battle of (1808) ref1

Virginia: tobacco from ref1; protests against British rule ref1, ref2

Voltaire, François Marie Arouet: on execution of Admiral Byng ref1; on war in Canada ref1; Letters Concerning the English Nation ref1, ref2

wages and prices ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Wagram, battle of (1809) ref1

Walcheren expedition (1809) ref1

Waldegrave, James, 2nd earl ref1, ref2

walks (leisure) ref1

Wallis, Henry ref1

Walpole, Horace: on Frau von Kielmannsegge ref1; on gambling ref1; encounter with highwayman ref1; on elder Pitt’s eloquence ref1; on crime and violence ref1; on earthquake fears ref1; congratulates elder Pitt on victories ref1; on death of George II ref1; praises George III ref1; on general election (1761) ref1; on elder Pitt’s resignation and pension ref1; on Britain at end of Seven Years War ref1; on Lord North ref1; on natural sciences ref1; on ballooning ref1

Walpole, Sir Robert: qualities ref1; rescues South Sea Company ref1, ref2; political career and dominance ref1, ref2, ref3; and death of George I ref1; marriage ref1; club membership ref1; good relations with Caroline ref1; reports George I’s death to George II ref1; opinion of George II ref1; opponents ref1, ref2; satirized in The Beggar’s Opera ref1; imposes restrictions on theatre ref1; and parliamentary corruption ref1; attempts to introduce excise duties ref1; anti-war policy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; resigns (1742) ref1; created earl of Orford ref1

Walsingham, Francis ref1

War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48) ref1

Ward, Edward: Five Travel Scripts ref1

Washington, George ref1, ref2, ref3

Waterloo, battle of (1815) ref1, ref2

Watkinson (master cutler) ref1

Watt, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Wedgwood, Josiah ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Weekly Journal, The ref1

weeping ref1, ref2

Wellesley, Henry, 1st baron Cowley ref1

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

Wentworth, Isabella, Lady ref1

Wesley, Charles ref1, ref2

Wesley, John ref1, ref2, ref3

West, Benjamin ref1, ref2

West Indies: trade ref1; British possessions in ref1; slaves ref1; in French revolutionary wars ref1

Whaley, Thomas ref1

wheat: prices ref1

Whigs: differences with Tories ref1, ref2, ref3; William favours ref1; policies ref1; support Marlborough ref1, ref2; attacked by Sacheverell ref1; criticized for financial management ref1; and succession to Anne ref1; favoured by George I ref1; internal divisions ref1; government under George I ref1; encourage trade ref1; hostility to Walpole ref1; and Walpole’s retirement ref1; advocate peace with America ref1; support Burke ref1; and 1793 war with France ref1; join Pitt’s administration (1794) ref1; secessionists in war with France ref1

Whitbread’s brewery ref1

Whitechapel: theatre ref1

Whitefield, George ref1, ref2

Whitworth, Charles, baron ref1

Wilberforce, William ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Wild, Jonathan ref1

Wilkes, John: protests and career ref1, ref2, ref3; An Essay on Woman ref1

William III (of Orange), king of England: installed as king ref1, ref2; coronation ref1; qualities ref1, ref2; relations with parliament ref1, ref2; hostility to Louis XIV ref1; war with France ref1, ref2, ref3; campaign in Ireland ref1; maintains coalition against France ref1; favours Whigs ref1; and Mary’s death ref1; recaptures Namur ref1; conspiracy against ref1; Louis XIV recognizes as king ref1, ref2; army curtailed ref1; and Spanish succession ref1; death and achievements ref1; Queen Anne disdains ref1; introduces gin to England ref1

Willis, Thomas: Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes ref1

Wilmot, Alderman ref1

Wilson, Benjamin ref1, ref2

Wiltshire Outrages ref1

Windham, William ref1, ref2, ref3

Wolfe, Major-General James ref1

women: in industrial labour ref1, ref2, ref3

Wood, John ref1

Wood, William: Survey of Trade ref1

wool industry ref1

Wordsworth, Dorothy ref1

Wordsworth, William: attitude to French Revolution ref1; The Excursion ref1, ref2; ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ ref1; Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge) ref1; The Prelude ref1

Workmen’s Combination Bill (1799) ref1

Wright, Joseph ref1; A Blacksmith’s Shop (painting) ref1; An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (painting) ref1; An Iron Forge Viewed from Without (painting) ref1; A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp Is Put in Place of the Sun (painting) ref1

Wrigley, E. A. ref1

Wyvill, Christopher ref1

Yale university ref1

York: Assembly Rooms ref1

York, Frederick Augustus, duke of ref1, ref2

Yorke, Charles ref1, ref2

Yorktown, Virginia: British surrender at (1781) ref1

Young, Arthur: on working class ref1; Annals of Agriculture ref1, ref2; The Northern Tour ref1; Political Arithmetic ref1

Young, Edward: Night Thoughts ref1

1. An inset from the ceiling of the painted hall of the royal naval college at Greenwich, with William III and Mary II in majesty.

2. Queen Anne. A singularly unhappy and gouty queen.

3. John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. A great general and a great spendthrift – Blenheim was his shining star.

4. A scene from the Battle of Blenheim. ‘I am very sensible that I take a great deal upon me,’ he wrote before the battle, ‘but should I act otherwise the Empire would be undone …’

5. George I of England, who had a very fat mistress, and a very thin mistress. It is almost a limerick.

6. George II was full of bullying, boastfulness and bluster.

7. An animated table at a London coffee house, circa 1700.

8. Robert Walpole. Plump, genial and a master of intrigue. All political strings led to him.

9. William Pitt ‘the Elder’, prime minister twice, with the badly misquoted line ‘unlimited power corrupts the possessor’.

10. The Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed James II who quite improperly considered himself to be James III.

11. The Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart (circa 1740), otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

12. Illustration from Hogarth Restored: The Whole Works of the Celebrated William Hogarth. The artist was the Rowlandson and Rembrandt of the age.

13. The spinning jenny, the latest example of industrial torture.

14. The horrors of gin and, at the time, spirituous frenzy.

15. John Dryden, poet, playwright and the first official Poet Laureate.

16. Jonathan Swift, satirist, pamphleteer and progenitor of the famous Gulliver.

17. Alexander Pope, perhaps contemplating ‘this long disease, my life’.

18. Scrofulous and scruffy, Samuel Johnson was the giant of the age.

19. George III: He lost his reason and the American colonies.

20. The Prince Regent, later George IV, was fat, dissolute and entangled with wives. He was the model of a Hanoverian monarch.

21. Joseph Wright’s The Iron Forge, circa 1773.

22. The Ball from ‘Scenes at Bath’. It looks very respectable.

23. From the sublime to the domestic. A teapot, circa 1775.

24. The Boston Tea Party, 16 December 1773. Do you want tea with your water?

25. George Washington, from slave owner to liberator.

26. William Pitt the Younger. Not a chip off the old block, but the old block itself.

27. A disconsolate and melancholy Edmund Burke at the loss of America.

28. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1804. He had a glow-worm in his head.

29. Wordsworth, in characteristically reflective mind.

30. A mythological depiction of The Ancient of Days by William Blake.

31. Taking the waters at the pump room in Bath.

32. Ladies in coffee-houses: It was a city of coffee-houses. They had begun life in the 1660s, and before long they were considered to be the most essential component of city life. It was important to be noticed.

33. A modern Belle creeping around Bath like a caterpillar in a chrysalis.

34. The Duchess of Richmond organized a ball for the Duke of Wellington and other famous participants two days before the Battle of Waterloo.

35. The great Battle of Trafalgar.

36. Napoleon in excelsis.

37. The Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. To the victors go the spoils.

REVOLUTION

PETER ACKROYD is an award-winning novelist, as well as a broadcaster, biographer, poet and historian. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers Thames: Sacred River and London: The Biography. He holds a CBE for services to literature and lives in London.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Non-Fiction

The History of England Vol. I: Foundation

The History of England Vol. II: Tudors

The History of England Vol. III: Civil War

London: The Biography

Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories

Lectures Edited by Thomas Wright

Thames: Sacred River Venice: Pure City

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Fiction

The Great Fire of London

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light

English Music The House of Doctor Dee

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America

The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales

The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Three Brothers

Biography

Ezra Pound and his World T. S. Eliot

Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More

Shakespeare: The Biography Charlie Chaplin

Brief Lives

Chaucer J. M. W. Turner Newton

Poe: A Life Cut Short

First published 2016 by Macmillan

First published in paperback 2017 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2017 by Pan Books

an imprint of Pan Macmillan

20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com

ISBN 978-1-5098-1148-9

Copyright © Peter Ackroyd 2016

Cover images: King George III, c.1762–64 (oil on canvas) painted by Allan Ramsay, National Portrait Gallery, London & akg-images/Quint & Lox/© Liszt Collection

The right of Peter Ackroyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

Peter Ackroyd

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

VOLUME V

DOMINION

Contents

List of illustrations

1. Malign spirits

2. The Thing

3. Eternity work

4. A queasy world

5. The door of change

6. False hope

7. The inspector

8. Steam and speed

9. The pig is killed

10. Young hopefulness

11. City lights

12. Charitable government

13. The salamander

14. A most gorgeous sight

15. Blood lust

16. A dark world

17. Quite the fashion

18. The game cock

19. The unexpected revolution

20. She cannot go on

21. The Tichborne affair

22. The angel

23. The empress

24. This depression

25. Frightful news

26. Daddy-long-legs

27. Lost illusions

28. The terrible childbed

Envoi

Bibliography

Index

List of illustrations

1. A portrait of Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of Liverpool, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, c.1825 (© Ickworth House, Suffolk, UK National Trust Photographic Library Bridgeman Images)

2. A portrait of George IV by Sir Thomas Lawrence (© Private Collection Roy Miles Fine Paintings Bridgeman Images)

3. An engraving depicting the 1815 Bread Riots at the entrance to the House of Commons, Westminster, London, c.1895 (© The Print Collector Print Collector Getty Images)

4. A contemporary cartoon by George Cruikshank of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre at St Peter’s Field, Manchester (© Granger / Bridgeman Images)

5. A portrait of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, twentieth century (© Mount Stewart House & Garden, County Down, Northern Ireland National Trust Photographic Library Bridgeman Images)

6. A portrait of Caroline of Brunswick, consort of George IV, by James Lonsdale, c.1820 (© Guildhall Library & Art Gallery / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

7. The arrest of the Cato Street conspirators, 23 February 1820, taken from V.R.I. Her Life and Empire by the duke of Argyll (© Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

8. A model of an ‘analytical engine’ invented in 1837 by Charles Babbage (© DeAgostini / Getty Images)

9. A painting of Mary Anning, pioneer fossil collector, before 1842 (© Natural History Museum, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

10. A portrait of the Rt Hon. George Canning, MP, by Sir Thomas Lawrence (© Attingham Park, Shropshire, UK National Trust Photographic Library Bridgeman Images)

11. A portrait of Arthur Wellesley, the duke of Wellington, by Sir Thomas Lawrence (Private Collection Photo © Mark Fiennes Bridgeman Images)

12. A portrait of William IV by Martin Archer Shee, c.1834 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

13. A portrait of the Rt Hon. Earl Grey by Henry Hetherington Emmerson, c.1848 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK / © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums / Bridgeman Images)

14. An illustration of Daniel O’Connell by George J. Stodart (Chris Hellier / Corbis via Getty Images)

15. The title page to The Life and History of Swing, The Kent Rick Burner, 1830 (Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

16. A portrait of Victoria I, Queen of England, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (© Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images)

17. A portrait of Prince Albert by John Partridge, 1840 (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

18. A portrait of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, by John Partridge, 1844 (© National Portrait Gallery, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

19. A mezzotint of Robert Peel by John Sartain (© Granger / Bridgeman Images)

20. A photograph of Lord John Russell, c.1860s (© Private Collection / Bridgeman Images)

21. A photograph of Lord Palmerston, nineteenth century (Private Collection © Look and Learn Elgar Collection / Bridgeman Images)

22. A photograph of the Rt Hon. W. E. Gladstone, nineteenth century (© Private Collection The Stapleton Collection Bridgeman Images)

23. A photograph of Benjamin Disraeli, c.1873 (© Private Collection / Avant-Demain / Bridgeman Images)

24. The ‘Rocket’ locomotive designed by George Stephenson in 1829 (© Historica Graphica Collection / Heritage Images / Getty Images)

25. Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1844 (© DeAgostini / Getty Images)

26. A portrait of the royal family in 1846 by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

27. An engraving of the Great Exhibition, 1851, by P. Brannon and T. Picken (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London / Bridgeman Images)

28. The Relief of the Light Brigade, 25 October 1854 (© National Army Museum, London / Bridgeman Images)

29. A painting of Mary Jane Seacole, 1869 (© Stefano Baldini / Bridgeman Images)

30. On Strike by Hubert von Herkomer, c.1891 (© Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

31. An illustration of music-hall performers for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1876 (Private Collection © Look and Learn Illustrated Papers Collection / Bridgeman Images)

32. Ramsgate Sands (or Life at the Seaside) by William Powell Frith, nineteenth century (Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2018 / Bridgeman Images)

33. An illustration depicting Mr Hawkins addressing the jury during the trial of the Tichborne Claimant from the cover of The Illustrated London News, 1874 (Private Collection / © Look and Learn Peter Jackson Collection Bridgeman Images)

34. An image of Annie Besant, from Bibby’s Annual (Private Collection Photo © Hilary Morgan Bridgeman Images)

35. A descriptive map of London poverty by Charles Booth, 1889 (© Museum of London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

36. The key for the London poverty map by Charles Booth, 1889 (© Museum of London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

37. A photograph of Lord Rosebery, nineteenth century (Private Collection © Look and Learn Elgar Collection / Bridgeman Images)

38. A photograph of Boer commandos armed with the German Mauser rifle, 1895 (© Private Collection / Peter Newark Pictures / Bridgeman Images)

39. A photograph of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony (© Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

40. A photograph of Queen Victoria, empress of India, and Abdul Karim (munshi), c.1894 (© The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London, UK / Bridgeman Images)

1

Malign spirits

At the end of Vanity Fair (1848) William Makepeace Thackeray closes his novel of the mid-nineteenth century with a relevant homily: ‘Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.’

Now the time has come to open the box once more, to dust down the puppets and set them on their feet. These are not the characters of the novel, however, but the characters of the Victorian world who surround it, animate it and give it its characteristic flavour of cunning, greed and good spirits.

The previous volume of this sequence ended with a universal peace and the removal of Napoleon Bonaparte from the stage, but the pleasures of peace were never more fleeting. More than twenty years had passed since the First Coalition of 1793 in which the demands of the army and the navy, the requirements of the men and the importunities of the allies had kept the farmers, the industrialists and the merchants busily engaged in the serious business of making money. For corn and cotton, for wheat and weapons, the demand had seemed limitless. But it was not so. The Annual Register of 1815 noted that the signs of ‘national glory’ had been altogether removed by the evidence of ‘general depression’.

Yet Wellington was still the national hero, and Britain the victor in a race that confirmed its new power in the world. Somehow or other it had acquired seventeen new colonies, with an attendant prestige and influence that would last at least fifty years. But it was no good cheering the departing pipers when they had nowhere to go; the most fortunate veterans found employment in their previous trades, but for many disbanded men only a life of penury and vagrancy beckoned. Some put their military training to good use, however, in organizing Luddite marches and directing the rioters who were soon enraged by hunger and want of work.

The post-war depression lasted for some six years, and with little understanding of the arcane principles of economics the populace had to find something, or someone, to blame. It was deemed to be the fault of the government, therefore, or rather of the laxity and profligacy of those who directed it. There was a call for ‘cheap government’, but nobody really knew how to manage the feat. The fear and loathing that the governing class incurred did not dissipate and had much to do with further riots and calls for political and electoral reform.

There were still many who lived in an earlier time. There were gentlemen who drank a couple of bottles of port before bed, even though drunkenness was growing quite out of fashion. The court and high society were venerated by some in a world where commercial wealth and the merchant were creeping forward. The richer neighbours of the London suburbs still kept a cortège of footmen and of carriages driven by coachmen in wigs. The counting houses and mercantile businesses of the City were conducted with exquisite anonymity, using only a brass plate under the bell-handle for advertisement. The streets in the vicinity were just wide enough for two brewers’ drays to pass without colliding. Every man, and woman, knew his, or her, place according to rank, wealth and age.

Yet by the second and third decades of the nineteenth century a new air of earnestness and energy was visible to observers. This was the era in which the characters of Charles Dickens’s novels belong – Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, Philip Pirrip known as Pip, and of course Dickens himself, of quick step and bright eye, who would think nothing of walking 30 miles each day. The characters of the fictional world display moral vigour in a manner entirely consonant with a new age. As the Daily News wrote on the day after Dickens’s death, ‘in his pictures of contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in contemporary records, the characters of nineteenth century life’. We can see clearly among other essayists and novelists, too, the broad outlines of the nineteenth century, in its brooding melancholy and in its ribald humour, in its poetry of loss and in its fearfulness, in its capacity for outrage or pity and its tendency towards irony and diffidence, in its embrace of the material world as well as its yearning (at least among the serious middle classes) towards spirituality and transcendence. But we cannot get too close to our forebears. Their world is not ours. If a twenty-first-century person were to find himself or herself enmired in a tavern or lodging house of the period he would no doubt be sick – sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the breath of others and the general atmosphere all around.

The word of these early years was ‘pluck’, meaning the courage and ability to take on all challenges. It was also known as ‘mettle’ and ‘bottom’, a deep inhalation of breath before the ardour of the Victorian era. They were obliged, in the words of one cleric, ‘to rush through the rapids’. They differed from their predecessors and their successors with their implicit faith in the human will; whatever their various religions might have been, this was the founding principle. They were determined to get to the other side with all the energy they could muster. The cult of independence came with it, immortalized at a later date in the ‘self-help’ preached by Samuel Smiles. It became part of the battle of life, as the phrase was, filled with manifest duty and diligence. Work was the greatest of all disciplines. The qualities needed were determination, hardness, energy, persistency, thoroughness and inflexibility. These were the cardinal virtues of the coming Victorian era.

This was a young society bolstered by the astonishing increase in the birth-rate; a population of 12 million in 1811 had reached 14 million by 1821 and 21 million by 1851; approximately half were under twenty and living in urban or semi-urban conditions. It is impossible fully to explain this significant rise in numbers, unless it be the organic response of a country on the edge of a giant transition, but the decline in infant mortality must have played a part. Where a modern household will tend to comprise three or four members, that of the early nineteenth century contained six or seven; very large families were also common. The religious census of 1851 reported that 7 million people attended a place of religious worship on Sunday, approximately half of them Anglican. Yet the same survey estimated that 5.5 million people did not care to attend a church or chapel at all. England was at a poise or balance which, from the religious point of view, could only go downwards.

The youthfulness may help to account for the vivacity that was everywhere apparent. The creed of earnestness survived for almost a hundred years, at which point it was parodied by Oscar Wilde. Yet the new dance of the day was the waltz, introduced in 1813 and at first considered ‘riotous and indecent’ because of the close proximity of the partners; it swirled and whirled its way through the ballrooms of England, with the barely repressed energy that marked the era.

The victors of 1815 picked over the bones of the world at the congress in Vienna. Europe now consisted of four great powers – Russia, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain – of which three were autocracies and the last scarcely a democracy. A few men held up the globe. One of them, Lord Castlereagh, foreign minister in Whitehall, was intent upon preserving that shibboleth of ages, the balance of power. The might of England itself was not in doubt, and he told the Commons that ‘there was a general disposition to impute to us an overbearing pride, an unwarrantable arrogance and haughty direction in political matters’ which he was not inclined to deny. It was also said of Castlereagh that he was like a top ‘which spins best when it is most whipped’.

The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had shifted from ministerial place to place but had already been the chief minister since the assassination of Spencer Perceval in 1812. He was a Tory of a kind familiar in the period; he disliked reform or change except of the most gradual kind, and was most concerned to sustain the apparent or nominal harmony of existing society. It was said that, on the first day of Creation, he would have implored God to stop the confusion immediately. He may have dreamed, as did many of his colleagues, of Catholic emancipation and free trade, but these were problems for another day. His job was to keep his supremacy warm. Liverpool made no great impact on his contemporaries, but he did not seem to care. Disraeli called him the ‘Arch Mediocrity’, and that might be considered to be his greatest achievement. The usual truisms about chief ministers were applied to him; he was honest and he was tactful. He was diplomatic, cautious and reliable, all of them tickets to oblivion, and sat quite comfortably in the Lords where it was relatively easy to acquire a reputation for wisdom. In 1827 he retired, from ill health, after fifteen years as chief minister, but no sooner had he left than he was forgotten.

Before he is completely embalmed with platitudes, a little spark of interest may be kindled. Liverpool was prone to weep at moments of stress, overwhelmed by what were called ‘the weaks’. He was considered to be too ‘spoony’ for his own good, a word translated by another generation as ‘wet’. He could not observe the Morning Post without trembling, and a wife of one of his colleagues, Charles Arbuthnot, described ‘a deliberately cold manner’ and a ‘most querulous, unstable temper’. So much for the tactful and equable appearance, which may be merely a mask for deep uncertainty and dismay. The early decades of the nineteenth century are sometimes presented as those of Regency flightiness before the little hand of Victoria firmly grasped the sceptre. But a contemporary, Sydney Smith, reported these years to be characterized by ‘the old-fashioned, orthodox, handshaking, bowel-disturbing passion of fear’. Liverpool’s predecessor, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated, not without public rejoicing. Nothing about the period was secure, with reports of rioting, rumours of conspiracy and revolution, threats of famine and another European war.

Lord Liverpool was a Tory at a time when the party label meant very little. Without any real discipline the two major formations of Whig and Tory were little more than disparate factions under a succession of temporary leaders. In 1828 the duke of Clarence said that the names ‘meant something a hundred years ago, but are mere nonsense nowadays’. The Whigs had fallen from power in 1784 when they ceased to represent comfortable authority and had become an oligarchic faction opposed to the king. The Tories under William Pitt had taken over power and were reluctant to return it. William Hazlitt compared them to two rival stagecoaches that splashed mud over each other while travelling along the same road.

The Tories complained of the Whigs’ negative attitude to the royal prerogative and their appetite for reforms such as Catholic emancipation; the Whigs in turn believed that the Tories were deaf to popular demands and too indulgent to executive power. There was not much else to separate them. Macaulay tried to dignify their respective positions as ‘the guardian of liberty and the other of order’, testifying to his genius in bringing regularity to the world in words. Lord Melbourne, a future Whig chief minister, said simply that the Whigs were ‘all cousins’. It was this lurking unease at a family affair that suborned their position. Byron said it in Canto XI of Don Juan (1823):

Nought’s permanent among the human race,

Except the Whigs not getting into place.

Policy was formed behind the arras or, as it was known, on the back stairs. Cabinets were often convened without any purpose or agenda, and the ministers would look at one another with a blank surmise. No cabinet minutes were kept, and only the prime minister was allowed to make notes, which were not always reliable. If it was not government by department, since departments were still ramshackle affairs, it was government by private committee. There were no party headquarters until the 1830s. The party leaders of the day were highly reluctant to pronounce on public policy. It could be compromising. The poll books of the unreformed electorate were equally bewildering and haphazard, and votes were influenced by one local grandee or one predominant issue.

Liverpool had many nicknames, among them ‘Old Mouldy’ and ‘the Grand Figitatis’. In his defence, he had much to fidget about. The post-war decline and depression aroused an already resentful nation dazed after years of war. The agricultural interest was at odds with the government, since an influx of cheap foreign corn led to a steep decline in prices. But if corn were raised artificially to a much higher price, popular unrest might ensue. What to do? The farmers feared, and many of the people hoped, that the progress of free trade was inexorable. Lower prices and profits threw many out of employment, however, and their number was increased by the influx of veterans from the war. It happened every time, but no one ever seemed to be prepared for it. Work was scarce and wages were low; the only commodity in abundance was unemployment. The threat of violence was never very far.

Riots had begun in 1815, particularly in North Devon, and in succeeding months they filled the country. They were joined by those agitating for industrial reform, and in particular for the relief of child labour. There was a belief abroad that practical and positive change was at least possible. Hence came the stirrings of political reform. And what was to be done with those many millions of people who had been amassed as part of the newly acquired empire? What of the Irish, for example, who had been part of the Union since 1800? One minister, William Huskisson, observed that all parties were ‘dissatisfied and uneasy’.

In 1815 no one had seen a train on land or a steamboat on water; horse-drawn cabs and omnibuses did not appear on the London streets until thirteen years later. Everybody, except those who were somebodies, walked everywhere. The stagecoach would have been too expensive to use on a daily basis. So the massive crowds made their way forward as best they could. Soon after dawn, among the pedestrians foot-sore and weary, the clerks and office boys were already jostling their way into the City, streaming in from the outlying areas. Apprentices were sweeping their shops and watering the pavements outside, the children and servants were already crowding the bakers’ shops. If you were fortunate you might, in the vicinity of Scotland Yard, see the coal-heavers dancing. Even in the early hours, sex was still the only pleasure of the poor. Alleys and bushes were used as public lavatories as well as for other more intimate purposes, and sexual intercourse with prostitutes was not uncommon for a couple of pennies.

A contemporary Londoner, Henry Chorley, noted that especially in the morning ‘people did their best, or their worst, to show their love of music, and express their gaiety, or possibly their vacancy of mind, by shouting in the streets the songs of the day’. Popular tunes were whistled in the streets or in taprooms or ground out by barrel-organs. Prints were sold in the street, characteristically placed inside upturned umbrellas, and the more enterprising print shops would continually change their displays. Already at work were the coster girls, the oyster-sellers, the baked-potato men and the chestnut vendors. A little later on, just before noon, came the negro serenaders and the glee-singers. The observant walker would know the weavers’ houses of Spitalfields, the carriage makers of Long Acre, the watchmakers of Clerkenwell and the old-clothes stalls of Rosemary Lane. Dog fights, cock fights, public hangings, pleasure gardens and pillories all added to the general air of excitement and display.

The nights became brighter. London at night had been only partly illuminated by oil and candle. But then the twin agencies of gas and steam became visible. Gas introduced into the streets a ‘brilliancy’ which outshone all others. The agitators and advanced political speculators had been right all along. This was an age of progress, after all. The country was in the process of slowly losing its eighteenth-century character. But the bellies of the poor were still empty. Not for the suffering were the taverns and the chop-houses. Even the penny potatoes were out of reach.

In March 1815, a Corn Law was enacted which prohibited the import of foreign corn until the domestic product reached 80 shillings a bushel, and as a result the price soared too high. With no remedy proposed, the poor and the disaffected fell to riot. The members of parliament complained that they were being tossed to and fro like shuttlecocks between battledores. There was in truth little understanding of economic theory, even though in 1807 John Ruskin’s father noted that ‘the one science, the first and greatest of sciences to all men … is the science of political economy’. The farmers themselves might as well have been engaged in high calculus; they relied upon observation and experience, common sense and Old Moore’s Almanack.

The recession gathered pace and Robert Southey remarked in the British Review that it was mournful ‘to contemplate the effects of extreme poverty in the midst of a civilised and flourishing state’. The Corn Law riots in London were ineffective, but Luddism returned to Nottingham. There were riots from Newcastle upon Tyne to Norfolk, in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. In 1816 gangs of the unemployed surged through Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and it was reported that large numbers of people ‘had been parading the streets and assembling in groups, using the most threatening language’. The Liverpool Mercury marked the end of the year ‘with sorrow in our habitations and with famine in our streets, and with more than a fourth part of the population of the country subsisting on alms’. This was the period when the anger of the public press mounted ever higher with prints such as the Black Dwarf and Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. They were supported and circulated by radical societies, none more effectively than the network of Hampden clubs which began in London and soon migrated to the north-east. A penny a week subscription was not considered too dear for spreading the word among spinners, weavers, artisans and labourers about state bribery and corruption. There were fears, however, that radicalism might have in its hands an instrument for a mass movement. It was in this period that ‘radical’ was first coined for any group of supposed malign spirits who, according to the vicar of Harrow, encompassed ‘the rejection of Scripture’ and ‘a contempt for all the institutions of your country’. The home secretary called them ‘the enemy’, and for some time any dissident or opposition force was automatically known as ‘radical’.

A larger dilemma had also been identified. In his Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (1815) Robert Owen noted that ‘the manufacturing system has already so far extended its influence over the English Empire as to effect an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people’. They were becoming specialized machines designed only to accumulate profit for their employers. Machines themselves served to promote and maintain the division of labour, where each worker had a relatively simple and specialized role. Machinery guaranteed uniformity of work as well as uniformity of product, and acted as a check against inattention or idleness. Machinery promoted a rational and regulated system of labour. It had happened silently and almost invisibly. Now the economists and some of the more advanced agriculturalists were eager to understand what was happening, and were ready to open the book of a new world. Among the first audiences at the new technical lectures on finance were Robert Peel and George Canning, two Tories on the rise.

The monarch was in name George III, but he was now gibbering and deluded. The royal master was the Regent, the Prince of Wales, who was described by the duke of Wellington as ‘the worst man I ever fell in with in my whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality’. It was in this period of hunger and riot that the Prince Regent began to build the Brighton Pavilion. He was forever blowing bubbles of stone.

2

The Thing

Cant was the moral cloud which covered the nineteenth century. It was part of the age of respectability. Byron wrote in 1821 that ‘the truth is, the grand primum mobile of England is Cant; Cant political, Cant poetical, Cant religious, Cant moral, but always Cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life’. He threatened to convert Don Juan into a Methodist as an example, but there were already many Dissenters as well as Anglicans who turned to God for the sake of propriety. Cant was the mirror of self-interest disguised as benevolence, of greed posturing as piety, of a ‘national interest’ that took into account the fortunes of only a few favoured families. Cant encompassed the politician who smiled while remaining a villain; cant was the language of the moral reformer who closed public houses on Sunday; the political vocabulary of the nation, often praised for its classical structure and its resonant periods, was mainly cant. Historians have often been amazed by the prolixity and ardour of the members of the nineteenth-century parliament; but the words were cant. Most people, at least those with any self-awareness, were conscious that their professed beliefs and virtues were hot air, but they conspired with others to maintain the fraud. Never has a period been so concerned to give the right impression.

Cant was for example the basis of the Quadruple Alliance in the autumn of 1815. It had been preceded by a Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria and Prussia. When holiness is credited with the business of nations, it is best to be wary. The foreign policies of the nations were now supposed to be directed by love and charity, but in truth the sovereigns were afraid of each other as well as of their own people. Castlereagh described the Holy Alliance as a ‘piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’ invented by a monarch whose mind was ‘not entirely sound’, but he did nothing to stop the Prince Regent from privately giving it his approval. Some love and charity might become useful, however, since the ‘Quadruple Alliance’ was designed with the express intention of consolidating the unity of monarchs and casting out the dynasty of the Bonapartes. So the ‘Concert of Europe’, as it became known, with Castlereagh its principal conductor, began with a peal of trumpets.

The great temple of cant in Westminster opened its doors in the early days of 1816, and its followers flocked into the Commons and the Lords. Castlereagh controlled the Commons and Lord Liverpool the other house. Why was the army not entirely disbanded? Why did the Prince Regent wear the uniform of a field marshal when opening parliament? What was the significance of the Royal Military Asylum? Of the real ills of the nation nothing much was said. ‘I am concerned to think that the prevailing distress is so severely felt in your county’, the home secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, told one member, ‘but I see no reason for believing that it would or could be alleviated by any proceedings at a public meeting, or by parliament itself.’ When some shearmen asked to be sent to North America, Liverpool replied that ‘machinery could not be stopped in the woollen trade’.

Income, or property tax, had been announced as a wartime contingency to be abolished when hostilities ceased. But in this parliament of 1816 the government withdrew the promise and, to general anger and consternation, wished to continue the imposition of a shilling on the pound. It became, as always, a shouting match, and the government lost the vote. Income tax was repealed. But, like the vampires of the ages, it was asleep and not dead. Castlereagh wrote to his brother, Charles, that ‘you will see how little what you call a strong government can effect against the tide of the day in this country’. Castlereagh, as leader of the House of Commons, was already reviled by many as one of the authors of domestic oppression. Shelley had a rhyme about him in The Mask of Anarchy (1819):

I met Murder on the way –

He had a mask like Castlereagh –

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him …

He was by no means as bad as he was portrayed, but it is easy to disparage virtue as vice concealed. So tranquillity can be mistaken for lack of feeling, and amiability for lack of principle. He was in fact as anxious and as restless as it was possible to be, a state of mind that would eventually lead him to a razor and a quick death. At this juncture his administration was left with a revenue of £9 million to face an expenditure of £30 million. It was forced to resort, in part, to indirect taxes on a variety of products. In one cartoon the chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, appears in a tub and asks the laundress: ‘How are you off for soap?’ But in a subsequent vote of confidence the Tories narrowly avoided defeat; their natural supporters hung on for fear of something worse.

Soap was the least of the problems. All the disappointments of the time erupted in a flood of casual riot and mayhem. From April to the end of May the price of bread, in particular, became the principal grievance of the people. The farmers, the shopkeepers, the butchers, the bakers, were attacked and their premises vandalized. It was one indication for the new century that the ancient violence of the population had never been quelled. The recent war was all but forgotten. Now the cry was for ‘bread or blood’, by which was meant country gentlemen’s blood, aristocratic blood and monopolists’ blood. English blood, in other words. The price of bread steadily rose.

In their alarm the gentlemen and large farmers flocked to the cause of the Tories. A few months before they had been denounced as a cabal of self-seeking rulers intent upon subverting the nation’s liberties. They were now the official face of law and order that were being grievously threatened. The Whigs had wished to denounce them as traitors to the nation; now they had become its guardians. The Tories seemed always best able to profit from general discontent.

William Cobbett, who can better be described as a radical rather than Whig or Tory, had a pen capable of expressing the general discontent. In one sense he wanted to return to an older England without paper money and national debt, the stock jobbers and the factory towns. He pledged his faith in a quiet and more decent nation based upon the traditions of an equal society untainted by money. He believed, as many did not, that general electoral reform was the key to quieten unrest. He was largely supported by weavers and other artisans who were being destroyed by industrialism. But he could not change a society with such allies alone.

He was rough-spoken, dogmatic and intensely satirical, but he got to the heart of the matter. ‘Who will pretend that the country can, without the risk of some great and terrible convulsion, go on, even for twelve months longer, unless there be a great change of some sort in the mode of managing the public affairs.’ He feared that ‘the Thing was biting so very sharply’. For him ‘the Thing’, otherwise known as Old Corruption, was the mass of venality and bribery which sucked out the lifeblood of the nation. His argument, if not his language, was already being extended further than he could have envisaged. Two years before, in 1814, The Times began to be printed by steam power. A new player had entered the scene. Despite the best efforts of the administration to limit or control the circulation of radical newspapers, the appetite for news in a disturbed and uncertain period could not be effectively controlled. Between 1800 and 1830 sales of the public prints had doubled. In 1816 Cobbett began to publish his Political Register as a pamphlet at the price of twopence. It circulated among the industrious classes, but was disparaged by their nominal superiors as ‘Tuppenny Trash’. On 12 October of that year he called for a ‘Reformed Parliament, elected by the people themselves’.

Cobbett was well aware of the enemies he faced, and described them to his mother as ‘wicked and hard-headed wretches who are stimulating indigence to madness and crime’. He had seen the same noble families, the same faces and the same cousins; he had heard ‘hear hear’ brayed from the same voices. He was sick to the soul with it. Were any people ‘so debased, so absolutely slaves as the poor creatures who, in the “enlightened” North, are compelled to work fourteen hours in a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of a factory’. He had seen the vagrants in the road, he had seen wanderers, going they knew not whither, in search of work. He had seen the cottages falling apart from wind and rain. And he asked: what will be the end of it?

The parish poor houses, before the workhouses took hold, were receptacles for ‘the vile, the dissolute and the depraved’ together with a scattering of the infirm and the imbecile. The plight of the poor in early Victorian England has been described so often that it might seem almost superfluous. Cobbett wrote with a fine ear for mixed metaphor that they were ‘as thin as herrings, dragging their feet after them, pale as a ceiling, and sneaking about like a beggar’. If a third of the population are in poverty throughout the nineteenth century, it is only by a trick of style or an aptitude for hypocrisy that it can be called prosperous. Yet so it was called. Their lives did not materially differ from generation to generation. A woman in 1894, after a century of change, asked how she kept a family of five children on 17 shillings a week, replied: ‘I am afraid I cannot tell you very much, because I worked too hard to think about how we lived.’ The labouring poor were in turn surrounded by a superfluity of people. Among them we might see the spirit of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus arguing that the redundant poor were a grievous burden in the competition between the rise of population and the means of subsistence. The unemployed and the unemployable were the enemy.

Cobbett was rivalled in eloquence and power, if not in acumen and intelligence, by Henry Hunt, another orator in the popular cause. In the middle of November 1816 he addressed a large assembly on Spa Fields in Islington; one of his supporters carried a pike with the cap of liberty aloft. It did not need a sage to realize that the spirit of French revolt was abroad. Two weeks later a similar demonstration created more trouble, when a bloodstained loaf was paraded towards the City. The protesters were swiftly cleared from the Royal Exchange by troops, since the authorities were not inclined to treat it as an amateur jape. A few years before, in the previous century, the cry of reform was hardly ever raised. Now it was on the lips of link-boys and chairmen. An inner circle of men plotted violent revolution, while a large number were content to attend tavern meetings, smoke their pipes and drink confusion to their enemies. They were too apathetic for individual action but were happy enough be part of a crowd at a meeting or to lend their voice to the cacophony.

The opposition party of Whigs was in singular disarray, having no coherent proposals of its own. In any case the Whigs had no appetite for the kind of reform for which the radicals were agitating. To their opponents they were nothing but aristocrats and country gentlemen, for the moment a junior branch of ‘the Thing’. Outrage was, in any case, good politics for all sides. The Tory ministers in turn did what they could to provoke treason and rebellion with spies and agents provocateurs, and at the end of 1816 Cobbett wrote in the Political Register that ‘they sigh for a Plot. Oh how they sigh! They are working and slaving and fretting and stewing; they are sweating all over: they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot!’

Then came the next-best thing. At the end of January 1817 the Prince Regent was driving in his carriage after the opening of parliament when something – a stone, a bullet, a falling piece of masonry – cracked his window. No one cared at all about the Regent, dead or alive, but it suited everyone’s habits to pretend to believe so. The Regent himself seemed happy with the attention, and boasted about his sanguine response to the outrage. It seems that he was not a man to be frightened by riff-raff. Castlereagh came into the Commons with a much more serious demeanour. He gave an impression of glacial self-confidence.

A series of hastily arranged committees now provided evidence to parliament that secret societies and a furtive rebel militia were intent upon storming the Bank of England and the Tower. As a result the law of habeas corpus, whereby prisoners could not be kept without charge, was abolished; it was a singular blow against British liberties. A series of repressive measures known as the Coercion Acts or Gagging Acts was also passed, and all meetings were banned on the grounds of sedition. Lectures of medicine and surgery were thereby forbidden and the Cambridge Union was closed down. The domestic furore helped to conceal the dire state of the economy, which was close to collapse. A Whig activist, George Tierney, told his colleagues that the ministers were ‘at the wits’ end’ and that ‘all the lower followers of the government were desperate’. National bankruptcy might in truth be as bad as revolution.

The furore created by the prosecution of the radicals in February 1817 set off another series of domestic fires. ‘All that we want’, the Norwich Union Society said, ‘is the constitution of our country in its original purity, whereby the people may be fairly, fully and annually represented in Parliament, the House of Commons cleared of that numerous swarm of Placemen and Pensioners who fatten upon the vitals of an half famished and oppressed people.’ In military conflict, this would be known as a ‘forlorn hope’. Parliament, before the salutary burning of 1834, was dark, badly lit and badly ventilated. The washing of bodies and the cleaning of clothes were not considered to be a priority. The members put their legs on the backs of the adjacent benches, or were half-sprawled on the floor, coming and going out at will, groaning, laughing, exchanging jokes, bellowing, yawning, talking nonsense, interrupting for the fun of it – all the more flagrant because social and political revolution was on everyone’s lips.

The multiple petitions of the Hampden clubs to the Prince Regent for the amelioration of the severe economic conditions had met with no response. So the weavers and spinners of Manchester embarked on a grand pilgrimage towards London in order to submit their own petition to him; among their demands, propagated in many other quarters, were universal suffrage and annual parliaments.

They were known as the ‘blanketeers’ because they wore shawls and blankets to keep them warm. But they never stood a chance. They were turned back before they reached Derbyshire and dispersed, not without much anguish. But they could not have come through. Cobbett himself had travelled to the United States to avoid prosecution. Their collapse in the face of the yeomanry provoked another rebel ‘conspiracy’ in Ardwick, a district of Manchester. There was talk of ‘a general insurrection’ and a ‘general rising’. Whigs and Tories were whipping themselves into an hysteria. Conspiracies and revolts could now be found under every bush and behind every hedge, but subsequent court hearings were abandoned when it transpired that the only evidence came from informers. It could have happened. It might have happened. In other countries it did happen. And yet the English poor, and the majority of the middle classes, proved remarkably quiescent. They never rose. Castlereagh was on at least one occasion recognized by the London mob. ‘Who is the man who comes here in powder?’ was the cry raised at the sight of his powdered wig. He was forced to run for safety, but the atmosphere of London was not that of Paris. He was not strung up from a lamp-post in Piccadilly.

The furore caused by the prosecutions of radicals quickly died down when it became obvious that juries were not likely to prosecute supposed malefactors who were in effect really malcontents. The leaders of the Spa Fields meetings were released without charge. The radicals were left with the impression that they had not spoken the right words to fire a nation, that something had gone unexpressed. The authorities did nothing further, and the interest in radical propaganda diminished.

The events of the next few months had a similar air of being half-finished, half-done. A good harvest of 1817 and better prospects for trade helped to change the sullen mood. Lord Exmouth noted that ‘the panic among the farmers is wearing off; and, above all that hitherto marketable article, discontent, is everywhere disappearing’. As agriculture improved, so did trade increase. It was believed that the time was right for habeas corpus to be restored, and the breach in liberty mended. The state had been shaken but was stabilized. In 1818 a grant of £1 million was made for the construction of one hundred new churches, which can legitimately be taken as a vote of thanks; the administration was becoming more religious by the day.

Confidence and self-assertion may also have helped to lengthen the whiskers. Where in the Napoleonic Wars the military of England tended to be clean-shaven, little by little the hair grew back. Moustaches had crept in by 1820 but they in turn were replaced by large whiskers, which had conquered the light cavalry and the heavy dragoons by the 1860s. All the men grew their hair long, and it was quite common for a man to wind a long lock around his cap. The fashions in facial hair are persistent. The men who came back from the Crimean campaign were always bearded, and within a decade the male civilians had followed the pattern.

Whether God was swayed by one hundred churches built in His honour is an open question. In the summer of 1818, in more favourable conditions of trade, the Tories decided to go to the country, which meant that body of freeholders whose land brought in 40 shillings a year. The qualification was open to manipulation though, and since there was no register of electors, the claims and counter-claims always threatened to destroy the process. That is why general elections were held over two or three weeks. They consisted of fairs, drunken sprees, settlings of old scores, battles of fists and were a cause of endless parades, marches and taproom sessions. It was believed by those who supported the system that concordia discors, creating harmony out of conflict, was the fruit of the ancient British constitution – which never in fact existed. One Tory politician, Sir Robert Inglish, stated that it grew and flourished as a tree and ‘there is, so far as I know, no evidence that our House was ever selected upon any principle of representation of population, or upon any fixed principle of representation whatever … It has adapted itself, almost like another work of nature, to our growth.’

As it was the Whigs gained thirty-three seats, which made no tangible difference to the diverse and divided House of Commons which met at the beginning of 1819. One member noted that the government ‘is so completely paralysed that they dare do nothing’. The Prince Regent was becoming afflicted with paranoia and hardly went out; his cumbrous size made it difficult, in any case, for him to cut a gracious figure. The Whigs themselves were timid of public attention for fear of the horrid day when they might be asked to form an administration. The early pages of George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), set in 1832, contain a representative scene between mother and son:

‘But I shall not be a Tory candidate.’

Mrs Transome felt something like an electric shock.

‘What then?’ she said, almost sharply. ‘You will not call yourself a Whig?’

‘God forbid! I’m a Radical!’

Mrs Transome’s limbs tottered, she sank into a chair.

In this session of parliament many fine words were spoken about the state of the nation’s finances and proposals were made for cutting expenditure and even for raising taxes. It was clear to almost everyone that economic reform was inevitable. One select committee was ordered to consider the problems of currency, and another those of public finance. The administration had finally summoned up the courage to fight what Castlereagh had once called ‘the ignorant impatience of taxation’.

One government measure is worth mentioning, if only as a harbinger of greater reforms. In 1819 a Factory Act, or more accurately a Cotton Factory Act, was passed after four years of agitation. It forbade the employment of children under nine in the cotton factories and restricted the rest of child labour to twelve hours a day. This seems almost a cruel joke in the face of the general suffering, and only two convictions were obtained under its code, but at the time it was violently opposed for ‘singling out’ cotton. The humanitarian sense, roused by slavery and foreign barbarism, did not yet reach out to the working population of the country. Yet the Factory Act did mean that for the first time the administration had turned its face against unchecked laissez-faire in the workings of the economy. It also meant that the government now had the opportunity, and power, to overrule the wishes of parents. It took a century or more to complete the work.

One man may step forward as a begetter, if not the only begetter, of necessary change. Robert Owen was the son of a shopkeeper who became, at an early age, the manager of a cotton mill in Manchester. When he opened his own factory in New Lanark, in Scotland, he paid attention to his employees as well as his profits. His contention was that circumstances form character, and he set about to undertake the education and recreation of the children in his charge. He opened the first infants’ school in Britain and arranged a ‘support fund’ for the sick and aged. His influence and example had a direct effect upon subsequent factory legislation and earned him the title of the first great industrial reformer.

In the spring and early summer of 1819 there were demonstrations and mass meetings in Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere in favour of a wider franchise. Parliament, noting the distance between the malcontents and Westminster, chose to ignore them. There had been calls for reform before and nothing had ever happened. Why test the water now? But the circumstances had changed. News came that millworkers were forming armed bands. A royal proclamation was issued, denouncing the combative language of the people. A great public meeting in Manchester was announced for 16 August. For the Tories, the fear of revolution once more emerged. On the appointed day Henry Hunt, now popularly known as ‘Orator’ Hunt, made his way through the gathering and mounted the platform. No sooner had he started to speak than a group of yeomanry was seen advancing towards him. The crowd bayed and booed, but the yeomen drew their swords and struck out. The hussars joined them in the general furore, which resulted in eleven deaths and some hundreds of demonstrators wounded. The place was St Peter’s Field, and the bloody event became known as Peterloo.

It was a breaking point. The size of the crowds, and the nature of the events, shocked many of those who did not believe that an autocratic regime should work its will in England. But now ‘the Thing’ had bowed, taken off its hat, and showed its face. When ‘Orator’ Hunt made his way to London, before his trial, he was greeted by some 300,000 people. The figure is perhaps questionable, as all estimates of size are, but there is some testimony from John Keats, who told his brother George that ‘the whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes’. The Crown and Anchor is close to what is now Euston station. There was also a less obvious consequence of the divisions in the nation. In October 1819 it was remarked that ‘the most alarming sign of the times is that separation of the upper and middle classes of the community from the lower, which is now daily and visibly increasing’.

Something would have to be done, even though no one was quite sure what ‘doing’ should entail. Taxes were as always the chief complaint. As Sydney Smith put it in the Edinburgh Review of January 1820, ‘taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot’.

The immediate remedy was not a remedy at all, but a series of bills named the Six Acts. Public meetings of more than fifty people were forbidden, unauthorized military training was prohibited, and the right of the authorities to enter private houses without warrant was confirmed. The measures did not include the suspension of habeas corpus, as before, but they inaugurated one of the most extensive investigations of radicalism in nineteenth-century history. They did not accomplish very much in the end, but the Six Acts were universally derided and condemned. Cobbett declared: ‘I was not born under Six-Acts.’ When the Prince Regent returned from a holiday in Cowes he was ‘hissed at by an immense mob’ outside his front door and Lady Hertford, his mistress, was almost tipped out of her chair before being rescued by the Bow Street Runners.

The home secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, had convinced himself that a conspiracy was waiting around the corner. Many of those in authority in fact feared for their necks in some general insurrection, and in 1820 their anxieties were partly reinforced by a small plot that became known as the Cato Street Conspiracy. Cato Street was a narrow thoroughfare close to Paddington. Secreted in the loft of an unprepossessing building a few conspirators, animated by enthusiasm rather than good sense, planned to seize London and to kill as many members of the cabinet as possible. Sidmouth knew all about it in advance and simply allowed it to go on as a salutary warning to any other political adventurer. The principal conspirators were hanged and their heads cut off. It was the last act of repression for some years, largely because there was no more reason for it. The country had been cowed, or persuaded, or bribed, into quietude.

It seems sometimes that the government had a secret pact with its enemies, but that would be a conspiracy theory to outmanoeuvre any conspiracy which had emerged since the Napoleonic War. More mundane considerations might have been at work. Alcohol may have played a part in the general feeling of overexcitement and perturbation that had afflicted everyone in public life for as long as anyone could remember. Sidmouth was known to drink twenty glasses of wine at dinner before attending parliament. This was not considered to be excessive. He was one of many ministers of the crown who suffered from gout. It may have had its current meaning, as an inflammation of the arteries in the foot, but it could also be associated with depression and with the excessive consumption of alcohol. One can hazard the conjecture that Sidmouth’s bibulousness represented an average quantity at Westminster, and that there were occasions when the proceedings resembled a barroom brawl.

Farce and tragedy had already turned to pantomime on the accession of the Prince Regent as George IV at the end of January 1820. His father, mad and blind, and bearded like a prophet, had been suspended somewhere between the living and the dead. He spoke to the dead as if they were still alive, and of the living as if they had been interred. His death on 29 January 1820 made nothing happen except to elevate his son to the throne. A new member of the strange family had come into the world in the preceding year. Alexandrina Victoria was better known by her second name. She was the daughter of Prince Edward, fourth son of George III, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Her mother’s family were all Germans, and she took pride in that fact; she married a German, and German was often the language of her court at Windsor and elsewhere.

George IV was already known to be fat, lazy and profligate. He had not endeared himself to many of his subjects by sending a message of congratulations to the magistrates of Manchester after Peterloo. It was said that he could at least have waited for an inquiry. But he did not dominate the farce. That starring role was reserved for his wife, Queen Caroline, who on the elevation of her husband was determined to claim all her rights as queen of Great Britain. Never was there a less likely queen; she, like her husband, was fat and profligate. She had entertained a string of lovers and now, in an aura of ill winds propagated by her lack of hygiene, set sail for her country.

They had married in unfortunate circumstances some twentyfive years before in St James’s Chapel, where the Prince could hardly stand upright. The shock of seeing, and smelling, his betrothed was too much for him and Lord Melbourne commented that ‘the prince was like a man doing a thing in desperation; it was like Macheath going to execution; and he was quite drunk’. Time was no healer. Princess Caroline created much scandal on her forced separation from her husband. She used Europe as her playground or payground and on one occasion in the Middle East rode into Jerusalem on an ass. She went to a ball with half a pumpkin on her head. On her return to England as presumed queen, the new king attempted every means of removing her, including a trial for adultery, prompting many remarks of a sarcastic ad hominem nature. But she survived the ordeal. Henry Brougham cross-examined the witnesses against her, to hear the reply ‘Non mi recordo’ time and again. It became a catchphrase of the moment, like the verse of an Italian song. The bill against her was abandoned. The trial was the only subject of conversation. ‘Have you heard anything new about the queen?’ was the question.

The extraordinary aspect of this ill-starred affair was the popularity she earned among the English populace. She was cheered and applauded wherever she went. She was for a while the queen of all hearts. She had been misused by the administration and mistreated by the king. Was that not also the condition of the country? Whether she knew it or not, she was a radical figurehead, embodying all the wrongs of the king’s unhappy and abused people. The women of London joined the city’s radicals in organizing large meetings and rallies in her cause. It seemed that the administration might be overturned by the plight of one woman. Sarah Lyttelton, a member of the royal court and wife of an MP, wrote that the king ‘is so unpopular, his private character so despised, and everything he does so injudicious as well as unprincipled that one can hardly wish him well out of it, except for the fear of a revolution’.

But then, in a matter of weeks, all pity and sympathy for Caroline disappeared. A verse became popular:

Most gracious queen, we thee implore

To go away and sin no more,

But if that effort be too great,

To go away at any rate.

When she accepted an annuity of £50,000 from the administration, she lost her audience. When she turned up at the doors of Westminster Abbey, in the summer of 1821, unsuccessfully trying one door after another in order to take part in the coronation ceremony of her estranged husband, she was mocked with cries of ‘Shame!’ and ‘Off!’. She was more or less abandoned, and died a few weeks later unmourned. Her fall from popular grace was in part due to the fickleness and forgetfulness of crowds who were eagerly waiting for the next scandal or sensation. The lesson was not lost on the more astute politicians who came to the conclusion that no popularity, or unpopularity, lasts for very long.

There were other ministers who sensed another change in the prevailing atmosphere. Robert Peel, a junior minister with a future before him, wrote to ask a friend in March 1820 ‘whether he did not think that the tone of England was more Whig – to use an odious but intelligible phrase – than the policy of the government’ and whether there was now a belief that the mode of government had to be changed. He was more accurate than he could have guessed, and within two years he had been propelled into Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry in order to alleviate the strictures of the Criminal Code. It was for this and other reasons that the 1820s seemed relatively quiet after the excitement of previous years and before the reform meetings of the 1830s.

One Whig measure was introduced, or alluded to, by Lord Liverpool in May 1820 to a deputation of City merchants. The advantages of free trade were calling to him. He knew that certain people believed that Britain had prospered under a protective system, but he was certain that the nation flourished in spite of it. In his slow, indirect and infinitely cautious way he did not put forward proposals of his own. Instead he set up parliamentary committees to examine the numerous and complex questions involved in what was by any standards a reversal of policy; as a result, goods might be imported into England in foreign ships. Foreign goods might be transported from any free port. Three hundred obsolete statutes on the laws of commercial navigation were repealed. The Annual Register described the measures as ‘vast beyond all question … this being the first instance in which practical statesmen have professed to act under the more literal principles of political economy’. So the process had begun.

By 1825 a Chair of Political Economy was established at Oxford. Memoirs and letters are full of the subject. Viscount Sidmouth wrote in the spring of 1826: ‘we hear nothing on all sides, at dinners, parties, in church, and at the theatre, but discussions on political economy and the distresses of the times’. Rarely has an academic discipline attracted so much attention with animated discussion on labour and profit, paper and bullion. An interesting connection can be discerned between theatricals and radical politics. The whole point and excitement of the Georgian theatre lay in its wilful blending of the real and the imaginary, which drew ‘dreamers of illimitable dreams’, including those nineteenth-century radicals who were as eager to change the conditions of their time as they were forthright in their optimism and their belief in progress. In the ‘low’ theatres, too, the emphasis was on the change and uncertainty of life where poverty, disease and unemployment were part of the drama.

The world beyond the seas was, as always, a cauldron of infinite troubles. In 1820 four revolutions broke out in Europe; Spain, Portugal, Naples and Piedmont were bubbling. Some of the nations of the Quadruple Alliance, pledged from the beginning to the support of monarchy, were ready to intervene. Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, was not. He wanted nothing to do with it, especially since the doctrine of nonintervention had become a matter of state policy. He told one colleague that ‘he was sick of the concern, and that if he could well get out of it would never get into it again’. England would play no part in continental broils. This stance might lead to a loss of influence upon the stage of the world, but anything was better than to become involved in affairs of which human foresight could not conceive the end.

In a message directed to Austria’s foreign minister, Prince Metternich, Castlereagh advised that ‘he must take us for better or worse as we are, and if the Continental Powers cannot afford to travel at our pace, they need not expect us to adopt theirs. It does not belong to our system.’ He deplored ‘dashing’. A significant Cabinet State Paper of 5 May 1820 declared: ‘this country cannot and will not act upon abstract and speculative principles of precaution’. In the early summer of the following year he declared in the Commons that ‘for certain states to erect themselves into a tribunal to judge of the internal affairs of others was to arrogate to themselves a power which could only be assumed in defiance of the law of nations and the principles of common sense’. He had all the pragmatism and practicality which the English applaud. The last thing the Foreign Office needed was an ideologue.

Trade was also climbing ever upwards and at the opening of parliament in 1820 the king felt able to say that ‘in many of the manufacturing districts the distresses … have greatly abated’. Even the French chargé d’affaires noted ‘the tranquillity which obtains in London and generally throughout England’. The king could go forward with a light heart, except that there was nothing else light about him. The thick and luxurious coronation robe added great weight to an already large frame, and during the ceremony he was constantly on the verge of fainting before being revived by sal volatile. Yet he still put on a good show. He may have been uncouth and sometimes ridiculous but he knew when he was on parade. In the month after the ceremony he travelled to Ireland, where he appeared ‘dead DRUNK’, according to an observer. This was the moment his wife chose to expire from drink and disappointment, and Castlereagh reported that George ‘bears his good fortune with great propriety’. ‘This’, he said on his arrival at Dublin, ‘is one of the happiest days of my life.’

3

Eternity work

Nothing in these days was left untouched by religious controversy. Religion was the air that the ‘respectable’ breathed. The religion of the day was in itself neither hot nor cold. Some parts were boiling while others were lukewarm. There was a Low Church of Evangelicals and Dissenters, and there was a High Church that moved towards Catholic ritual. There was also a Broad Church, Whig in its theology, that embraced a nationally based religion. Out of these great movements of faith came sects and groups that put their faith in general providence or special providence, in atonement or in hellfire. Calvinists, Methodists, Quakers, Arminians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists were all part of an informal ‘Evangelical Alliance’ that looked for points of contact with the Anglicans. There was among them a general and discernible movement towards piety and righteousness. But that was only to be expected. Eight out of nine of a Cambridge crew, having won the Oxford and Cambridge boat race on the Thames, went on to the East End for their missionary work. Among the Anglicans of the ‘Established Church’ there was not so much enthusiasm. They worshipped that which was customary and respectable, and perhaps looked with more horror on a poor man than an evil man. As Samuel Butler wrote of a rural congregation in The Way of All Flesh (1903), set in 1834: they were ‘tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practised’. They were decent, undiscerning people.

A report by the census-takers of 1851 remarked that ‘working men, it is contended, cannot enter our religious structures without having impressed upon their notice some memento of their inferiority. The existence of pews, and the position of the free seats, are, it is said, sufficient to deter them from our churches.’ As for the indigent poor and those close to absolute poverty, no one really expected them to attend church or chapel. They would probably have been ejected if they attempted to do so. One costermonger admitted to Henry Mayhew, the social inquirer, that ‘the costers somehow mix up being religious with being respectable, and so they have a queer sort of feeling about it. It’s a mystery to them.’

What really interested observers was the fact that many of the ‘respectable’ classes had no faith at all. They were armoured with scepticism against the arguments of priests and preachers. Many of them did not know what to believe – if anything. The French historian Hippolyte Taine remarked that the average Englishman or Englishwoman believed in God, the Trinity and Hell, ‘although without fervour’. And that was the key. It was not a secular nation. It was an indifferent one. Hellfire preachers were regarded as a novelty and a spectator sport, even though they had many spirited followers. Ecstasies and faintings, so popular in the eighteenth century, were no longer the English style. The only source of communal passion now came in the form of hymns. The deathly hush of the English Sunday, denounced by Dickens among others, was a clear sign that the Church bred no passion and no enthusiasm. There was no sense of a popular faith which could still be found, for example, in Russia or America. There was instead an irritable dissatisfaction with the tenets of established faith; in particular the belief in hell was under siege. It became possible to be less dogmatic and less specific, with certain doctrines silently dropped. There still remained regional differences, however, that had been maintained since the seventeenth century; Anglicanism lay in the southeast of the country, for example, and Primitive Methodism in the southwest and northwest.

Lord Liverpool himself was of a ‘methodistical’ temper, and in 1812 had been instrumental in passing an act for the further toleration of Dissenters. William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides (1830), described them as ‘a bawling, canting crew’ and ‘roving fanatics’, but they had already become a large part of the congregation of England, from the Quakers to the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, all of whom held themselves apart from the Church of England. They in turn were prohibited from attending Oxford or Cambridge universities and were obliged to be married in chapels or buried in graveyards under the auspices of Anglican clergymen.

The largest religious group, after the orthodox, was that alliance between Evangelicals and utilitarians which did much to shape the temper of the age. The passion for moral reform was deep within both of them, with the belief in reason and the faith in renewal as the twin paths to enlightenment. To study and to labour, to preach and to denounce idleness and luxury; these were the twin elements of secular belief and religious faith which changed the nature of English sensibility. The Evangelicals practised the strictest interpretation of Scripture, a good companion to the ‘felicific calculus’ of the utilitarians who sought the greatest good for the greatest number. They shared pragmatism and dogmatism in equal measure, and were the moral agents for social as well as religious reform. ‘It is’, according to one of their number ‘eternity work’. But they were also zealous to redeem the time. A deluge of pamphlets and periodicals, concerned with self-improvement and practical morality, was aimed at anyone who could read.

Providence, progress and civilization were parts of God’s law. The Evangelicals preached individual regeneration, and the utilitarians promoted the doctrine of self-help. Their first success was the introduction of the treadmill into the regime of prisons, and by the 1830s their convictions had become public policy. Not all they preached was dour; the Evangelicals campaigned vigorously against the slave trade while the utilitarians attacked the Corn Laws and other obstacles to free trade. They demanded reform, and their joined forces helped to dissolve the politics of the 1820s. They drew in people who were on the brink of industrial change. George Eliot wrote that ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism – and it has abundance of fine drama for anyone who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it – lies among the middle and lower classes’. These were the classes who changed Britain utterly.

Charles Babbage, a Londoner born in Walworth in 1791, was one of the greatest inventors and analysts of the nineteenth century who fully fashioned what he called the ‘difference engine’ and the ‘analytical engine’, which are the direct predecessors of the digital computer. They were elaborate affairs of punched cards and dials which few people ever understood or now understand. Curiously enough, given his reputation as a reactionary force, the duke of Wellington seemed implicitly to realize the potential of the machines.

From the age of seventeen Babbage became obsessed with algebra; what made these figures live? He was so confident of his abilities with numbers that he dreamed of creating them in a mathematical process. He recollected that: ‘The first idea which I remember of the possibility of calculating tables occurred either in the year 1820 or 1821 … I expressed to my friend the wish that we could calculate by steam …’ This was in part a metaphor, since in a different account he recalled: ‘I am thinking that all these tables [pointing to the logarithms] might be calculated by machinery.’ Steam, engines and machinery were all part of the cloud of knowing. After he sketched some designs he fell ill with a nervous complaint. He had envisaged an engine for making mathematical tables which presaged a new world of machine tools and engineering techniques. It was so far ahead of other calculating tools that for his contemporaries it was equivalent to putting a television set in the hands of monkeys.

It was called the ‘difference engine’ because it computed tables of numbers by the method of finite differences. But then within a short time he began work on what became known as the ‘analytical engine’, which was essentially an automatic calculator. It worked like a cotton mill; the materials, the numbers, were kept in a storehouse apart from the mechanism until they were processed in the mill. Each part was designed to carry out its function, such as addition and multiplication, while being connected with every other part. He described it as an engine ‘eating its own tail’. He wrote that ‘the whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism’. These reflections might have come from another world, and were ignored until the middle of the twentieth century. They have been described as ‘one of the great intellectual achievements in the history of mankind’. Few people in England showed the slightest interest.

The engine was out of its time. Its technology was too advanced to be understood adequately. It was the most ingenious and complex machine ever built, but it had leaped across a historical period which had yet to be assimilated. We cannot be sure how many other devices or inventions have fallen through the cracks of time. A replica of the ‘analytical engine mill’ is exhibited in the Science Museum of London and still resembles some strange god hauled from an unknown cave. Somehow it still remains out of time. There is also another survivor. Half the brain of Charles Babbage is preserved in the Hunterian Museum, with the other half in the Science Museum.

The fact that the name of Babbage is still not as well known as the poets and novelists of the period is testimony to the fact that the Victorian intelligentsia did not take kindly to applied science. One who persisted through the sheer weight of his genius was Jeremy Bentham. He may properly be described as the ‘pan-progenitor’ (to adapt one of his neologisms) of utilitarians and the felicific calculus. Although he began his work and his investigations in the eighteenth century, he is best seen in the context of the succeeding century. He was another great London visionary, born in Spitalfields in 1748, a practical genius who may be placed beside Babbage himself. Bentham was not widely known in his own lifetime, despite the plaudits that have been heaped on him ever since. He and Babbage can still be hailed as prophets without honour.

Bentham propounded in all his work for reform the simple belief in ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, a radical maxim that propelled him through the thorny ways of legal reform, prison reform and Poor Law reform. If he had been a Christian, he might have taken as his motto Luke 3:5 – the crooked ways will be made straight, and the rough ways smooth. He was in part responsible for the working of the Reform Act of 1832, which led the way to adult male suffrage, and propounded the notion that ‘every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty’. The pursuit of rational solutions by means of rational methods was the greatest problem of the age. It was the music of the machine, of competition and progress. To be or not to be was no longer the question. That had become, does it work?

Bentham also helped to establish the Mechanics’ Institutes, which became one of the self-proclaimed glories of the Victorian Age. They were a venue not only for mechanics but for clerks or apprentices or shopkeepers who had been stirred by glimpses of the world of knowledge before and, so far, beyond them. The Institutes in fact became the venue of the middle classes, always aspiring, rather than the manual labourers for whom they were originally intended. Nevertheless, many of the most interesting biographies and fictions of the period are concerned with the arduous and sometimes painful exercise of self-education in the face of difficulties. There were some who got up before dawn to study by candlelight, those who read by the light of a tavern fire, those who would walk thirteen miles for a bookshop, even those who paid a penny to read the newspaper in the local alehouse.

The nineteenth century was not necessarily an ally to religion, therefore, as later pages will show. The growing regard for science as a mode of knowledge was not helpful for those who fostered religious truth, and the increasing indifference to religion itself was one of the first signs of what would become a more secular society. The Christian faith became more fractured and uncertain. The drama of evolution superseded that of redemption, and it became clear that the scientific model offered more insights into the practical business of life than any pamphlet by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) is as quintessentially Victorian as the Great Exhibition or the Albert Hall. Its thesis is based upon the twin imperatives of struggle and competition, and in the consequent race of life the ‘northern forms were enabled to beat the less powerful southern forms’. There is nothing here of atonement, redemption or grace. It is a dark world indeed, dominated by the necessity of labour and the appetite for power, in which combat and slaughter are the principal components. To see Victorian civilization from the vantage point of Charles Darwin is to see it more clearly. He had also adopted Malthus’s doctrine that populations grow faster than their means of subsistence, and are thus doomed to extinction. This also is a key to Victorian melancholy, which was perhaps as influential as Victorian optimism.

It is of no surprise that the study of the gospels was losing ground to the investigation of stratigraphic geology. It is perhaps no more wonderful that the domain of science remained largely in the hands of Nonconformists rather than Anglicans. Geology had become the most popular of the sciences, and its adherents felt free to speculate upon the spans of millions of years. But the most significant aspect of geology in the nineteenth century lay in the fact that these adherents were amateurs drawn to the study through sheer intellectual curiosity. It was a topic for curates. The most prominent of the amateurs, however, was Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, born in 1799. Her father was a cabinetmaker but he soon began to neglect his occupation for the sake of fossil hunting. Lyme was the perfect location. The crumbling of the region’s cliffs had already begun in earnest and the fossils embedded therein were ripe for plucking. From an early age Mary Anning accompanied her father on fossil expeditions and it can only be assumed that his advice and her experience gave her an otherwise preternatural skill in recognizing and identifying the remains of previously unknown species. She was, according to a childhood friend, ‘a spirited young person of independent character who did not much care for undue politeness or pretence’. This bravura was generally laid to the fact that at the age of fifteen months she survived a great lightning strike which killed three people; she had been a sickly infant, as were so many of the babies of Lyme, but from that time forward she was spirited and adventurous.

Her pursuit survived her father’s death, which may even have quickened her search for what were known variously as Cupid’s wings, ladies’ fingers and devil’s toenails. Some of these she sold to visitors near the coach stop at the Blue Cups Inn in Lyme. It was not unusual for her to charge half a crown for an ammonite laid on a cloth with others on a table. Her first great success, however, came in the summer of 1811 when her younger brother, Joseph, came across the outlines of a strangely shaped head. It was embedded in a geological formation known as the Blue Lias, consisting of limestone and shale. He had no time to dig out the rest of the fossil, and the task fell to Mary. It took her a year of painstaking digging and excavating what seemed to some to be a large crocodile. But as she pieced it together, bone by bone, she eventually reconstructed a creature more than 17 feet long. It was to be called ichthyosaurus. From that time forward she became a geological celebrity. John Murray, a fellow enthusiast, noted: ‘I once gladly availed myself of a geological excursion and was not a little surprised at her geological tact and acumen. A single glance at the edge of a fossil peeping from the Blue Lias revealed to her the nature of the fossil and its name and character were instantly announced.’

It was believed astonishing that ‘this poor ignorant girl’ could talk with professors and other eminent geologists on their own terms and with equal knowledge. Yet she was not mentioned in lectures and she was not invited to colloquia. She was only a female. She wrote to a friend, Anna Maria Pinney, that ‘the world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of all mankind. I hope you will pardon me, although I do not deserve it. How I envy you your daily visits to the museum!’ Pinney herself wrote of her that ‘men of learning have sucked her brains and made a great deal by publishing works of which she furnished the contents while she derived none of the advantages’.

In pursuit of the light of the early decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, the student could look in vain at John Henry Newman’s tracts or Charles Spurgeon’s gospel missions in Southwark. He or she might look instead at Humphry Davy and the beginning of electrochemistry, at John Dalton and the atomic hypothesis, Michael Faraday or Thomas Young. Religion was not of course altogether neglected. Books such as Henry Brougham’s Discourse on the Objects, Advantages and Pleasures of Science (1826), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Intellect, were seen as an advantageous branch of natural theology. Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology (1830–33) declared that ‘we discover everywhere the clear proofs of a Creative Intelligence, and of His foresight, wisdom and power’. Shorn of Darwin’s savage vision, this was better than a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral.

4

A queasy world

Struggle was not very far from the surface of life. In August 1822 Castlereagh cut his throat with a penknife. The unending and weary oppression of work and watchfulness had taken its toll. He had been speaking and behaving oddly for some days; when a household servant tried to cheer him, he put his hand to his forehead and murmured: ‘I am quite worn out here. Quite worn out.’ He asked for an audience with the king, to whom he confided that he was homosexual and that he was ready to flee the country before exposure as such; he behaved oddly enough for the king to warn Lord Liverpool of his condition. He believed, in what was perhaps the final stage of a nervous breakdown, that he had been observed in a male brothel three years before and that he was still being blackmailed. This may or may not have been true, and there is some anecdotal evidence to support it, but it is significant that his mind gave way at a time when London itself was gripped by a homosexual scandal involving the bishop of Clogher in County Tyrone, who had been caught with a soldier. To avoid what he considered to be an overwhelming public and private scandal, Castlereagh put the knife to his throat.

By the end of 1820 it was already clear that, in men and measures, the cabinet would change or would surely fall. With Castlereagh gone, Liverpool’s administration had suffered a severe blow. It was also clear that Castlereagh’s greatest opponent, George Canning, would have to take his place. Canning had been ready to depart for India as governor general, but he could not resist the allure of high office at home. There was no one to match his popularity or his oratory; only he had the vitality and political intelligence to take on the Foreign Office while at the same time becoming leader of the House of Commons. Nevertheless, he had made many enemies as a result of his pro-Catholic stance. It was said that Castlereagh never gave a speech without making a friend, while Canning never opened his mouth without losing one. Wilberforce said that the lash of his sarcasm ‘would have fetched the hide off a rhinoceros’. He was always plotting and scheming. Apparently he would not ‘take his tea without a stratagem’, but in fact his policy was essentially that of Castlereagh conducted with more elan and publicity. He was a different kind of politician, much to the dismay of those of the old school. He dwelled in the open. It was to his disadvantage that he was the son of an actress, but he needed no fine inheritance to make his way. As soon as he entered the cabinet it was said that he began to look and behave as if he were prime minister. Wellington said that Canning’s temper was enough to blow him up. He was, as one contemporary put it, ‘perpetually doing & undoing’. A distinction is often drawn between ‘Whig Tories’ or ‘ultra-Tories’. But the phrases mean very little, and it is better to speak of those who supported Canning and those who detested him. Lord Liverpool, apparently more reticent and disengaged than ever, kept the balance.

Lord Liverpool had in fact accepted reinforcements for his administration from a group of disenchanted Whigs under the leadership of Lord Grenville, who had migrated in search of offices and emoluments. The marquess of Buckingham, for example, received a dukedom, while one of his acolytes gained a seat in the cabinet. Everybody won. Liverpool’s government had been further revived by the steady rise of Robert Peel. Peel had become chief secretary for Ireland at the age of twenty-four, and by all accounts acquitted himself well. He did everything well, in fact, and in 1822 he first joined the cabinet as home secretary, to be joined there by William Huskisson at the Board of Trade. The change of men had an instinctive, if not immediate, effect upon the administration. It seemed stronger and more robust, filled with the energy of new ambitions. Some observers disagreed that ‘Old Corruption’ could change. ‘To be sure’, Cobbett wrote, ‘when one dies, or cuts his throat (as in the case of Castlereagh), another one comes; but, it is the same body.’

Anyone with eyes to see, or ears to hear, knew what was going on. The poetry of Shelley and Byron, together with the prose of William Hazlitt, helped to encourage a mood of sharp or sullen cynicism against the nefarious powers of authority. Robert Southey attacked them as ‘men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society …’ It is hard not to sense the strength of feeling against the nobility and the ‘booby squires’ who might have been Whig or Tory for all the writers cared. In this period there were no fewer than nineteen Sunday newspapers. Seditious pamphlets and broadsheets against the administration found a lucrative market, and the new king was abused as roundly as Liverpool or Canning. For the legislators it was in many respects similar to living on the very rim of a volcano. Canning relished this uncomfortable position and, unlike his predecessor, played to the gallery whenever the occasion demanded it.

Opinion, such as it existed, was essentially a phenomenon of the middle classes that were now discovering their own strength. It was not a question of policy as such – although an issue like income tax could raise the slumbering beast – it was obeisance to an accepted code of duty, thrift and industry, any infraction of which had the direst consequences. The voting public were all middle class now.

It has been said that the newly refreshed cabinet was in every respect more ‘Whig’ than its predecessor. Peel began to liberalize the criminal code and brushed away the litter of fussy and outmoded legislation, abolishing the death penalty for a hundred different crimes. In the process he fashioned a revolution in nineteenth-century criminal justice. He changed the laws on transportation, abolished judges’ perquisites in favour of salaries, and simplified the criminal law. In all those measures he earned Canning’s approbation. The Metropolitan Police force came a little later.

William Huskisson, at the Board of Trade, had turned his attention to free trade. It was the catchphrase of the time, although its effects on prices or on the labour market were not properly understood. He followed earlier measures by reducing the tariff on imported goods and by allowing foreign vessels into English ports. It was a long time coming. More than one hundred years before, in Windsor Forest (1713), Alexander Pope had prophesied that:

The time shall come, when, free as seas or wind

Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind …

Huskisson also ventured to touch on the price of corn as a preliminary measure to the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1832. He could not hope to please both farmer and consumer, and there were so many special interests involved (including the wealth of the landowning gentry and the possibility of starvation among the poorer classes) that he had to move slowly. He set up a sliding scale where the duty on imported corn varied with its price in the domestic market. It was assumed, by those who did not understand it, to be a form of compromise. And in that muddled state it passed.

Just as Huskisson further opened up the protected economy of the nation, so Canning defied conventional diplomatic wisdom by recognizing the emergent South American nations. But Canning was always fated to be the lightning conductor of the storm of change. When he had taken on the Foreign Office after Castlereagh’s death he was confronted by another Congress of the ‘Holy League’ determined to extirpate popular liberties. But Canning was never a member of what was known as ‘the Vienna Club’, the old boys who had carved up Europe between themselves. He would have nothing to do with it, and he registered his displeasure by warning that if France or Spain should dare to invade Portugal, Britain’s old ally, Canning would undoubtedly intervene. The duke of Wellington, who acted as Britain’s representative at the Congress, had declared: ‘we stand alone, and we do so by choice’. It was not in Britain’s interests to alter the internal administration of other nations, but it was her choice to recognize and to nurture de facto governments that had sprung up from popular demand. It need hardly be said that the motivating principles were those of trade and finance.

When the Spanish began to surrender their South American colonies to the French, the English merchants, furious that trade could be snatched from them, found a strong ally in their government. British merchant ships acted as an unofficial war fleet to maintain supplies and communications between the various rebel territories. Simón Bolívar had an army of six thousand British volunteers to prove his part as ‘the Liberator’ for a string of countries from Venezuela to Ecuador. Canning was the single most important politician to lead the charge, or at least the insurrection. Towards the end of the conflict Britain recognized Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina as independent states; Venezuela and Honduras then joined the magic circle, thus guaranteeing that the South American continent would never again be enslaved by the Spanish empire. Native Amerindians, however, were to endure many decades of forced labour at the hands of Spanish settlers.

Most of the cabinet were opposed to supporting rebels against the lawful authorities; the monarchs and monarchists of Europe were horrified at the prospect of a string of new republics across the ocean. Plots against Canning were engineered in the capitals of Europe, with the active or tacit approval of some members of the cabinet, but they came to nothing. He said later that there was a conspiracy ‘to change the policy of this government by changing me’. Canning had the inestimable advantage of the Americans on his side. In the Monroe Doctrine of December 1823 the Americans had announced that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for any future colonization by any European powers’. Canning put it more succinctly in the Commons: ‘Contemplating Spain as our ancestors had known her, I resolved that if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’ George IV was violently opposed to any independence for previously subject nations; the agitators for liberty were no less than traitors to their own imperial monarch, Ferdinand VII. Such matters touched too close to home. He refused to read out Canning’s report at the beginning of parliament, complaining that his gout made it impossible for him to walk and that he had lost his false teeth. Yet he could do nothing to restrain the policy and wish of George Canning. The last links of royal power were beginning to rust.

The question of Catholic emancipation had also divided the cabinet, with Peel opposed and Canning in favour. ‘There is little feeling, I think,’ Peel wrote, ‘in this country, upon the question. People are tired of it, and tired of the trouble of opposing it, or thinking about it.’ This was undoubtedly true of those whose religion was comfortably placed. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1791 had dismantled many of the hurdles by allowing freedom of worship and liberating Catholics from the Oath of Supremacy. But in the hypothesized ‘age of improvement’ it was not enough. And then there was the little question of Catholic Ireland, which was not to be wished away. The Union of 1800 had abolished the Irish parliament but had left nothing in its place except a wholly inadequate civil service and bungling English administrators. The Anglo-Irish aristocracy was in large part venal and impotent while the Catholic peasantry had been brutalized and impoverished by English rule. To allow the vote to Roman Catholics in England and in Ireland was a measure of natural justice that was ever more necessary in the nineteenth century. Canning pushed and pulled at it with all his tenacity and taste for the spotlight. How was it possible to assist Simón Bolívar in his wish and desire for independence while at the same time denying Daniel O’Connell a similar courtesy?

A Catholic Association was established by O’Connell in the early months of 1823 after Irish hopes had been raised by the Whigs and dashed by the monarchy, even as the condition of the Irish themselves steadily grew more unruly and impatient. Most of them lived off what little land they possessed while being harassed by rack-rent landlords and obliged to pay one-tenth of their produce in tithes to a Protestant Church. When the more militant Catholics turned against their oppressors they were bullied and beaten by the Protestant ‘Peep-o-Day Boys’ and the ‘Ribbonmen’; they in turn relied upon ‘the Defenders’. In 1825 the Association was suppressed, but it reinvented itself as a group for educational purposes. It fooled nobody, but it was more difficult to prosecute. It was O’Connell who brought the priests and laity together in combination.

Combination had once been equivalent to conspiracy, but it had become a word of much wider import. The Combination Act of 1799, prohibiting the formation of trade unions, had been passed as part of the reaction to the Jacobin scare of that time. Yet in the 1820s combinations sprang up among groups as disparate as tailors, shipwrights, sawyers and coopers. They regulated wages, limited the number of apprentices and refused to work with those that had not joined them. A parliamentary committee discovered that some of these groups had been in informal existence for almost a century, but only in the 1820s were they given a name and an identity. The Stockport Cotton Jenny Spinners Union Society was formed in 1824, at the same time as other ‘union societies’ emerged in the familiar trades. They were known as ‘trade unions’ because they represented those in an historic trade; they had nothing to do with the working classes of the factories and mills.

One of the leading figures of this nascent union movement was Francis Place, conventionally known as ‘the radical tailor of Charing Cross’. He was one of those city radicals who have as long a history as the city itself; wherever there are large groups of men and women there will be common discontent and shared grievances. He had organized a strike among the makers of leather breeches, then an indispensable part of the working costume, but his failure in that effort did not dissuade him from helping to organize other radical associations. His chief aim, however, was to abolish the legislation which forbade the forming of trade unions. With the help of allies in parliament, a Combination Act was passed in 1825 which defined the rights of trade unions in a very narrow sense as meeting to bargain over wages and conditions – anything else might be construed as criminal. The act allowed workers ‘to enter any combination to obtain an advance or to fix the rate of wages, or to lessen or alter the hours or duration of the time of working, or to decrease the quantity of work …’ The Sheffield Mercury of 8 October 1825 reported that the mechanics of the kingdom, in combination, were ready to act in accordance with these narrow limitations. The act was passed during a period of prosperity but, when that prosperity faltered and began to fade, the new trade unions were ill equipped to deal with the slump.

The Catholic Association continued to thrive in Ireland under Daniel O’Connell’s leadership. The Roman Catholic Church supported it, and used its money for membership fees, and O’Connell himself became one of the heroes of Whig reform. Ireland was no less a candidate for victimhood than Sicily or Greece, and it became natural to talk of ‘the poor Irish’ as a race rather than as a special class. George IV did not help matters. He wrote to Robert Peel that ‘the king is apprehensive that a notion is gone abroad that the king himself is not unfavourable to the Catholic claims … he will no longer consent to Catholic Emancipation being left as an open question in his Cabinet’. The letter was of course shown to Wellington, among others, who wrote: ‘If we cannot get rid of the Catholic Association, we must look to civil war in Ireland.’

There had always been talk of civil war, and the temperature was raised when in 1825 a reform politician, Sir Francis Burdett, introduced an Emancipation Bill. It passed through the Commons by the end of April 1825; Peel and Lord Liverpool threatened to resign if the bill passed its final hurdles. Liverpool declared that ‘my particular rejection of the Roman Catholic religion is that it penetrates into every domestic scene, and inculcates a system of tyranny never known elsewhere …’ The old and familiar cry of ‘No Popery!’ was once more heard through the land. The Lords rejected the bill, but it was widely apparent that in terms of natural justice and national peace the Catholics would eventually succeed.

But then came the financial crash of 1825, the popping of yet another bubble of greed and overconfidence. By the middle of 1826 the once overworked mills were forced to close down, and their workers were put on short time. It seemed natural, even inevitable, for the economy to prosper for a few years and then go into decline. But nobody fully understood the lesson. A see-saw economy, as it has sometimes been called, was the image of this financial age. The major panic, the eye of the storm, lasted for ten days when many of the major institutions shut their doors against the blast.

The financial crisis coincided with the Catholic crisis, hitting landlords, farmers, artisans and social reformers alike. ‘As to ministers,’ one MP had observed, ‘they had fully proved their inability to govern. Never was the community so universally impressed with the conviction of the incapacity of their responsible ministers as at the present moment; so general was the feeling that all ranks of men looked to their removal as their only hope.’

The general situation was exacerbated by a chronic shortage of corn after a bad harvest. Very few people held land of their own, and the paucity of corn led to general and genuine distress. Many businesses were forced to close, and it was widely rumoured by the Evangelical population that the hand of God had been raised against the nation in a fit of justified wrath. Edward Irving had begun his visionary ministry two years before, and many now said that his denunciations and prophecies were nothing less than revealed truth. Was the second advent about to occur? Talk of apocalypse, divine punishment and the wrath to come was commonplace. John Martin painted The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1822, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii was published in 1834.

Parliament was more prosaic and practical. Half a million quarters of bonded corn were released from the warehouses, much to the chagrin of the landowners and farmers. Canning announced the measure to a plainly dissatisfied House of Commons. ‘I never saw’, one observer, Thomas Creevey, noticed, ‘anything like the fury of both Whig and Tory landholders at Canning’s speech, but the Tories much the most violent of the two.’ It was considered to represent nothing less than the destruction of the Corn Laws. It was believed that the liberty of the market in corn had other malign consequences, since the attack upon landowners and farmers was one step closer to a general reform which would ‘bring the overthrow of the existing social and political system of our country’. To destroy the Corn Laws would undermine the inherited system. According to the reformers, however, to support the Corn Laws would extinguish freedom for ever. The language was meant to be, and was taken to be, serious. Some even blamed the scarcity of corn on the effects of free trade and innovation. Canning had an answer. ‘Those who resist indiscriminately all improvement as innovation’, he said, ‘may find themselves compelled at last to submit to innovations, although they are not improvements.’

But even in their anger, and in the face of famine, the landowners did not attempt to thwart popular demand or tempt the wrath of God. The skies were searched for signs. The anger of the Almighty was further divined when a rag, tag and bobtail English army, intent upon annexation of the prosperous Ashanti region in West Africa, was defeated by the Ashanti themselves on the banks of the Adoomansoo, and all its officers beheaded. News from a region so remote, and so difficult to pronounce, only served to emphasize God’s power.

An election was held in June 1826 but it blew neither hot nor cold, with perhaps the faintest breeze for the Protestant cause. Lord Liverpool held on for a while, progressively enfeebled.

In an episode that might claim symbolic significance the duke of York, an arch-Tory and heir to the throne, died of dropsy at the beginning of January 1827, and was buried during an interminable service in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. It was attended by the duke of Wellington, the bishop of Lincoln, the duke of Montrose, George Canning and other dignitaries, but the bitter cold and the plain stone floor of the freezing chapel affected some of those who had come to the funeral. The bishop died, while both Wellington and Canning fell seriously ill. The old guard were being cut down by a cold scythe.

Lord Liverpool, in the face of all this discontent, finally made up his mind and died. He suffered a fatal seizure, six weeks after he had seen the duke of York lowered into the grave, but lingered for eighteen months before his surcease. His death let loose the dogs of party war, unmuzzled at last after a decade or more of false harmony, vicious rumour and whispered insult. Canning was the natural successor, but on his appointment as first minister six of his cabinet colleagues resigned. He was obliged to bring in some Whig colleagues, but it was rumoured that he was half a Whig himself. Palmerston, then secretary at war, took his side in the dispute against what he called ‘the stupid old Tory Party’. ‘On the Catholic question,’ he wrote, ‘on the principles of commerce; on the corn laws … on colonial slavery … on all these questions and everything like them the government finds support from the Whigs and resistance from their self-denominated friends.’ Did Canning not espouse the cause of the Catholics in marked contrast to Robert Peel, one of those ministers who had resigned? There were some who jeered that Peel and his friends were now officially ‘his Majesty’s opposition’. Only Liverpool had been able to keep order among them, which was perhaps his largest claim to competence. Had he secretly agreed with Peel or with Canning? No one ever knew. He was reserved, taciturn and enigmatical. The undersecretary at the Home Office decided that ‘Liverpool had fewer personal friends and less quality for conciliating men’s affections than perhaps any Minister that ever lived.’

But he lived in a queasy and uneasy world. Lord Holland wrote, at the end of 1826: ‘Political parties are no more. Whig and Tory, Foxite and Pittite, Minister and Opposition, have ceased to be distinctions, but the divisions of classes and great interests are arrayed against each other – grower and consumer, lands and funds, Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant.’ The duke of Wellington observed that government in this period was ‘impractical’.

5

The door of change

So George Canning stepped forward to become the first prime minister with the open support of those Whigs whom he had invited into office. He was distrusted by many, but it seems unlikely that a conspiracy or a cabal was waiting to undo him. The people who refused to serve with him, citing his support for the Catholics, did so openly enough. He began governing with some success, managing to formulate and pass a budget. Foreign affairs were still his first and last concern; he was obliged to negotiate with Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal over their various grievances. ‘I am quite knocked up’, he told a fellow minister. But the foreign secretary of the time, Lord Dudley, saw more of him than most others. He wrote that ‘never did I hear from him an unkind, peevish or even impatient word. He was quicker than lightning, and even to the very last gay and playful …’ This does not contradict William Hazlitt’s more censorious judgement of a man who liked to play ‘the game of politics’ involved in ‘dilemmas in casuistry’ and ‘pretexts in diplomacy’. He was still always the cleverest boy at Eton, full of gimmicks and easy eloquence. Hazlitt added that ‘truth, liberty, justice, humanity, war or peace, civilisation or barbarism, are things of little consequence, except for him to make speeches upon them’. He had enough fluency and engaging fancy to give some evidence for that claim.

Nature, rather than his protean sensibility, brought him down. He told the king that he felt ‘ill all over’ and on 8 August 1827, after one hundred days in office, he died so peacefully that no one around him noticed. He was one of those nineteenth-century statesmen who worked themselves to death in an almost literal manner. Without a proper civil service, without a proper party, he had no one except his friends and immediate family to support him. Wine did the rest. His foreign enemies rejoiced because, like Oliver Cromwell, his domestic reputation was ‘but a shadow of the glory he had abroad’, where he was known as the terror of tyrants.

He had of course left important business behind him, and in his last hours his mind was wandering over Portugal without anyone understanding what he meant. The hopes of the more liberal Tories crashed with him. It seemed to many that the Catholic cause, in particular, had been lost.

Canning’s successor is perhaps the least known of all British prime ministers. Viscount Goderich was known as ‘Goody Goderich’ and the ‘Blubberer’ for his apparent weakness against any challenge. It is said that he burst into tears when he handed his resignation to the king. He could no more manage the balance of Whigs and Tories than he could have followed Charles Blondin on a tightrope across Niagara. He lasted just six months and holds the remarkable record for a prime minister of never having appeared in parliament. He had only one thin skin, and shrank from any attention.

There is no evidence that Goderich or his ministers shared Canning’s fascination with foreign affairs, and it was only coincidence that during Goderich’s short ministry the British navy achieved a remarkable victory. Admiral Codrington, in an effort to aid the Greek war for independence from the Ottoman empire, sent a Turkish squadron to the bottom of Navarino Bay. In this action he was allied with the French and Russian navies, but the concerted action did not win instant independence for Greece. It was nevertheless the harbinger of that country’s secession from the Ottoman empire. Metternich said that the action ‘began a new era’ in European affairs. New eras come and go but the duke of Wellington, in particular, wished to maintain the Ottoman empire as a counterweight to Russia.

Whether Goderich approved of the undertaking at Navarino is of no consequence. He did not last long enough to make his opinion important. Huskisson had said of the new prime minister that ‘his health has been suffering, his spirits are worn out, and his fitness for business and power of deciding upon any questions that come before him are very much impaired’. He was said to be as firm as a bulrush. And so with great relief he resigned. He had neither appetite nor aptitude for the high post, and therefore tired of it quickly and completely.

The king, perhaps rueing his appointment, now chose quite a different leader in the redoubtable duke of Wellington. There must be a truism somewhere that good soldiers do not always make good politicians. Wellington never paid heed to public opinion. What he knew best was the battlefield. What was Portugal to him but the site of so many victories? After the first cabinet of the new administration he is reported to have said: ‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’ Wellington had Peel beside him, as home secretary and leader of the Commons, but he could not keep the cabinet intact. After that first cabinet one of the ministers noted that they exhibited ‘the courtesy of men who had just fought a duel’. The lord chancellor said that ‘we should have no cabinets after dinner. We all drink too much and are not civil to each other.’ They met, and disputed, and disagreed. They could concur on nothing. Wellington was deeply dismayed that, having accepted the post as first minister, he could no longer be commander-in-chief of the armed forces; such a dual post would have smacked of military tyranny. The king already regretted his appointment as prime minister and accused him of want of flexibility. There was a phrase. Either King Arthur must go to the devil, or King George will return to Hanover. Wellington’s first name was Arthur.

Peel himself was scathing about some of his more conservative colleagues: ‘Supported by very warm friends, no doubt, but these warm friends being prosperous country gentlemen, foxhunters &c &c most excellent men who will attend one night, but who will not leave their favourite pursuits to sit up till two or three o’clock fighting questions of detail …’

Peel knew, better than anyone else at Westminster, that detail is at the heart of policy. The administration was at best a shaky coalition of disparate interests, comprising his own supporters, the erstwhile supporters of Canning, and the king himself. ‘I must work for myself and by myself,’ Wellington told a colleague, ‘and please God however I may suffer I shall succeed in establishing in the country a strong government, and then I may retire with honour.’ The best of intentions, however, may be thwarted.

There had been some fortunate episodes, one of the most important being the success of the Whigs in managing to repeal the Test and Corporation acts in the spring of 1828. These acts had been devised to exclude Protestant Dissenters from a share in the administration. If they took Protestant communion on certain days of the year, they might take office under the crown. These obligations were lifted, and public offices became open to Dissenters who now enjoyed equality with the members of the Established Church. It was another step in the movement towards social liberation. It had the additional effect, considered only in passing, that the previously indissoluble bonds of Church and State had been broken. It was widely believed that Catholic emancipation was sure to follow. We may have a presentiment of the dying words of Arthur from Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’ in Idylls of the King: ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new …’

The repeal of the Sacramental Test Act, as it was known, had been proposed by one of the more prominent Whigs of the age. Lord John Russell came from an old and distinguished Whig family. Russell was an exiguous and apparently frail man who had reserves of strength and will that astonished his opponents. He was rather small and prim, with a reedy old-fashioned voice that he bequeathed to later members of his family. His household at Pembroke Lodge has been described as ‘timid, shrinking, that of a snail withdrawing into its shell full of high principle and religious feeling’. He was high-minded and thin-skinned. Victoria would consider him ‘impulsive’, ‘imprudent’ and ‘vain’. Compared to what she said of other political leaders, this was almost praise. One foreigner noted, however, ‘his apparent coldness and indifference to what was said by others’. A frigid intellect was another aspect of the Whig aristocracy. He had the natural flair and hauteur of a solidly based Whig family, but had quick wits and keen spirits that navigated him through the parliamentary turmoil.

In the same spring of 1828 the supporters of Canning, motivated by pique or perhaps by a misunderstanding, left Wellington’s cabinet in a body. It was in fact a rather eminent body. Viscount Melbourne, Viscount Palmerston and Lord Dudley Ward went out together and, according to David Cecil:

the three went to see Huskisson and then, leaving their cabriolets to follow slowly behind them, strolled back through the balmy silence of the spring night for a final consultation. Ward walked between the two others. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘now that we are by ourselves in the street, and no one but the sentry to hear, let me know right and left what is next to be done – in or out?’

‘Out,’ said Palmerston and William [Melbourne] echoed him … Poor Ward made a last try. ‘There is something in attaching oneself to so great a man as the Duke.’ ‘For my part,’ retorted William unmoved, ‘I do not happen to think he is so great a man. But that is a matter of opinion.’

Next day they were all three out.

Much to the delight of the Tories, gone were Huskisson, Palmerston and other notable parliamentarians. Wellington had let them go with so little remonstrance it became clear that he had not really wanted them with him in the first place. They had been chosen because they had acted as Canning’s worry beads, but they were not indispensable. With Wellington and Peel solely in charge, a Tory Paradise opened its gates.

In June 1828, a by-election in County Clare was won by Daniel O’Connell. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary, but supported any likely measure for the liberation of oppressed peoples. He opposed any act of violent intimidation or agitation in Ireland, however, believing that liberty by means of parliament was stronger and safer than liberation by armed struggle. But there were three faces to O’Connell: the one he presented to his close allies, the one he eventually demonstrated to the House of Commons, and the one he showed to his people. That was his skill and strength as a leader. To his people he was a man of his native soil, a man of Ireland with the eloquence of a barroom orator. In parliament he was passionate and at times almost incoherent. To his friends he was urbane and even languid. He was a master of mood and of tempo.

It had occurred to him, as to others, that although Catholics might not sit in Westminster there was nothing to prohibit them from standing for election, so he stood in the by-election for County Clare. He won the day. He could not take his place at Westminster because he was a Catholic and would not take the oath of allegiance. What was to be done? If he were refused a place on the benches it might create the conditions for a rebellion and even civil war in Ireland. If he did take his place it might prompt a similar situation in England, where the king clung – like a limpet or, perhaps, like a drowning man – to the Coronation Oath. It would need a palace revolution to move him. When you mix in the hive of zealous reformers, and the ever tempestuous Protestant mob roaming the streets of London, the dilemma was all too clear. There could be no general election since the Catholics, now following O’Connell’s example, would elect a phalanx of Roman Catholic MPs who could not be permitted to take their seats. If the Catholic Association had now proved stronger than the traditional landed interests, what was the point of the Protestant Constitution itself, which growled and pawed the ground but could do nothing?

Wellington and the king talked for hours, the king often in tears of grief and anger. Wellington was now convinced that Catholic emancipation was the only viable and practical course. The king grew more and more agitated until madness threatened him as it had his father. Lady Holland, the Whig hostess, heard from reliable sources that he talked for hours on the dreaded topic ‘and worked himself up into a fury whenever the subject was mentioned’. He threatened to retire to Hanover and never return to England. He boasted or pretended that he had fought at Waterloo. Wellington now believed that he had truly gone mad. But Wellington and Peel both knew that the game was up, and that the Irish could no longer be barred from Westminster. Hands were wrung. More tears were shed. Kisses were given and returned, at least on the king’s side. Eventually, on 4 March 1829, the king wrote to Wellington:

My dear Friend, as I find the country would be left without an administration, I have decided to yield my opinion to that which is considered by the Cabinet to be for the immediate interests of the country. Under these circumstances you have my consent to proceed as you propose with the measure. God knows what pain it causes me to write these words. GR.

It had to be done. It was done. The king could only be a diminished figure in the administration of the country.

Peel introduced the Catholic Relief Bill in March 1829. Everyone knew it was coming: Peel knew that the Catholic hour was at hand, Wellington knew it too. Perhaps no force on earth could now have stopped it. Daniel O’Connell’s erstwhile opponent in County Clare, Vesey Fitzgerald, sounded the alarm. ‘I believe their success inevitable – that no power under heaven can arrest its progress. There may be rebellion, you may put to death thousands, you may suppress it, but it will only put off the day of compromise …’ It passed its third reading by the end of the month and in April passed the Lords by a majority of two. ‘Arthur [Wellington] is King of England,’ the king complained. ‘O’Connell is King of Ireland and I suppose I am Dean of Windsor.’ The king seems to have persuaded himself that he had most of the country behind him. Others thought that ‘public opinion’ would be a force for liberal change but, in reality, it had no steady or certain voice.

On 13 April the bill received the royal assent, and Catholic Emancipation became law. The members of that once proscribed religion could now hold any public office in the United Kingdom with the exception of the Lord Chancellorship of England and the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland. Not all ran smoothly. The removal of Catholic disabilities would be balanced by a sharp rise in the Irish county franchise of minor landholders; the threshold was raised from a 40 shilling to a £10 freehold. Two hundred thousand electors lost their right to vote. The Catholic Association, once the cradle of Daniel O’Connell, was no more. But no Jesuits were allowed to instruct novices, in the hope that the black brigade would wither away.

It could be argued, however, that after 300 years the Anglican ascendancy had now come to an end. With the role of the sacred steadily being marginalized, the clergy of the Church of England took the role of the occupational professionals, imbibing the secular habits and manners of lawyers and others. The number of graduate clerics increased, and Church authority was transferred to a Privy Council Judicial Committee.

In the process the Tory party, the original anti-Catholic combination, had been reduced, with 173 members of the Commons and one hundred of the Lords fighting to the last stage. There was more to come. The door of change had been opened, and through it could be glimpsed the vista of electoral reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and Wellington were widely regarded as traitors to their cause. The dowager duchess of Richmond, believing that Wellington had ‘ratted’ on the Protestant cause, filled her drawing room with stuffed rats bearing the names of the ministers of the crown. But Wellington was more blasé; he did not care about the Catholics ‘one pin’ as long as they were gentlemen. Stirred as if by a trumpet, six Catholic peers entered the House of Lords for the first time. But it was not a question of party, Whig or Tory; they added their voices to the mixed response of various individuals to various matters of public concern. Charles Greville, the political diarist, remarked that ‘if Government have no opponents, they can have no great body of supporters on whom they can depend’. It was said, just to complicate matters, that the Wellington administration was ‘a Tory government with Whig opinions’.

This indeterminacy of opinion was one of the reasons why Robert Peel was able to push through so many legislative acts as home secretary. In 1829 he engineered his Metropolitan Police Improvement Bill, which at another time would have been highly controversial. Three hundred and fifty men had once been expected to supervise a city of more than a million people. ‘Think of the state of Brentford and Deptford, with no sort of police at night!’ Peel told Wellington. ‘I really think I need trouble you with no further proof of the necessity of putting an end to such a state of things.’ So he organized a highly efficient force of 2,000 men, arranged in a number of divisions, under the supervision of two magistrates or ‘police commissioners’. By the autumn of 1829 the ‘Peelers’ or ‘bobbies’, named after their creator, were on their beat with iron-framed top hats and truncheons. They were not necessarily popular, suspected of spying on the poorer sort in order to defend the property of the rich. When a man was accused of murdering a policeman in a riot, he was acquitted by the jury with a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’. There had been so much furore and frenzy in the year that Peel took the opportunity of sketching the outline of a quite new society.

The idea of a police force was met with horror as an assault upon individual liberty. Could not a sword or a pistol do the job? The hue and cry, as well as the ever vigilant mob, were always available in an unhappy incident. That was surely enough? ‘What! Is this England?’ Cobbett asked of the new police. ‘Is this the land of manly hearts? Is this the country that laughed at the French for their submissions?’ Yet all the authoritarian agencies of the day, whether they were utilitarians or Evangelicals, were not to be stopped. Too much unrest in the country provoked the need for further security.

The problems of the Catholics were eclipsed by the crisis of corn. All the people – tradesmen, manufacturers, farmers, labourers – were still enduring the hard conditions and ‘distressful times’ first manifest in 1826. The member of parliament for Kent stated that all the farmers in his county were insolvent. The silk weavers of Somerset were obliged to live on half a crown a week, hardly enough for salt and potatoes. In March riots erupted in London and were matched in Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne and elsewhere. The Riot Act was read in Stockport. It was a matter for Peel to decide at what point the studied neutrality of the government should degenerate into armed intervention. In 1830 the Manchester Political Union and the Metropolitan Political Union were established to promote social and political reform. Strikes, reform meetings and political activism by various trades also maintained their pressure for the next two years. At the close of the year, Thomas Attwood established the Birmingham Political Union and held what was the largest-ever indoor meeting. It was no wonder that the propertied classes were beginning to feel in a state of siege.

6

False hope

By 1830 the strikes had reached a climax, many of them directed against the ‘knobsticks’ or scabs who insisted on working. One union newspaper, the Union Pilot and Cooperative Intelligencer, proclaimed in the spring of that year that ‘the improvements of machinery will soon enable them to do without you’. A plethora of unions grew up – the Grand National Union, the Potters’ Union, the Grand National Consolidated and the Operative Builders’ Union. ‘The history of these Unions’, Friedrich Engels wrote, ‘is a long series of defeats of the working men interrupted by a few victories.’ By which he meant that the laws of economics, or perhaps the laws of capitalism, were irrefragable.

Spectators of the struggle for Catholic liberation noticed one or two matters that pertained to coming disorder. They observed that just two or three cabinet ministers could persuade or cajole the monarch to agree to proposals which he profoundly deplored. They observed that the same two or three members of the cabinet, if powerful enough, could sway the Commons and the Lords with arguments as well as threats and bribes. They observed also that the country as a whole did not particularly care about the constitutional measures which so exercised their leaders. Perhaps the giants and bugbears of conventional political discourse did not exist after all. The people may have been frightened of their own shadows. Not a dog barked when the Catholics and Dissenters were granted their civil liberties. The country was not the one that nursed the anti-Catholic Gordon riots fifty years before.

It has been suggested that the ‘middle classes’ were too concerned with their social and financial well-being to care much for the religious controversies of the period. Catholics and Dissenters, after all, could both aspire to being gentlemen. An anonymous article appeared in the Quarterly Review of January 1830, and gave a name to the rise of the middle classes. It confirmed that they were:

decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative party; a party which we believe to compose by far the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent and respectable portion of the proportion of this country and without whose support any administration that can be formed will be found deficient both in character and stability.

The word ‘Conservative’ was swiftly taken up. By the singular mysteries of numerology or chronology it was in this same year that the Whigs, once fissiparous, began to congregate together and to form a coherent platform of party policies.

The rural poor were less fortunate. The only reform they wanted (apart from the rapid extermination of farmers and landowners) was the number of coins in their patched and worn trousers. They came to a large extent from the stock of unemployed agricultural labourers who had haunted the English countryside since the end of the Napoleonic War. Many of the others were factory workers thrown out of employment by the gyrations of the manufacturing system. By 1830, just as the rudimentary workers’ associations were taking shape, so the agricultural labourers organized themselves into the fictional body of ‘Captain Swing’, the name they used to sign their letters. In the summer of the year the threshing machines of East Kent were attacked; by October one hundred had been destroyed, together with the paraphernalia of rural tyranny epitomized by the tithe barns and the old workhouses. The rick-burners had fire in their hands. They were protesting against tithes and enclosures, game laws and poor laws, and all the other constituents of rural misery and impoverishment. More than a thousand violent incidents occurred within a year.

The Swing Riots were not a national or coordinated movement; they emerged from a hundred local grievances which all found their centre in the need for basic subsistence. Francis Jeffrey, a Scottish advocate and editor, wrote: ‘The real battle is not between Whigs and Tories, Liberals and illiberals, and such gentleman-like denominations, but between property and no-property, between Swing and the law.’ Another Whig notable, Earl Grey, wrote in February 1830: ‘all respect for station and authority entirely lost – the character of all public men held up to derision …’

King George IV himself was now in a parlous condition, ‘scratching himself to pieces’. His reaction to Catholic emancipation, his hysterical antics, his copious tears, his prostrations, his temper and his shameless mimicking of his closest ministers did not endear him to Wellington and his cabinet colleagues. His last days were marked by volatile moods, sometimes lethargic and sometimes voluble, sustained by laudanum, cherry brandy and other cordials. This was the moment when the king began his slow but inexorable journey to the grave with the unspoken wish of his people that it might be concluded sooner rather than later. ‘My boy, this is death!’ he announced to a courtier, as if he had been expecting a long-awaited visitor. And so it was. Nobody mourned him. No one cared.

His successor was William IV, the ‘Sailor King’ of manifestly good intention but awkward manners. ‘Look at that idiot,’ George IV used to say of him. ‘They will remember me, if he is ever in my place.’ But of course they did not. The new king’s head was shaped rather like a pineapple, but there was a great deal of pith inside. He was called ‘the Sailor King’ because he had been for a while Lord High Admiral, and there were intimations that he was something of a Whig. ‘There is a strong impression abroad’, Charles Greville wrote in his notable diary, ‘that the King is cracked, and I dare say there is some truth in it. He gets so very cholerick and is so indecent in his wrath.’ This had been said of almost every sovereign since the first William, and might be said to be an occupational hazard.

Yet the fourth William had a benign, and almost raffish, demeanour. He was described by one contemporary as ‘a little, old, red-nosed, weather-beaten, jolly-looking person, with an ungraceful air and carriage’. He walked down the street alone, and attracted large crowds. When he rode out on his horse he often offered Londoners ‘lifts’. Melbourne remarked that ‘he hasn’t the feelings of a gentleman; he knows what they are, but he hasn’t them’.

The death of the king rendered an election necessary, but the only question seemed to be whether William would favour Wellington and his Conservatives or turn his attention to Earl Grey and the Whigs. The campaign was begun on 23 July but was interrupted and enlivened by news of another Paris revolution. It is a matter of conjecture how many Englishmen were aware of events across the Channel, but there was no doubt some connection with the fervours of ‘Captain Swing’ and the events of July in Paris when the regime of Charles X gave way to the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe. The bourgeoisie threw out the aristocrats with little bloodshed, but many in England trembled for their own country’s constitutional balance.

In the event, the election of 1830 settled nothing, but it brought forward all those issues of agricultural reform and electoral change that had dominated the last ministry. The Swing Riots had been enough to cause something close to panic among the landowning class. They wanted peace at almost any price, and the demand for political reform became ever more pressing.