Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Page 1
Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Rethinking the Regency
By
James Hobson
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Pen & Sword History
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © James Hobson, 2017
ISBN 978 1 52670 254 8
eISBN 978 1 52670 256 2
Mobi ISBN 978 1 52670 255 5
The right of James Hobson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
By TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall, PL28 8RW
Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Books Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Transport, True Crime, Fiction, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Seaforth Publishing, Wharncliffe and White Owl.
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk
Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
For Christine, my wife.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Darkness Years
Chapter 2 The Poor Weavers
Chapter 3 Making Life Worse
Chapter 4 Why People Rioted
Chapter 5 Bread and Potatoes
Chapter 6 The Poor Law
Chapter 7 Cold Charity
Chapter 8 Old Corruption: The General Election, 1818
Chapter 9 All About The Money
Chapter 10 The Disgusting Prince Regent?
Chapter 11 Arthur Thistlewood – The Gentleman Revolutionary
Chapter 12 1817 – The New Peasants’ Revolt
Chapter 13 Peterloo: Who Killed Joseph Lees?
Chapter 14 Peterloo: The Radical Women
Chapter 15 The Freeborn Englishman?
Chapter 16 The Punishment Didn’t Fit the Crime
Chapter 17 Retribution
Chapter 18 Child Labour
Chapter 19 Currency Crisis
Chapter 20 Adultery
Chapter 21 Regency Body Snatchers
Chapter 22 Being Irish
Chapter 23 A Rash and Melancholy Act?
Postscript
End Notes
Bibliography
Introduction
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and … had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Jane Austen Emma (1815)
This book is not the ‘Anti-Austen’. I am not using Emma Woodhouse as a stick to attack Jane Austen; Emma is a fictional character and it is the author who admits that she is insulated from the worst effects of these terrible years. Austen was also more than capable of making judgements about the rich and powerful and wrote about aristocrats and clerics who were neither moral, nor glamorous. This is also the basis of my argument, but my material is different – war, corruption, poverty, class selfishness and political repression.
Dark Days of Georgian Britain is more of an attempt to agree with Jane, probably a wise move on my part. I accept Karl Marx’s view that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle, and I think Jane might have at least considered the notion. Her genius would not have been enhanced with a passing reference to bread prices or trade unionism. She manages to be a moralist about society without any of this. However, some grim background might be useful, especially when the Regency is often portrayed through the TV and cinema screen as looking even lovelier than it does in prose.
The point still stands that, if you were not lucky enough to be Emma Woodhouse or one of her ilk, then this era of history was appalling in nearly every way that a period could be. This is no comment on Austen however; portraying this misery was not what she was trying to achieve, so she cannot be condemned for not achieving it. It bears repeating though: the late Regency was terrible, truly appalling, and people at the time knew it.
Indeed, when historians debate the ‘worst year in history’, the only recent year that is considered is 1816, and its earlier competitors are usually times of vicious epidemic disease or fratricidal civil war. I contend that 1800 to 1819 were the most dismal years in the last three centuries in Britain, with 1815 to 1819 being the worst. They had the full range of calamities – climate crisis, war, austerity, social unrest, a rotten and corrupt system of law, welfare and government, and a ruling class too scared and arrogant to do much about it. Unlike disease and civil war, it was only the lower orders that were affected by the Regency crisis.
The rich and privileged are present in this book, but only in their role as tormentors of the ordinary people or as thoroughly bad examples. They are not presented as cardboard-cut-out villains, but I will admit to having no sympathy for them. The poor are my main interest, although they are not always presented as heroes. There was little scope for heroics when conditions were so bad.
Luckily, this is one of the first eras in history in which the voice of the poor can be heard, albeit faintly and often through the filter of people who had no regard for them. The eighteenth century was a time of rising literacy and for the first time the lower orders could sometimes speak without the squire or the vicar looking over their shoulder. We also have, faintly but with growing confidence, the voice of women. I have tried to find original stories of real people that shine a light on their life.
The book falls into four parts: the appalling experiences of the poor in the years 1811-1820; the failure of the rich to help and their tendency to make things worse; the ramshackle and the corrupt nature of the British state; and finally, some aspects of social history which show how very different we are from our Regency ancestors.
Chapter 1
The Darkness Years
This year has been a very uncommon one. The spring was exceeding cold and backward or rather there was no spring, the summer was cold and wet, or rather we had no summer. The Crop was very bad and unproductive. The Harvest was very late, the crop was not well got in. A Scarcity has taken place. The Quartern loaf is 1/6, other articles in proportion.1
There never was so many beggars as thee is at present in our streets. Taxes are high and are levied with Severity. Petitions for a reform have been presented to the Prince Regent from London and other Cities, and have not been well received. Neither trade nor commerce are revived. Tradesmen and labourers are out of employ and are in a state of Starvation. The Regent and his ministers do not seem to care for the grievances under which the Nation groans under, and seem to be deaf to a reform of flagrant abuses that universally exist in the expenditure of the Public money.
Diary of Edward Lucas of Stirling, 31 December 1816.2
The title of this book is more than a metaphor. The period 1810 to 1820 was one of the darkest and coldest in the last 200 years. The causes are well known now; in April 1815 there was a colossal er
uption of Mount Tambora, in present-day Indonesia. It was the biggest explosion on our planet for 80,000 years, pushing ash and pumice into the air, but more importantly, pushing sulphur above the atmospheric level of the weather. The sulphur became sulphuric acid. The earth cooled, harvests were decimated and trade and transport were hugely affected. Between 1809 and 1820 there had only been one really good harvest in Britain, that was in 1815, just before the eruption. 1816 was the worst; it was ‘The Year Without A Summer’; forty days of rain in spring in most of the country; frosts in June and July; orange and brown snow in winter; and bright yellow and reddish-brown sunsets, as clearly shown on Turner’s painting from this period.
The cause was not known at the time, although it was suspected by some that the weather was outside of normal variations. The Leicester Journal commented in July 1816, ‘such inclement weather is scarcely remembered by the oldest person living’.3
The temporary cooling was made worse by a cyclical increase in sunspots called the ‘Dalton minimum’, which also reduced global temperatures. On some days in July 1816 the sunspots could be seen quite easily with the naked eye and some people panicked, thinking the end of the world was approaching.4 The poor harvests, and the lack of availability of food from the foreign markets which were experiencing the same freak weather effects, increased the price of food, causing riots, misery and repressive measures from the government. The consequences of Tambora can be clearly seen in the early chapters of this book.5
These are also the darkness years because of the consequences of Britain’s first ‘total war’. Britain has experienced two of these in the last century and nobody today is in any doubt about how serious they were. The Napoleonic War is outside our folk memory, but it was a war to the death; a struggle which threatened every aspect of the British state. Britain went to war against a revolutionary enemy, and for most of the time, especially when sympathy with France waned, it was a war of national survival.
The suffering was immense, especially amongst the poor, and the state was nearly bankrupted in an attempt to repel Napoleon and defend the balance of power in Europe. However, the darkness years really started when the war was won; the suffering did not stop when the war ceased.
For almost a generation the war with France had been a national focal point in the same way the Second World War was. Following both world wars of the twentieth century, people expected change and improvement, but after the war with Napoleon, these things did not happen. Indeed the opposite happened. The end of the First World War brought the commemoration of the sacrifices of the many, and a promise of a ‘land fit for heroes’; a consequence of the Second World War was a welfare state for all. You will look in vain for cenotaphs and commemorations about the Napoleonic War however. Victory was celebrated but the victors were not. There was no improvement in life after Waterloo. Those lower orders who thought peace would end their problems were whipped up into a fury which disrupted life for a very turbulent five year period.
These were the darkness years because life in Britain was changing and people did not know how to respond. The population had doubled between 1751 and 1821 causing panic and deep pessimism about the future; there was a genuine belief that starvation was on the way – not the near starvation that kept the poor in check, but actual national calamity. Thomas Malthus was the prime source of this fear and uncertainty. His Essay on the Principle of Population was in print every year from 1798 to 1817. It suggested two possible futures: either the population increase would lead to mass starvation as agriculture failed to feed the new mouths, or disease, famine and war would hold back population growth. The government was so worried that it took some action – there was a nationwide head count organised in 1801 and another in the midst of a desperate war in 1811.
Malthus’s pessimism encouraged many of the ruling classes to change their attitude towards the poor. Malthus regarded unemployment as just another word for overpopulation, and he believed that the vast increase in the number of poor families with poor children was caused by early marriage and encouraged by generous welfare policies. Like many aspects of life in the Regency, the old ways were not working and nothing new was appearing to take its place. William Cobbett, a radical reformer who used his newspaper the Political Register to attack the government and its actions, and a man to whom hate came easily, told Malthus that he loathed him more than anything in the world.6
The population rise led to new urban areas which ushered in new ways of living, disrupting the traditional ways of doing things. Prior to this, people had mostly lived in small units, where problems were locally based and could be solved face to face, and where the rich felt a responsibility for the poor. It was a hierarchical society, but one based on consensus and some shared values. There were laws forbidding new machinery and other laws guaranteeing hours of work, rates of pay, and protecting apprenticeships. These were swept away in the Regency period, and the social mobility and prosperity needed to mitigate the problems caused did not arrive until later. Although people at the time would not recognise the term – as then you were either a child or an adult with nothing in between – the Regency was the ‘awkward adolescence’ of modern British industrial society.
To our eyes, the political figures of the Regency were unappealing, and this was magnified by the fact that they lived in a time when critical public opinion had some effective outlets. The Prince Regent was one of the most unpopular members of the royal family in British history. This is partly due to his long list of personal failings, of which we could cite greed, arrogance, and insensitivity as the main three jostling for first place. The major members of the government, Lord Liverpool the prime minister, Lord Sidmouth the home secretary and Viscount Castlereagh the foreign secretary are also unappealing from the modern perspective. They were certainly reactionary – they looked backwards – and they severely curtailed the political freedoms for the population in the darkness years.
The police, justice, finance and welfare systems were no longer fit for purpose, but they were applied with increasing severity during the Regency period by politicians such as Liverpool, Sidmouth and Castlereagh. There was a crime wave caused by poverty and resentment, and a welfare system that was out of control. Reform was about to happen; there were parliamentary inquiries into prisons, poverty, and child labour, and this was the age of William Wilberforce and Elizabeth Fry. There were debates about voting, trade unions and the death penalty. One of the reasons why we consider this an age of darkness is that a new dawn of reform and improvement was approaching – just not yet.
The years after 1820 were slightly better. Austerity slackened a little. Food prices fell and diets improved, slowly. The justice system was reformed. Rights to free speech and agitation were restored. The first reform of parliament happened in the 1830s and the Poor Law was improved administratively, if not humanely. Even the grave robbers were put out of business. Some people continued to be desperate for food, but agricultural improvement saved Britain from the Malthusian trap of mass starvation.
The darkness years of the Regency bears striking resemblance to Britain in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Climate change threatens; childhood seems to be in crisis; relations with Europe and within the nations of the UK are uncertain; the existence of an unpopular ruling elite and the widening gap between the rich and poor are causing tensions; technological change and the destruction of employment is a challenge; an expensive and creaking welfare system may need reform; an unrepresentative electoral system that does not seem to reflect the will of the majority.
We seem to be facing the same challenges in Britain now as 200 years ago. The following chapters explore some of those challenges.
Chapter 2
The Poor Weavers
There is no better example of misery in the Regency period than the handloom weaver. In 1815 they were struggling; by 1840 they were starving. Weavers had initially prospered after spinning was mechanised, when the Jenny produced ample thread for weavers an
d demand was high. There was plenty of work in the weaving villages of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Scotland from 1790 to about 1805. William Radcliffe, a textiles entrepreneur noted how well the handloom weaver was doing during this period:
Their dwellings and small gardens clean and neat, – all the family well clad, – the men with each a watch in his pocket, and the women dressed to their own fancy, – the church crowded to excess every Sunday, – every house well furnished with a clock in elegant mahogany or fancy case, – handsome tea services in Staffordshire ware, with silver or plated sugar-tongs and spoons, – Birmingham, Potteries, and Sheffield wares for necessary use and ornament, wherever a corner cupboard or shelf could be placed to shew them off.1
The most skilled Bolton muslin weavers at the beginning of the nineteenth century were said to parade the streets with a £5 note in their hats, showing off their week’s wages, wearing expensive shirts and leather boots, and excluding less wealthy weavers from their favourite public houses.2
By 1810 this prosperity had ended and wages began to fall. Decent workable power looms, first invented in 1785 were slowly being gathered in factories. Wages were pushed down not so much by the power looms themselves, as there were no more than a few thousand in the whole country in the 1810s, but the fact that the owners could turn to machines if workers’ pay rose too much.