by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
The Marine Pavilion at Brighton is claimed as one of the prince’s lasting contributions to British life. The design of the building divides opinion today and it was mocked mercilessly from the moment it was built. It was originally a modest cottage on the Steine at Brighton and the prince moved there in 1787 as an economy measure after one of the regular clearings of his debts. Economy was abandoned when a stable block for sixty-four horses was built and there was a seven-year remodelling which started in 1815. Dorothea Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador, visited Brighton in 1818 and estimated the cost of the Pavilion at £700,000. She was also invited inside, according to her biographer:
Here the Prince held a continuous house Party in his brilliantly illuminated, centrally heated, lavishly decorated Pavilion. Daily, thirty or forty people came here for consistently excellent dinners…at midnight they sipped iced champagne punch or lemonade, and nibbled on sandwiches.
George used the expensive services of John Nash to create the building we see today, but the mixture of styles was the result of the Prince’s changing fads and preoccupations and unlimited amount of other peoples’ cash. This little ditty was penned in 1817, and was first published in a newspaper in 1828, when people had stopped worrying what the Prince Regent thought:
Master Nash, Master Nash, You merit the lash,
For debauching the taste of our Heir to the throne:
Then cross not the Seas, To rob the Chinese.
Cobbett called it the ‘Kremlin’. William Hone, in his satirical poem The Joss and his Folly, presented it as the work of an oversized despotic ruler:
The queerest of all the queer sights
I’ve set sights on;
Is the what d’ye call’t thing, here,
The Folly at Brighton
The outside – huge teapots,
All drill’d round with holes,
Relieved by extinguishers,
Sticking on poles;
The inside – all tea-things,
And dragons, and bells,
The show-rooms – all show,
The sleeping rooms – cells.
But the grand Curiosity’s
Not to be seen –
The owner himself –
An old fat Mandarin.
The building was an ‘opium dream,’ according to some observers.1 A lot of artistic work was done under the influence of opium – Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was written as the Pavilion was being built. There was no reason to believe that the prince took opium for artistic inspiration, but he did take laudanum to relieve the effects of over indulgence.
Was he a spendthrift? This seems an easy judgement. He always had debts and he spent money easily and the debts were always paid off by others. In 1816, with his new yacht ‘Royal George’ harboured in Cowes, and chandeliers costing £5,600 recently installed in the Pavilion, he received a rare warning letter from the prime minister to tell him that he was inflaming the lower orders with his excessive spending. There are hundreds of examples of his spending habits; some of them on art, science, and literature, and he could be randomly generous to individuals in distress. However, it was never his money, nor his responsibility. When he died in 1830, £10,000 in cash was found in nearly 500 different pocket books that he had simply forgotten about. To give that figure some perspective, this was exactly the same amount of money that Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy had per year, and he was a rich man.
His ten-year reign reflected the utter lack of promise of his Regency. While his people suffered he bought himself a giraffe and paid £200 for a painting of it. He was a near blind recluse by 1830. Carlton House, his main residence was demolished in 1827 while still unfinished. The king had spend £300,000 of public money on the edifice but it was still structurally unsound – an extended metaphor for the state of the monarchy, which he left at a very low ebb. Harriet Arbuthnot chronicled his last days, a mixture of emergency medication and, during brief recoveries, appalling overeating and drinking. ‘Last night they gave him some physic…and after that he drank three glasses of port wine and a glass of brandy. No wonder he is likely to die! But they say that he will have all these things and nobody can prevent him.’2
Three weeks after his funeral, the Times was scathing:
What eye wept for him? What heart has heaved one sob of unmercenary sorrow?…If George IV ever had a friend – a devoted friend in any rank of life – we protest that the name of him or her has never reached us.…Selfishness is the true repellent of human sympathy. Selfishness feels no attachment, and invites none
The Times was merely saying what the Hunt brothers had said eighteen years earlier. In that period, these sentiments had gone from being criminal libel to established fact. That was the achievement of the Prince Regent.
Chapter 11
Arthur Thistlewood – The Gentleman Revolutionary
Arthur Thistlewood was one of the few people who openly advocated revolutionary violence during the Regency; he was infamous for a botched and pathetic attempt to assassinate the members of the Cabinet in 1820, but deadly in his seriousness. This became known as the ‘Cato Street’ conspiracy.
Thistlewood was the illegitimate son of a minor Lincolnshire landowner. Arthur was treated well by his father, so had no pressing reason to rebel against anything. The family were respectable gentry and the son seemed dutiful at first, but underneath there appears to have been a rebellious streak. He rejected his father’s ambition for him to become a land surveyor and in the 1790s joined the militia and served in the West Indies. He spent time in the USA and later in France during the era of Robespierre. He became a deist, influenced by Thomas Paine, accepting the Supreme Being but not other aspects of established religion. He fought for the French around 1794–5, accepting the Jacobin view that violence should be used for political ends. He supported a regime that had put his hero Thomas Paine in a damp, rotting prison. It is not recorded how he dealt with this contradiction. Both his friends and enemies accept that he was an excellent swordsman, had an obsession with military matters and a burning desire to protect the vulnerable and poor, especially those in the armed forces.1
Although some commentators suggest he was taking part in massacres as part of the French Army in 1799, this seems to be only in the imagination of hostile sources.2 By 1798 however, he was a gentlemen member of the West Riding militia. His marriage was duly reported in the Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1804, but his next appearance in the newspapers in May 1805 was for a sad reason. His wife, Jane, had died in childbirth on 29 April, aged 30. The couple lived at Bawtry, West Yorkshire ‘in some splendour’, according to his unreliable post-mortem biographies. Also in 1805, a man of the same name and location subscribed to a progressive but far from revolutionary book of religious and political discussions called ‘Essays on Various Subjects’. Was he a revolutionary Jacobin or a typical member of the Georgian minor gentry? Was he reliable and steady or was he a wild man?
Thistlewood seems to have married Jane Worsley for money, although biographers cannot agree about the figure. This was in a tradition common among Georgian gentlemen, but he seemed to have been particularly intense in his courtship. A hostile biographer stated jocularly that he ‘ha[d] laid siege to her at Lincoln’, but after her death he found out that the majority of her money would not revert to him. For most of his life, he seemed to be both lucky and careless with money.
Some primary sources suggest that he was financially stranded with a small annuity. However, the house Thistlewood bought in Lincoln around the time of Jane’s death in 1805 seems far from ordinary. He sold it a mere two years later, in May 1807 according to this notice in the Stamford Mercury:
FOR SALE. All that substantial dwelling-house, in complete repair; consisting of commodious kitchen, breakfast, dining and drawing rooms; four lodging rooms on the first floor, and several good attics and rooms for servants; with brewhouse, stabling for three horses, kitchen and pleasure gardens, and a very excellent paddock immediately behind
the Dwelling-house, containing upwards of 2a acres, and late in the occupation of Henry Rutter, Esq. But now of Arthur Thistlewood, Esq.3
The house, in the medieval centre of Lincoln near St Mary’s Church had previously belonged to the eminent solicitor and substantial Lincoln citizen Henry Rutter so it seems that Thistlewood was living the life of the gentry, despite his Jacobin beliefs.
Later, when he was on the run from a charge of high treason in 1817, the Cambridge Chronicle suggested that he had property worth £15,000 from the death of his first wife. This sum may have purchased the Lincoln property; the paper claimed that he later gambled much of the proceeds away. The post-mortem biographies suggest something similar; that by 1805, he had lost money at Lincoln races and failed to pay his creditors. The motives of the biographers will always be suspect but the constant and varying references to gambling at different times in his life makes the charge credible.
There is some evidence for his dissolute lifestyle, the details of which can be seen in a law suit of 1815, referring to an incident that occurred at an unknown earlier date – possibly 1806 or 1807.4 In this case, Thistlewood’s brother John had sent Arthur to London to collect the £800 proceeds of a property deal. Arthur had drunk ‘too freely’ and found himself ‘by accident‘ in a drinking den in St James with the notorious gambler and ruffian Hill Darley. During the night he lost all of his brother’s money at the game of hazard, a dice game, and usually a game of chance unless you are drunk and playing with criminals, in which case you have already lost.
Many later biographies, especially those written at the time of his execution, suggest that Thistlewood had fallen in with a dissolute London crowd and had gambled regularly, but the Hill Darley episode seems to be an example of an innocent man out of his depth. The 1815 lawsuit then explains how Thistlewood sobered up and went to ask for his money back, which would have been naive if he was really part of the ‘Hellfire’ set. Many primary sources suggest that he was a professional gambler. The Calcutta Chronicles, a newspaper for the British in India, produced at the time of his execution, suggested that Thistlewood had lost £2,000 on that night in St James. Was he a professional gambler or merely inept with money? Once again, the sources do not agree. He may have lied in the lawsuit – he was both desperate enough and sufficiently contemptuous of the legal system to do so.
According to the Calcutta Chronicles, Thistlewood fled to France after losing the £2,000, where he was imprisoned for having no passport and was involved in violence and atrocities in the army of the enemy. It also claimed that he learnt French moderately well; which was not a compliment on his language skills but a comment on his loyalty to the British constitution. His enemies also place him in Paris in 1814 and 1815, either gambling at the Palais Royal or plotting against the French monarchy.
He may have been a fool with money, but he seemed skilled in the art of marrying it. In May 1808 he married Susannah Wilkinson, the daughter of a wealthy Horncastle butcher, who came with a dowry of £2,000. He then quit his commission in the army and, with the help of his family, bought a farm. The farm was not a success; by 1811, Thistlewood was back in London with his wife and son. In March he was in the local press as the secretary of a committee to defend Peter Finnerty, who was being prosecuted for libelling Lord Castlereagh. In that meeting, Thistlewood was present with the reformer Major John Cartwright and would have known Sir Francis Burdett. The meeting took place at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, the home of political dissent in London, suggesting that Thistlewood was active in the radical movement at that time but at a relatively humble level.5
He first encountered the revolutionary Spencean Philanthropists in 1814. Their views would have chimed with his; opposition to most forms of private property, a rejection of the established Church and conventional religion, a call for communal ownership of land, and the belief that violent action could, and should, overthrow a rotten government. He must have been increasingly active in the movement, because although he did not become leader after the death of Thomas Spence in 1814, he was certainly in charge a year later.
The Spenceans planned an armed revolt against the government in December 1816. They believed that their thirty activists could start a chain reaction among the lower classes. When it failed dismally, Thistlewood and other leading Spenceans – James Watson, Thomas Preston and John Hooper – were tried for high treason in March 1817. The others were a surgeon (meaning a chemist or apothecary), a cordwainer and a labourer. Thistlewood had no occupation; he was a ‘gent’ and he seemed to have left most of the heavy revolutionary work to the others. Preston wrote the inflammatory leaflets and posted them around London; Watson visited the public houses of Holborn and Paddington and tried to agitate the navigators building the Regent’s canal. These Irishmen would provide muscle, have a grievance against the protestant state and could be found easily in pubs, the favourite place of the Spenceans.
The day of the attempted coup was 2 December 1816. This second Spa Fields protest started by looking very similar to the first – the same field, the same public house, and the same flooding of London with pamphlets and handbills beforehand. However, the tactics of the Spenceans had changed. A petition to the Prince Regent had been presented after the first mass meeting on 15 November. They already knew that the Prince Regent had refused permission to even present it to him and they were determined to incite a riot and then try to turn it into an armed revolution against the Lord Liverpool government.
The other similarity between the two meetings was the planned speech by Henry Hunt at 1pm. However, the Spenceans seemed to have preempted Hunt’s arrival when they appeared an hour early with a cattle wagon full of flags and banners proclaiming: ‘Nature, Truth and Justice’, ‘Feed the Hungry’ and ‘Protect the Oppressed’.
There was also gunpowder, guns, and pikes in the wagon and this seems very likely to be the work of Thistlewood, although the 200 metal pikes were provided by one of their new members, John Castle. Thistlewood was there, clearly focussing on the military aspect, but the main speaker, who introduced himself as ‘Mr Smith’, was actually James Watson junior. He told the crowd that their petition had been rejected. He attacked the monarchy – ‘This Brunswick Family’ – ‘people with a million pounds who give the poor £5,000’.
Henry Hunt was late. He couldn’t resist a meeting, even with people with whose views he did not fully agree. In reality, the Spenceans did not rate Henry Hunt very highly, and they knew only his ego had brought him back to address another mass meeting. Hunt was caught between the moderate reform positions of Cobbett and Burdett, and the unconstitutional ambitions of the Spenceans, and trying to be the leader of both.
John Castle, Hunt’s driver, was under orders to delay Hunt so that the others could start without him. ‘Mr Smith’ continued his speech, comparing Hunt to Wat Tyler, the leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, and made it clear that this was a good thing. About 200 of the crowd of protesters never heard Hunt speak, as they had successfully been peeled off by Watson’s inflammatory speech. They accepted the Spenceans’ offer to arm themselves and defend their English liberty with force. The Chester Courant said that the ‘trail was soon discernible by fragments of lamps and windows’. They stormed away to the Tower of London and the Royal Exchange by way of all the gun shops. The ease with which they located them suggested that some research had been done.
This serious violence was to continue for many hours. Meanwhile, Hunt arrived at about 1 pm and reported what the crowd already knew – that the Prince Regent had declined to see their petition. The Prince Regent had contributed £5,000 to the Soup Committee, which provided sustenance to distressed mariners, but he had no interest in any political or economic change. Hunt reported back his exchange of exaggeratedly polite correspondence with Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary. Despite the formulaic good manners of his letters, Sidmouth was now convinced of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Hunt continued to better his two hour speech of 15 November, when the hosti
le press claimed that he had ‘talked down the sun’, with an even longer exhortation to face the artillery of evil with the more powerful artillery of truth and with condemnations of corrupt sinecurists, unrepresentative parliaments, taxation, and a standing army designed to oppress the people.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, state power was reasserting itself. Despite arming themselves with the proceeds of looted guns shops, the Spenceans were unable to defeat the Life Guards and Dragoons set against them. The Riot Act had already been read at 4 pm. There were failed attacks on the Tower by a very drunk Watson; the members of Lloyds Coffee House were conscripted as special constables. Sir William Curtis MP – also known as ‘Billy Biscuit’ – organised a spirited defence of the Royal Exchange. Thistlewood was at the Tower of London. Despite banners with slogans such as ‘We consider the soldiers our friends’, the army remained loyal to the government. The insurrection ended about 9 pm. Two Spenceans, Hooper and Cashman were arrested immediately. There was a least one casualty, a warehouseman called Platt, shot in the groin by a Spencean, probably Watson, and probably still drunk.
Thistlewood was on the run from December 1816 to February 1817. A reward of £500 was offered and this newspaper description makes him sound like the desperate soldier he was:
