Illusions Of Change (A Poor Man at the Gate Series Book 6)

by Andrew Wareham

  “Does his father have plans for him after that?”

  “Public life? Probably not, he does not show the aspects of a political being, though he might have some interest in the various reform movements that seem to be stirring again. On that topic, there seems to be a plethora of Private Bills just of late, half of the towns in the country must be trying to organise councils for this and boards for that – sewerage, waterworks, street paving, paid watchmen, hospitals, gas lighting even. Have you heard any whisper that government might wish to become involved in any way in such matters?”

  Robert had not – his prime source of information was Lord Castlereagh whose interests did not extend to domestic issues.

  James rather thought that Peel was trying to whip up support for changes in the field of criminal law and prisons and policing but that he was unlikely to achieve much in the next few years.

  “As for the other things, sir, local boards and all that, the only thing I have heard is that there are worries about finance. From what I can gather, and that ain’t much, most of these Private Bills make provision for a local council or set of trustees who can levy a small tax, more or less an addition to the Poor Law rates, and use that to repay loans over twenty or more years. The word is that they don’t all get their sums right and they may be borrowing against a future income that just ain’t there. Government has no way of checking that they know what they are doing, of course, just has to take them on trust. The Board of Trade was told to look some of the proposals over, but they have too few salaried officials to do the work they have already. Huskisson, and he’s the Minister of the Crown, told me that he writes most of his own letters himself and sometimes has to take them to the General Post Office in person, for lack of any clerk to do it.”

  They laughed, but only half-heartedly.

  “The government is too weak, I suppose to do anything in the way of reform?”

  “Too weak, sir, and too divided. Lord Liverpool is running out of energy and patience with the various factions, and now this damned divorce is monopolising almost all of the time he has for work. If they would all pull together then something sensible could be done, but the different groupings will barely even speak to each other any more. Canning, especially, seems more interested in pursuing various feuds than in governing the country and he is using the King’s difficulties to serve his own advantage, and, of course, his past involvement with Queen Caroline makes it impossible for him to take an unbiased position.”

  “From all one has heard of the lady one wonders just what position he did take.”

  Serious discussion ended at that point.

  Frances met with Lady Jersey and conferred briefly on the question of James. She was instructed to bring the young man into Society, under no circumstances must he be permitted to distance himself from his peers. That he could not dance was, of course, to be regretted, it would make it so much more difficult to bring him into the immediate company of the young ladies, but he should be visible, one of the less eligible but not poverty-stricken younger sons. Whilst he could not expect to carry off any great prize from the marriage mart, nonetheless as a public man he could expect to ally himself very respectably indeed – many of the great families would consider a connection with the Andrews clan eminently suitable for a younger daughter.

  “He is quite young yet, of course, though I have observed him to have the lineaments of a mature man. No doubt the hardships he has endured have aged him, Lady Andrews. Over four or five years I am sure that he will come to meet a caring and appropriate young miss. I shall bear his case in mind, ma’am, and will ensure that he has invitations to all of the better events, in and out of the Season. As for Almacks, well… it is a dancing club, essentially, but there is always a place for those who must sit for a while. He should attend occasionally, possibly to escort you when my lord cannot be available. He must be seen in the right places, which will be to his advantage, of course, for by no means all members are to be found there!”

  She seemed very welcoming and Frances wondered whether coal or iron ore had been discovered on any of the Jerseys’ vast estates. The Jerseys’ children were all adult, none remaining to be disposed of, so the obvious reason was not there. Lady Jersey was, however, a close friend of Lady Castlereagh and no doubt would wish to assist in the necessary cover-ups of my lord’s nastier activities, both Robert and James being of potential use in such endeavours. It was always as well to understand one’s contemporaries’ motivations, particularly bearing in mind that Castlereagh must almost inevitably create a scandal one day.

  A wife should always seek to protect her husband, and Thomas was not as aware of the undercurrents in Society as he needed to be. A word to the wise addressed to both of his London-based sons would be sensible, and she was on good enough terms with both, she thought.

  “Lord Castlereagh, Robert! Is he the same man that he always was? Are his powers declining, perhaps?”

  Robert knew that she was au fait with some of Castlereagh’s habits – he had warned his father and he would have told her to be cautious in contacts with lord and lady both.

  “Politically, I believe him to be as powerful in his understanding as ever, ma’am. But…”

  “I had heard the occasional rumour.”

  “He may well wish to raise the wind by, for example, offering a mortgage on some of his unentailed lands, possibly even by selling a small estate in Ireland or Scotland where the transaction might not come to public notice.”

  “I should advise your father not to become involved, you would suggest?”

  “Most certainly so, ma’am. I have, by the way, already spoken to James.”

  Neither said more on the topic. They had done enough to protect the family from public contamination if scandal arose.

  Book Six: A Poor Man

  at the Gate Series

  Chapter Five

  France was a boring place.

  Paris might, just possibly be exciting, but the provinces were tedious, in the extreme. It seemed as if the whole country was exhausted, experiencing the morning after feeling, the flatness that followed a party lasting three decades. The exhilaration of the Revolution had been followed by the glory of Napoleon, and now they were paying the price; the country was poor, hungry, oppressed and underpopulated.

  There were too few men.

  Eustace Hood had driven past miles of fields, spring ploughing underway, doddering dotards heaving at the plough handles, women lending their weight, boys and little girls at the horses or oxen’s heads. He doubted that he had seen a single tall, strong ploughman, putting all of his muscle into a heavy job; where there was a young man at all it was normal for him to have but one arm, or be missing a leg or be bent over hunchbacked, only partly recovered from ball or sabre slash to belly or chest.

  The wars had been cruel to the French peasantry; it was their men who had been conscripted for Napoleon’s short-lived conquests. The merchants and the bourgeoisie complained of the taxes levied on their fortunes, but the peasantry had been mulcted of their blood, and with little choice in the giving.

  The shipyards were almost silent. During the wars they had been busy, skilled hands conscripted from Spain and Italy and the Germanies slaving alongside the few Frenchmen who had avoided sea service or forced enrolment in the armies. The foreigners had all gone home and the yards sat empty now. Fulton had launched his first steamers on the Seine, but there was no sign of any more building, and no likelihood that there would be for many years.

  The new port and town that the English called Harbour-Grace, and which the French in their ignorance referred to as Le Havre, had been a massive naval yard and harbour in the war. It was almost empty now, a few king’s ships laid up in ordinary, no vessels in commission, no activity on the slips. The commercial port was a little busier, there were several French coasters, but every sea-going ship was English, every cargo had passed through a British port, and had often paid its taxes to the foreign government.

 
There was nothing here, no prospect of partnership in any commercial venture.

  Captain Hood took a room for the night in an almost empty inn, ate a dinner that was well-cooked but long on vegetables, very short of meats.

  Several under-employed maids smiled invitingly. He had heard of worse ideas, and he was a civilian now, no longer needed fear entrapment. He smiled back at the prettiest, talked to her as well, later.

  There was no money in the town, and little prospect of any future prosperity, the land was bankrupted. France had lost the war and would be many years before it profited from peace.

  He wrote his report, addressed it to Mr Robert Andrews at Mostyn’s Bank in London, wandered downstairs in the morning to ask of the landlord where the Post Office was.

  A pair of gendarmes stirred forward, one putting a hand out and saying he would take the documents. A thin man in black civilian clothes stood up from a chair near the door, made a curtailed bow, a bob of the head, failed to mention his name.

  “Captain Eustace Hood? Have you any papers of identification or introduction, sir?”

  He spoke fluent, unaccented English, probably born in England to émigré parents and ‘returned’ to France to serve the new Royal government. Likely to be bitter in his hatred for the English, many of those in his case finding the need to be Frencher than French.

  Hood produced a thick wallet, extracted three sheets of paper, unfolding them carefully before passing them across.

  “The first, sir, identifies me as a half-pay captain of the navy. It is signed by the Secretary of the Board of Admiralty. The second, as you will see, sir, is addressed from His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and requests cooperation of government officials in France, the Low Countries and the various states of the Germanies; you will note that copies have been sent to British embassies where appropriate. The third is a brief statement from my current employers, Roberts Ironfounders and Mostyns Bank, stating that I am on business for them and introducing me to interested parties.”

  The policeman read all three, held them to the light to check the watermarks, returned them with obvious reluctance. He dared not offend the British government by arresting an overt employee of their Foreign Office, which this man must be; his own people would have his head if he did – they might well declare him to be an Englishman and deport him.

  “May I ask of your business in Le Havre, Captain Hood?”

  “Of course, sir. My employers are one of the largest builders of steamships in England and are considering the logical course of expanding onto the major waterways of continental Europe. The Seine and the Rhine are obviously of greatest importance and I am to survey both, discovering active shipyards that might be approached as partners in such an enterprise. The letter your man holds contains the first results of my survey – not, I fear, very satisfactory from our point of view.”

  The shipyards were almost wholly inactive, as both had observed.

  The man was obviously lying, he was spying for the English navy, but he was untouchable in this time and with these papers.

  The letter was returned, Hood was pointed to the posting place, asked if he would remain long in Le Havre.

  “I intend to leave tomorrow, sir. I wish to make a final inspection of the town first, and perhaps talk to some of the merchants.” Hood was quite happy to turn the screw – he did not like secret policemen, was not very enamoured of any other sort. “Do you know if there are coastal boats that could take me to Dunkirk or must I travel overland?”

  “By road, sir. I know of no ferry service. I presume you will not be recommending your employer to set up here?”

  “Perhaps in twenty years, sir, when a new generation has come to manhood. There are simply too few workers to make industry possible at the moment.”

  The long wars had been a disaster for France, it seemed. The new industries had been present in the last years of Louis 16th, just beginning to grow, much as had been the case in England, but every manufactury in France had failed, and would be many years in limbo. It was interesting, Hood thought, to compare the two countries; he wondered why they had diverged to such an extent. Perhaps it was God’s Will, France punished for her collective sins, but if that was the case then, logically, England was being rewarded for her virtue, and that really seemed an unlikely event.

  Dunkirk was hardly more active than Le Havre – for fifty years the port had based its prosperity on privateering and smuggling into England, the two activities carried out interchangeably by the same craft and crews. Now, not only were the wars over and none foreseeable, but the Admiralty had turned its attention to the Trade and had filled the Narrow Seas with frigates, sloops and cutters, all with nothing better to do than stop and rummage every vessel they came across. Smuggling, profitable for half a century, had come to a sudden end and the merchants of Dunkirk had been bankrupted, forced out of town to seek legitimate trade elsewhere in a deeply depressed economy, no few ending up in London where business was flourishing.

  The shipyards had all specialised in launching fast, predatory small ships, had no idea of steam or commercial hulls and no great wish to find out about them – they knew what they knew and were far too old to discover novelty, thank you.

  Spring found Captain Hood on the Rhine, making his way towards the clouds of coal smoke just beginning to rise over the Ruhr, the first signs of promise he had discovered.

  Omens for an industrial future they may have been, but no more than that. Industry was only just impinging on the countryside above the Rhine, growing rapidly but at the stage Lancashire had been in during the ‘80s, a great number of small manufacturies but none large. A few tiny, single-slip yards were building barges propelled by sail and sweeps but there were none that could possibly venture into steam. They were too early by a decade, it seemed, in their ambitions; equally, it was quite certain that there would be no competition for the English ship-owners for many years and Roberts could expand massively and safely in English waters.

  Captain Hood retraced his steps and made towards the port of Hamburg, thinking to travel from there to Copenhagen, greatest of the Baltic ports, and thence to London. In the event the information he received on the coast of the German Ocean decided him to give Copenhagen the go-by, there was no steam there, nor the likelihood of it arriving for fifty years he was told.

  He travelled overland to Brussels, changing his travel plans at the last moment after being informed that there was political agitation amongst the Dutch-Belgians that could create a degree of unrest involving France and Prussia both and, by extension, Britain.

  Belgium, never a unitary state prior to the French invasions, had a hankering to be free of the Dutch, having been thrust into a union it had not asked for and did not want. Unfortunately, the two disparate parts of Belgium, Flanders and the old Walloon states, spoke different languages and had no wish to form a single country. Flanders might have been able to exist independently but it was the opinion of all outside observers that the Walloons would very rapidly be swallowed up by France, and the rest of Europe had lost all tolerance for French imperialism. It was the decision of every other country that Belgium must never be French, and if that meant the creation of a mongrel, unwanted state, then so be it – the only alternative was for the Dutch-Belgic state to remain in being. Presented with this ultimatum the politically active Belgians shouted outrage, only to discover that the overwhelming majority of their countrymen simply did not care because all they wanted was peace and a chance to rebuild their towns and farms and lives.

  Captain Hood ventured into Brussels and found that the few newspapers carried bold headlines but that the people were not interested to read them. It was very puzzling, there were all of the ingredients for a revolution on the streets except that the revolutionaries stayed home and the army refused to have any part in the business; they all wanted a quiet life and to hell with patriotism, principle and death before dishonour.

  It was not very English, Captain Hood felt
, and he did not entirely understand it.

  He spoke to a number of Belgians, and they did not understand it either. Most of them had no wish to.

  Captain Hood gave up the struggle and hired a coach to take him to Calais, four horses, frugality be damned for this once. He tried to write his report in the carriage, the French-made roads so much better than the English that it was physically possible to do so, but in the end gave up, for he did not himself comprehend what he had seen and was at a loss to concisely explain it.

  Mayor White was stood on the roof of his cabin, nailing down the last row of shingles on the pair of rooms he had added, a celebration of the child to come and the others that might, he hoped, follow. He watched a wagon drawn by four good horses plod slowly down the track to the village, man and wife on the driving bench, three at least of children behind them. New settlers and welcome; despite their own expansion there was still room and to spare just a couple of miles down the river, the land good. The newcomers stopped outside the store, hitched a lead horse to the rail, got down and stretched. White worked on for five minutes, finished the job and then climbed down his ladder, called to his wife and walked very slowly at her side down the single street.

  “Good day to you, sir, ma’am! Welcome to Andrewstown. My name is White, I am the mayor and blacksmith here.”

  “Oliver Merton, Mr White. I am a surveyor by apprenticeship, a bee-keeper by avocation, and I have some knowledge of carpentry. Will it be possible to set up a workshop near the smithy as well as file on my section of land? I have it in mind to build a wagon-making trade over many years and to keep bees and breed horses and grow potatoes and cabbages to market rather than plough fields of grain. I have enquired of three other villages and found that my ambitions did not suit them. Will there be a welcome here?”

  “There is space and to spare behind the smithy, Mr Merton, and pasture land down river a short way from here. You are driving a team of mares, sir.”