Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  The strain had been tremendous. For every Briton in the fight there had been at least two, and at times as many as four Frenchmen, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Italians and Danes. Yet outwardly Britain was not weaker and poorer for the struggle but richer and stronger. In the last three years of the century the annual value of her foreign trade had risen from £50,000,000 to £73,500,000 and her revenue from £19,000,000 to £33,000,000.1 She owed this to two factors: the initiative of her private citizens and her command of the sea. Into every French, Dutch and Spanish colony and island which her ships of war isolated and her red-coats occupied, her merchants had carried their trade. And, since the Navy raised its men from the Merchant Marine, every increase in trade had led to a corresponding growth in sea power. While the French armies absorbed immense multitudes from field and mart, Britain, with a comparatively small part of her population serving at sea, became the workshop of every nation with

  1 . H. B. E., II, 78-9, 81, 83.

  a coastline unguarded by Gallic bayonets. Served by the inventiveness of British mechanical genius and fed by healthy and vigorous rural stocks, the raw industrial cities of the coaly North and Midlands had grown during the war by leaps and bounds.

  Thanks to Adam Smith and the libertarian bent of British law and habit, few administrative swathes had impeded this process. While Bumble and the squire still governed by ancient lights in the village, the winding road to the smoky towns in the northern dales was open to every man of enterprise. Activity followed opportunity, and wealth and power activity. The whirling wheels of Brummagem and Manchester span the pattern .of a new world.

  The workmanship, durability, ingenuity and variety of British goods were the wonder of the age. Visitors to Sheffield saw knives with a hundred and eighty blades and scissors so small that they were hardly visible to the eye; at Leeds one could step at nightfall into clothes which at daybreak had been raw wool from the sheep's back. Every nation's fashions were carefully studied; Latins could walk their native Boulevards in their traditional costume and yet be clad from head to toe in the products of the West Riding.1 William Radcliffe on his return from the Manchester cotton market used to be asked by his mill hands from what remote land the week's returns had come. He and his like won and kept their customers by honest dealing; the label "English" was a universal passport.2 To the hallmark of quality—legacy of generations of fine craftsmanship and integrity—were added the range and cheapness of the power-machines. Demand for English wares fostered the growth of machinery, and machinery, by lowering prices, multiplied sales. National necessity and the opportunity for growing rich quickly overcame a conservative people's prejudices against the snorting, roaring monsters that revolutionised their lives. At Bradford a steam engine, rejected in 1793 as a smoky nuisance, had become by 1801 the pride of that thriving town; at South Cary Parson Woodforde watched with approval a wool-carding machine with 3000 motions operating simultaneously.

  All this, taking place in the midst of a great war, had involved an immense dislocation of social life. The ruling class, absorbed in the struggle for national existence, had neither time nor thought for the regulation of a new kind of society. Their eyes were riveted

  1 Letts, 129-30; Espriella, I, 70-1 j II, 145-6.

  2 Sec Letts, 122. It was not, however, always so. The cheap ironmongers of Birmingham were beginning to acquire an unenviable reputation for shoddy wares; their contribution to the African Slave Trade, if Southey is to be believed, was guns sold to the negroes at a dollar and a half and which, on being fired, were apt to burst and mangle the purchaser. —Espriella, I, 118.

  on southern horizons where their fleets contained the great explosive force of Continental Revolution; they could only spare a hasty glance northwards when some riot in hungry Lancashire or Staffordshire sent the yeomanry clattering over the cobblestones. Trade and men alike had had to find their own level in the rough England of endurance that stood the long siege of the Revolution militant.

  The results were grave. To those who troubled to visit the new towns it seemed as though the nation had sold its soul to Mammon. Under the double effect of war and the new price-cutting economics, men, women and children were, subjected to influences which endangered the future morality and physique of the race. At the moment that British patriotism was being invoked as never before to defy the French, the conception of patriotism was being discarded in economic matters for the creed of a bagman. Liberty for the thrustful to grow rich was held to justify every abuse. Ancient pieties and ways of life were uprooted in a few years by the uncontrolled action of machinery and cut-throat competition. While cultured folk deplored the sufferings of French exiles, thousands of Britons were driven from their homes and traditional crafts by enclosure and unemployment and herded like slaves into the new mills without the leaders of national opinion uttering a word in protest or even apparently being aware of the fact. In Manchester and the surrounding cotton towns children, set to the looms at seven years of age, worked from five in the morning^ till six at night, while the population, multiplying itself every few years, was crowded into narrow, airless, sunless streets and underground cellars. Little girls of ten, naked and black with coal dust, dragged trucks on all fours down the tunnels of Northumbrian mines, and in Birmingham men went about with thumbs crushed into formless lumps by unfenced machinery. Stench and darkness, hellish din and ignorance were becoming the lot of an ever-growing proportion of the race. And this in a Christian country whose social happiness and freedom had long been the envy of the world! If the French paid for their victories in piles of mangled corpses, the British paid for theirs in the bitterness and human deterioration of the labour reserve of laissez-faire. For it was from the rising tolls on unrestricted trade that the Treasury financed the war and supported Pitt's alliances.

  Yet the disease was still in its infancy,-affecting only a small part of the population, and might have been controlled by a modicum of statesmanship. The race was tough enough to stand a good deal without taking much immediate harm. The hardihood of the Britain of 1800 is not easy for the twentieth century to realise.1 Even in the upper classes men like Charles Apperley's father rose daily at six till past their eightieth year, and allowed their children to run wild and lousy with the sturdy rapscallions of the waste. At the great Midland school of Rugby ten-year-old boys from rich homes were flogged from their beds in the small hours to take up night-lines for their seniors2: softness was a thing almost unknown—the prerogative of degenerate fops and invalids. In the North the country women went in front of the reapers wielding the sickle; in the farms and manor-houses of the Welsh border phalanxes of buxom, rosy-faced maids gathered round the washing tub at midnight every Sunday for Herculean labours. Such bore the stalwart soldiers—" not particularly tall but full in the chest"3—whom Wellington was to use with such effect in the Peninsula.

  A hardy and passionate race, not over-refined but self-centred, vigorous and given to internecine fighting, was the general verdict of foreigners on Britain. The cook at Plasgronow threw a cleaver at the gardener's head before marrying him; a hunt over the stony Welsh foothills generally ended in a free fight. The pride of that neighbourhood, students of Nimrod's youth will remember, was a farmer who could thrash any two men with his fists, beat them afterwards at drinking and lift an oak table by his shining teeth. John Varley, the waterrcolourist, used to vary his prolonged labours with bouts of boxing, and was so full of life that he welcomed the daily procession of duns up his attic stairs, declaring that without his troubles he would burst with joy.

  Fighting, not for the State but for personal rights, was an inherent part of the English system. There was antagonism and struggle in everything. " Check and counter-check," wrote Southey's Spaniard, "is the principle of their constitution, and the result of centuries of contention between Crown and people." Even the King, the most respected and safely-seated in Europe, was regularly caricatured in the newspapers, and, if he arrived late at the theatre, expected to be—and was—booed by the
gallery. If his bow to his subjects was not deep enough, he would be greeted by shouts of "Lower! Lower!"; on one occasion when one of his sons bobbed in a perfunctory way, the Queen—wise woman—seized the Prince's head and pushed it down.4

  This universal spirit of contention was harmonised by two powerful attributes: respect for Law and love of fair play. At the

  1A background against which the horrors and injustices described in Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's great books must be set; without it the historian is apt to lose his sense of proportion.

  2 Apperley, 155. 3 Stanhope, Conversations, 24. 4 Letts, 147.

  time of the Peace the English were still without a police force. Yet if a man knifed another in the street, passers-by did not shrug their shoulders but spontaneously endeavoured to prevent the crime and seize the offender. Such a people, as Southey said, put out riot and insurrection as they would a fire. Many of their laws never appeared on the Statute Book; others were not even recognised in the Courts. A gambler who failed to answer his debts in the cockpit was hoisted to the ceiling in a basket and kept suspended there till the sport was done. And though fisticuffs was a universal activity which no one dreamt of stopping, a bully who drew his sword on an unarmed man would have a hundred indignant citizens round him in a minute. A Frenchman, visiting London during the Peace, was astonished to see the Duke of Grafton, instead of chastising the insolence of a rough with his cane, roll up his sleeves and "lamb him most horribly." In England it was the recognised way.1

  From the crowd round the pillory hurling garbage, dead cats and ordure at the malefactor who had offended against popular standards of behaviour, to the gentlemen of the Commons sprawling on the benches, cracking nuts and eating oranges as they applauded or interrupted the speeches of the King's Ministers, open judgment by a man's peers was the English rule. When the Prince of Wales threatened to speak in the House of Lords on the affairs of India, Lord Ellenborough let it be known that, if he did, he should get neighbour's fare, for he would not spare him. It was this boisterous breath of liberty that kept the country so astonishingly free of political tyranny; despite the bitterness of Party feeling, the epidemic of food riots and the temporary suspension of Habeas Corpus, there were less than thirty State prisoners at the close of the war.

  One saw the spirit of freedom in the London streets: the "multitudinous moving picture" of the Strand with the crowds coming and going like a continuous riot under the flickering oil lights; the rattle of the coaches and drays: the cheerfulness of the fashionable shops with their glistening panes and smart bow-windows huddled against lowly dwellings behind whose open doors and low, ragged hutches cobblers and other humble artisans did their work; "the mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury Lane theatre just at the hour of five"; the traffic blocks with the gilded carriages of the aristocracy patiently taking their turn behind droves of oxen, coal-wagons and blaspheming draymen; in the floating pall of congealed smoke that, rising from the chimneys of a hundred and sixty thousand houses and furnaces, hung for more than half the year, sometimes in impenetrable fog and at other times

  1 The Times, 23rd Sept., 1797.

  in a glorious, sun-pierced canopy, over the domes and spires of the City and which always put the painter, Haydon, in mind of energy personified. In the capital of England—" Lunnon," as Fox called it— every one seemed to be absorbed in his business and every one had to look after himself. "You stop," wrote a dazed foreigner, "and bump! a porter runs against you shouting ' By your leave ' after he has knocked you down.... Through din and clamour and the noise of hundreds of tongues and feet you hear the bells of the church steeples, postmen's bells, the street organs, fiddlers and the tambourines of itinerant musicians and the cries of vendors of hot and cold food at the street corners. A rocket blazes up stories high amidst a yelling crowd of beggars, sailors and urchins. Someone shouts ' Stop thief!', his handkerchief is gone. Every one runs and presses forward, some less concerned to catch the thief than to steal a watch or purse for themselves. Before you are aware of it a young, well-dressed girl has seized your hand, ' Come, my lord, come along, let us drink a glass together I'... All the world rushes headlong without looking, as if summoned to the bedside of the dying. That is Cheapside and Fleet Street on a December evening."

  Yet in all this chaotic city, with its 864,000 inhabitants and its congeries of thieves' kitchens and Alsatias, there was no police force but a handful of scarlet-waistcoated Bow Street Runners and the aged watchmen of the medieval Parishes. The government of the greatest city in the world was still fundamentally that of a village. The sculptures in the Abbey were so dirty that it was impossible to distinguish the figures, the tombs were mutilated and covered with names scratched by citizens in search of a half-holiday's immortality, and outside St. Paul's stood a shabby statue of Queen Anne, lacking nose and ears, with a pile of stones at her feet—target of successive generations of urchins. The seats in St. James's Park were too rickety to use, the streets fouled and blocked by herds of cattle, the air hideous with cries extolling the rival merits of flowers and vegetables, rabbits and lavender, baked fruits from charcoal braziers, bandboxes slung on poles, baskets and rat-traps, bellows and playbills and even pails of water, for large parts of the capital lacked the most elementary conveniences. It was so all over England; at Bristol the steps of the Cathedral were used habitually as a public lavatory.

  What served when England was a village no longer sufficed in an age of steam and world trade. Within three generations the population of the United Kingdom had risen from five and a half to eleven million. The country was crying out for organisation. But so long as its leaders were busied with the struggle with France none was to be had. Peace meant a chance for England to put her crowded house in order; renewed war the postponement of all that was needed if fatal injuries to the national well-being were to be averted.

  Even in the unsullied countryside with its unbroken life of centuries the need for wise control and thought for the future was being felt. Outwardly all was well: the freshness and sweetness of the air, the sunshine unclouded by smoke, the singing of the birds, the verdure of the fields had never seemed so beautiful to Englishmen. Crome's cottage in the woods, with its tiny latticed windows and fine jointing and plastering, its deep roof of thatch, its wood-smoke rising in the soft air, still stood foursquare to the challenge of a new world. So did the sturdy country folk; the squire in coat of pepper-and-salt cloth, white dimity waistcoat, nankeen breeches and fine linen ruffled at breast and wrist whom Nimrod saw standing with benevolent gaze and regular, pleasing features against the background of his own fireside; the retainer in his moleskin cap and stout Sunday suit of olive-coloured velveteen that lasted a lifetime; the black-eyed, rosy-cheeked kitchenmaid among the shining stew-pans and pewter starting up the great coal fire at daybreak with the blows of her mighty hammer. From the land they served with hereditary skill and virtues was drawn the abundant, home-grown, unprocessed fare to which the English attributed their robust health; the vast joints of beef and mutton that so astonished foreigners, the tubs of salted butter and curds and whey, the plentiful fat turkeys, geese and capons, the sides of bacon and bowls of eggs, the gigantic coppers and vats of beer and cider that they brewed at home and kept on perpetual tap as befitted neighbourly men of "great stowage" whose boast it was that they "never dried their nets."1

  Yet beneath its smiling surface the cancer of commercialised individualism was sapping even this strong polity. Though under pressure of war and rising prices more wheat was grown than ever before, the process was mercilessly sacrificing the small man for the large and the peasant for the tenant farmer. Those able to borrow freely from the banks on the security of broad acres or ample stock were able to keep back their crops till the market reached its peak while smaller men were forced to sell early and cheap. Landlords and bankers both encouraged this tendency; it saved the former trouble to let his land in a few big holdings, and paid the latter to offer extended credit to facilitate the throwing
together o"f farms.2

  1 Apperley, 7, 19, 70, 80-1, 84, 224. 2 Farington 1, 317.

  Rendered inevitable by war and the threat of famine, the process had not enhanced the country's living wealth, which had always rested on the transmitted skill, industry and self-interest of a numerous and contented peasantry. By driving the latter to the towns the engrossment of farms and enclosure of commons, though resulting in a great improvement in stock-raising and cropping methods, was beginning to depopulate the countryside. That system of farming down to the smallest blade of grass associated with the family holding was now to be abandoned. The consequences were not to be felt till the next age. Yet with it went the tradition of a thousand years. When Betsey Fremantle, staying with the Temples at lordly Wotton, watched the contest of fifty-four labourers, each mowing a quarter of an acre against one another for a new hat and a few groats, and saw them afterwards with their wives and families at dinner under the avenue, she was unaware that she was witnessing the passing of the Buckinghamshire peasantry.1 Their rustic knowledge and enthusiasm, the heritage of many generations, were still at the disposal of their new masters, but its sources were drying up. Presently the yeomanry were to follow them into penury and, in the fullness of time, the squirearchy, leaving the

  land a wilderness of dock and undrained swamp to be farmed by the bank and the mortgagor.

  To all these things the rulers of England were blind. So long as French bayonets lined the Channel shore and the Combined Fleets lay at Brest, it is hard to blame them. For a quarter of a century, ever since the start of the American War, England had faced external crisis, with only a break of six years between the disastrous Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution. That brief trough between two wars had been her only chance to recover from bankruptcy and the loss of her first Empire. Her immense reserves and vitality had since enabled her to ride storm after storm:. there had seemed no limit to her resilience and capacity for growth and achievement. Yet in 1802, having been at war for thirty-three out of the past sixty-three years, she was ripe for a long period of peaceful reorganisation. British civilisation needed re-orientating.