This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  At sea, Britain was in control. But ashore it was another matter, although the British did burn the White House to the ground. Peace, in this unnecessary war, was signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but perhaps its most famous battle took place a fortnight later: the Battle of New Orleans. In just thirty minutes the Americans, commanded by Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)50 killed or wounded 2,000 British troops and lost just thirteen of their own. Jackson was a hero (and became the seventh United States President, 1829–1837) and a new legend grew up: the war of 1812 was the Second War of Independence.

  The war with the Americans was, in European terms, a diversion. Napoleon had been pulling back his troops from across Europe for a great assault on Russia. The Tsar, once Napoleon’s admirer, now believed that peace in Europe was impossible while Bonaparte marched. And in June 1812, the Emperor marched for Moscow. He believed his military strength would have the Tsar calling for peace – that is, capitulating. The Russians would not do so and at Borodino, just west of Moscow, a quarter of a million Russians and French fought the bloodiest battle of the whole century. True, Moscow fell, but the Russians did not. The severest of winters closed in on Napoleon and he started his retreat. Fewer than 20,000 of his once invincible army made it to Warsaw.

  By the spring of 1814, Wellington had driven the French out of Spain and was in Bordeaux. Napoleon’s allies had abandoned him and some were now opposing him. In April that year, Napoleon abdicated and went to Elba. A Bourbon, Louis XVIII, brother of the beheaded King, was now on the throne. From his Mediterranean island, Napoleon saw that there were differences of opinion among his allied enemies. Also, his friends brought news that the King of France did not really command the respect of the people. On 26 February 1815, Napoleon sailed for France. Three weeks later he was back in Paris and the Bourbons were running.

  Meanwhile, the allies decided the time had come to destroy Napoleon. They prepared to invade France but Napoleon didn’t wait for their invasion. He moved on Belgium where Wellington now commanded Dutch, German and Belgian troops as well as his own. The Prussian army under Marshal Gebhard von Blücher was defeated at Lugny on 16 June. Wellington withdrew to Waterloo.

  The Battle of Waterloo lasted one day. Wellington had 68,000 troops but Napoleon had 72,000 and attacked three times between the late morning and late afternoon of 18 June. Blücher arrived in the early evening with a further 45,000 troops to support Wellington, and a last French attack at about seven o’clock failed. Napoleon’s army retreated, leaving 25,000 dead and 9,000 captured. Wellington is thought to have lost 10,000.

  Napoleon escaped to Paris; he had visions of making a great stand on French soil but none shared his enthusiasm. On 22 June 1815 he abdicated and by the end of the month he had escaped to Rochefort on the Biscay coast. He imagined he would go to America. He did not. Instead, he was taken aboard a British warship, the Bellerophon, perhaps in his belief that he would be received as an Emperor and allowed to live in considerable style and dignity in England, the country that he had longed to invade and subjugate its people. Instead and, apparently to his surprise, he was put aboard another ship and on 26 July set sail for the island of St Helena in the Atlantic where he would die six years later.

  Throughout the long campaign, Waterloo was the only time Napoleon and Wellington met in battle and both would be remembered for this one day, although neither thought it their finest. Now all that remained was to draw up a treaty of Europe that would manage the peace as successfully as Wellington had managed the last days of the war. There was now the chance of a long-lasting peace with France for the first time since the days of the Normans. The allies went to conference rather than war but skirmishing continued in the negotiating chamber. Rather like the post-First World War conference on the future of Europe and the degree to which France insisted the Germans had to pay for the war, so now the Prussians demanded France suffered. Castlereagh had a wiser formula for peace. It was a lesson that we had forgotten by the time of the 1920 Versailles Treaty. Castlereagh understood that the war was done and the best way of avoiding grievance and animosity, which could lead to a further rising, was to be moderate in the settlement terms. The French would pay a financial penalty but more testing would be a British army of occupation with Wellington as an imperial figure in command for three years. Churchill, in his A History of the English-speaking Peoples, thought the agreements and protocols, ‘the last great European settlements until 1919–1920’.51

  Meanwhile the style of early nineteenth-century clothes, furniture and buildings – the style of Regency Britain – began to establish itself. This was the period of Jane Austen, of the construction of, appropriately, Regent Street in London, of gas lighting in fashionable places and of Davy’s safety lamps in the coal mines. It was also the period of continuous unrest among the newly named working class.

  In 1799 a Leicester youth called Ned Ludd is said to have smashed machinery that had been installed by a stocking maker because the machinery did the jobs of many who had worked by hand. Then, in 1811, organized machine-smashing occurred in the textile factories of the Midlands and Yorkshire. In 1813 the Luddites, who took their name from Ned Ludd, were executed at York.

  The end of the Napoleonic Wars meant peace in Europe, but in England there was now no need for huge numbers of sailors and soldiers: 300,000 servicemen were discharged from the war at a time when the combined British population was perhaps no more than thirteen million. And the labour market was already overcrowded, inflation was high, perhaps artificially so, and taxation was at wartime levels.

  Manufacturers who thought that the war’s end would bring increased export markets were wrong: there was now no war from which to make profits. Iron production is just one useful indicator: the price of iron was now £8 a ton, whereas during the war it had been £20. Thousands of iron- and coal-workers lost their jobs and many of them took to the streets. A year after the war ended there was considerable evidence that the government could lose control of the country. This was the atmosphere in Britain on 16 August 1819 when between 60,000–80,000 people attended a meeting in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. The speaker was Henry Hunt, known as Orator Hunt and described as one of the extremist leaders. The local yeomanry was sent in by magistrates to arrest him but they failed so the magistrates, instead of sending in the army, ordered the cavalry of the Hussars to do the job. There was panic and hundreds in the crowd received sabre wounds; eleven died.

  The name given to this massacre was Peterloo – a popular irony derived from the British success at Waterloo. The rights and wrongs of that day are debated still. However, in spite of the threat of sedition, treason and uprising, the increasingly prosperous British had more confidence than ever in the very institutions that had been threatened. And the governing caste was just as confident of its right to govern. Perhaps it was a sign of this confidence, and of a faith in future prosperity, that in the year of the Peterloo Massacre the East India Company was arranging to buy a tiny area of Asia called Singapore.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  1820–23

  George III died in 1820 and Britain’s fourth Hanoverian monarch was another George. George IV, although intelligent, was given to pleasures rather than statesmanship and, as Prince of Wales, he had been incautious in some of his friendships. For example, he had been very much under the influence of the best-remembered dandy of early nineteenth-century England, Beau Brummell. Brummell and the Prince of Wales parted company not long after George III was declared insane and incapable of ruling. By 1820 Brummell was hiding from his creditors in France and later perished in an institution for the insane.

  However, before the Prince of Wales assumed the responsibilities of Regent, he took easily to the fashion of drinking and whore-mongering, often, it is said, at Carlton House, close by Pall Mall. He attracted an odd baggage of creditors, debtors, madams, officers on half-pay, bucks and society wits, and the likes of Letitia Lade, once the mistress of the highwayman Sixteen-String Jack, who was hanged. And then
, in 1784, the young Prince had lost his heart to a twice widowed commoner, but more importantly, a Roman Catholic, Maria Fitzherbert, six years his senior. Worse still, he was a strictly Protestant heir who wanted to take a Catholic wife – an utterly illegal proposition under the Royal Marriages Act. It could never be a public union, but it is largely accepted that a ceremony did take place in Mrs Fitzherbert’s Mayfair drawing room. Robert Burt, an Anglican clergyman, officiated. Under law, this was not recognized, but both the Church of Rome and the Established Anglican Church of England recognized the union.

  However, there had to be a public marriage, but not between the King and Mrs Fitzherbert. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, Mrs Fitzherbert was the love of the Prince’s life and the embarrassment of the court. And so, as seemed best in the circumstances, a royal wedding was arranged – to a royal princess. In 1795, George miserably married Caroline of Brunswick and promptly got drunk for the rest of the day. The only child of this unhappy union, Princess Charlotte, was born the following year. But that young Princess died when giving birth to her own child, who was stillborn. If either of them had survived, one or other of them would have become Queen and there would have been no William IV, perhaps no Queen Victoria and perhaps no Elizabeth II.

  George and Caroline’s marriage was made in Brunswick and St James’s, not in heaven. George called the Princess of Wales, ‘the vilest wretch this world was ever cursed with’. He absolved her of all marital obligations, which was a nice way of saying that she was to be kicked out of his life – or so he thought. In 1806 a committee of the Privy Council began what was called the ‘Delicate Investigation’. It certainly was. Its brief was to examine rumours that the Princess of Wales had given birth to an illegitimate child. If this were true, there would be a constitutional crisis. After all, she was the wife of the heir to the throne. Nothing was proved although, considering her lifestyle, there was good reason why such a rumour might have gripped the Privy Council’s imagination.

  In 1814, George banned Caroline from court, and eventually she left England for the Continent – but still as the Princess of Wales, and as the darling of the people. As in other times, the nation took sides. The Prince of Wales was only a few years away from being King or, to put it another way, the Princess of Wales was only a few years away from being Queen. The Prince wanted a divorce. She had been having an affair with a former member of her household, Bartolomeo Pergami, and adultery by the Princess of Wales, the future Queen, was a treasonable offence. A letter from Caroline to George found its way into The Times. The Princess of Wales, by now the uncrowned Queen, had not written the letter. It had been composed for her by those who knew the publication would harm George and bring the people even more to her side. It did both. Not that she needed much in the way of a public relations exercise.

  For example, when she returned to England her carriage was spontaneously hauled by exuberant supporters. Crowds gathered outside her London house. Her every public appearance was followed, whereas George was seen as the wrongdoer. In July 1820, a hearing was opened in Westminster Hall to examine the case against the Princess of Wales, accused of adultery. It all fell apart. The witnesses for the government were unreliable. Parliament was split. Earl Grey, the leader of the Whigs, declared that Caroline was innocent of adultery. The Cabinet was forced to drop the matter. London was delighted: flags, illuminations, minor rioting. George Canning, President of the Board of Control, who favoured Caroline’s viewpoint, resigned in protest at her treatment.

  But even now the matter was not done with. The final scene for Caroline came on 19 July 1821. The stage was the coronation of her husband as George IV at Westminster Abbey. She went to the Abbey and was refused entry. ‘Let me pass; I am your Queen,’ she cried. The pages slammed the doors on her. Her cause was finished. As Sir Walter Scott wrote, it was ‘a fire of straw burnt to the very embers’. And then, the next month, she died. Of what, it is uncertain. She was fifty-three and for the government, the embarrassment of Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, and their newly crowned monarch was over.

  The political theatre quickly, if not quietly, moved on. Collective party responsibility was still confined to military, foreign and, sometimes, economic affairs. And apart from the fact that Parliamentary systems and collective responsibilities were still developing, the Duke of Wellington was not simply a run-of-the-mill politician-turned-soldier-turned-politician. Wellington, like many of his colleagues at the head of the governing classes, was an exceptional personality. He was someone who regarded his own counsel as the correct one. He watched, waited, planned and was cautious. In other words, his instinct was that of the conservative thinker. In a letter to the Prime Minister, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool, on 1 November 1818, Wellington outlined very clearly his idea of how government should perform without what he called factious opposition.

  The experience which I have acquired during my long service abroad has convinced me that a factious opposition to the Government is highly injurious to the interests of the country; and thinking as I do now I could not become a party to such an opposition, and I wish that this may be clearly understood by those persons with whom I am now about to engage as a colleague in Government

  This is a Commander-in-Chief making it clear that he is loyal, but equally, he remains his own man. Within a week, Liverpool was telling Wellington that he understood and accepted the conditions for Wellington’s return. After all, Liverpool could hardly afford to lose the nation’s one living hero.

  And so Wellington joined Liverpool’s Cabinet with the simple ambition of being part of a political system united in preserving the order of things. Not everyone went along with this view. In 1820, the threat of insurrection was considered very real. Twenty Radicals led by a middle-aged man called Arthur Thistlewood met in a hayloft in Cato Street in Marylebone, London. Their plan, or so it was said, was to assassinate the Cabinet and take over government. It came to nothing and they were arrested. Five of them, including Thistlewood, were hanged.

  The immediate result was the Parliamentary Statutes, known as the Six Acts, which, among other things, banned gatherings of more than fifty people at a time. And a heavy stamp duty was imposed on newspapers, the idea being that the Radicals wouldn’t be able to afford to print their own.

  The Acts weren’t much more than political gestures, in theory to strengthen the authority of the magistrates. Nevertheless, confidence in the government’s ability to cope with civil disorder appears to have been restored, although there is some evidence to suggest that Radicalism was not as threatening as was supposed. But it is important to remember that this was a society which didn’t have an organized police force and much of the information came from paid spies. Spying was a lucrative occupation. Here’s a bill for spying services sent to the Home Office from the Bolton magistrate.

  Mr C and his agents:

  £71

  Mr W and his agents:

  £122.11s.3d

  LF and his agent B:

  £34.17s

  Postage and various expenses:

  £6.1s

  Total:

  £234.9s.3d

  At these rates, spies were on to a good thing. So a lot of the intelligence about the Radicals might have been spiced up to keep their paymasters happy.

  While the greased palm of domestic bureaucracy kept regular hours, the oil lamps burned nightly in Castlereagh’s understaffed and overstretched Foreign Office. Castlereagh became overworked. He had guided the nation’s foreign policy through seven dangerous years which had included the rewriting of the political and diplomatic laws of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon. He had hoped for a safer Europe. But much militated against that: revolutions in Portugal, Spain and the Two Sicilies; suspicions of Russian ambitions; threats from Austria to existing treaties; the Greek War of Independence and the threat to Turkey. Castlereagh became deranged, and on 13 August 1822 he went into his dressing room and cut his own throat. Some have suggested that on top o
f these professional stresses, Castlereagh was being blackmailed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  1824–7

  The 1820s began and ended with George IV on the throne. It was a decade of change, a decade of four prime ministers: Liverpool, Canning, very briefly Lord Goderich and the Duke of Wellington. This was the decade of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, of the bridge over the Menai Strait, of the death of Lord Byron who had gone to fight in the Greek War of Independence. It was a period in which the term ‘reform’ was being taken more seriously.

  The Reform Acts were three nineteenth-century Bills designed to allow more people to vote and to change the voting method. The First Reform Act was in 1832, the second in 1867 and the third in 1884. But back in the 1820s there were other reforms: reforms of how to react to political necessity and moral indignation that produced, for example, the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act. There were also new laws that would allow freer trade and tariffs; reforms that moved towards active trades unions and changed attitudes to the way, and the conditions in which, people worked. One example came in 1823 with the repeal of the Combination Acts that had made it illegal for two or more people to combine in trying to get better conditions at work and more money. Without the Combination Laws the passage towards active trades unionism became clear – at least with the benefit of hindsight. And there actually was an attempt – an unsuccessful one – to establish something called the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

  Reform did not suddenly come upon the British conscience. The French Revolution nudged any complacency among the people and their so-called representatives. MPs did not represent the people, of course; the best that we can judge, Members of the Parliament simply represented the right to rule and, at best, would take up a mood. That was what Pitt had done when he threatened to resign over Catholic Emancipation in Ireland; that was what Clarkson et al. encouraged the MP William Wilberforce to do when he took up the cause to abolish the slave trade and then slavery altogether in the British colonies. So we can see there was no single reason for the British to look at themselves and judge if they were a fair or unfair society. A series of sometimes startling, even unnerving, events and movements would set in motion an era that would move society to look at its institutions and their functions, exclusive or otherwise, for the next two centuries. There were so many wrongs by twenty-first century standards that needed reforming. In the period we have reached, the British had been subjected to political trauma rather than pangs of social conscience.