A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  The inventor of the ha-ha was Walpole’s landscape designer at Houghton, Charles Bridgeman, and the conceit was also pure Walpole in that it converted a military trench into an ornamental effect. Discreetly defended pleasure, the appearance of inclusiveness through the policing of exclusion might have been the watchword of the regime. The grazing animals – especially deer and their woodland habitat – were protected by the most ferocious anti-poaching laws enacted in England since the Angevins. In 1723 Walpole’s parliament put no fewer than fifty capital offences on the statute book, most of them dealing with poaching, the cutting of trees (or even tree limbs) and the robbing of fishponds. In enacting the savage code of penalties, the government was responding to a sudden crime wave in Waltham Forest in Essex, committed by gangs with blackened faces. For those who have argued that Walpole was merely using a disingenuously concocted Jacobite scare to impose a judicial terror on the countryside on behalf of the landed oligarchy, the Waltham Blacks have been described as heroes of the poor: Hanoverian Robin Hoods liberating the rich man’s venison, or men on the margin of subsistence just attempting to keep body and soul together. In this particular case, though, there seems little doubt that for once Walpole’s low threshold of paranoia was perfectly justified since the most recent research makes it incontrovertibly clear that the Waltham Blacks were, in fact, part of a well-organized Jacobite underground.

  Justified or not, however, when the Whig government made it possible for a man to be hanged for taking a sheep, it was completing the security arrangements deemed necessary to protect the investment that the oligarchs had made in their property. Walpole made good his promises to use the institutions of government to look after the interests of the landed classes. Land taxes were kept low, and enclosure acts got rid of the scattered strips that had supported families for centuries, replacing them with consolidated, rationally planned, profit-yielding farms. Smallholders who had kept the odd pig or goose and grown a few crops on their strips now had their land taken away for paltry compensation or sometimes none at all. Reduced to living entirely off wage labour, they could hang on in their village or trudge off to somewhere else in hopes of better prospects. The stewards who had seen them off remained quite dry-eyed. It was a shame, no doubt, but agriculture was no longer a matter of sentiment, much less a charity. Like virtually everything else in Hanoverian England, it was strictly business.

  If landowners needed to treat their country property as a money-pump it was because, increasingly, they also needed to keep up appearances in town. And while it was possible to cut something of a figure in a provincial town, especially those like Bristol or Glasgow where money came pouring in from the colonial trade, anyone of real ambition had to be seen in London. Walpole may have liked to play the country magnate at Houghton, but his house in Chelsea was just as important as a headquarters for political strategy.

  For London, arguably, was the one empire of men and money that escaped from Walpole’s managerial control. No one political boss, not even someone of Walpole’s inexhaustible, omniscient talents, could manage a city of some 700,000 souls – easily the biggest urban concentration in all of Europe. One in ten of the population of England lived there and one in six had spent some time working there, and every day the country wagons and carriages would disgorge yet more hundreds looking to cash in on the dazzling fortune they imagined the city to promise. As a headache for political management London was a special source of aggravation, since it acted as a magnet for some of the most creative and independent men of talent, and had generated a market for their ideas independent of anything the Crown could adequately control. As a centre of patronage the court had already begun to atrophy somewhat under the later Stuarts, and the much more parsimonious and philistine Hanoverians completed the process of shifting the centre of attraction from court to city. By the 1730s there were in London some 550 coffee-houses and scores of clubs, all with ardent, literate clienteles for whom irreverence, often of a brutally malicious tenor, was as much a necessary daily diet as mutton pies and ale. And the likes of Steele and Addison, Swift and Pope, whose Dunciad (1728) railed against the scandalous scoundrel time of the pax Walpoleana, were more than ready to supply them.

  And London was also a great, and potentially subversive, dissolvent of rank. Foreigners, accustomed to more rigorously policed separation of the social orders, were horrified by the promiscuous jostle of the city as well as its gut-packing greediness and roistering, drunken violence, and especially by the indiscriminate mingling of classes in the pleasure gardens. Paris could not yet boast anything like Ranelagh or Vauxhall where, since all the men carried swords and all the ladies arrived in painted finery, many of both in masquerade, it was quite impossible to distinguish between the genteel and the common.

  The same was true of the great pleasure hubs of the city. The only marker of esteem, the only necessity for gratification in a place like Covent Garden, was money (or at least credit). And there was so very much to buy. Every kind of prostitute for a start, from fake-virginal to fake French to ‘singers and dancers’. If you were after something more specialized, then Harris’ New Atlantis or The Whoremongers’ Guide to London could help find cross-dressers, flagellants, gay ‘molly-houses’ or posture girls who would dance naked over a silver reflecting dish. And if all this parade of vice sickened, more innocent pastimes were also available – like the hunchback Robert Powell’s puppet show in Covent Garden, or the coffee-house of the retired actor and murderer Charles Macklin who had stabbed a colleague in a fit of rage and who kept his own private theatre of oratory where he gave voice on issues of the day. As the morning dawned, Covent Garden would fill with other kinds of vendors: pie-men and sellers of dried and fresh fruit and vegetables, dolls and toys, hats and canes.

  It became a commonplace of moralists to deplore the seductions of display, the knowing arrangement, designed to prick the appetite. But there was no stopping it with clucking against iniquity. Shops – and there were, it was estimated, 20,000 of them in London – were increasingly fitted with glass windows, bowed in front to expand the area of effective display. Streets were better lit, so that the rituals of inspection became part of the experience of what, for the first time, can be described without anachronism as shopping. The mistress and master of the household as well as their servants might now take themselves to ogle exotica newly arrived on the market, like oriental goldfish, blue macaws or warbling finches. Previously inaccessible luxuries were now manufactured and priced to find a market among the middling sort of people: Delft blue-and-white pottery somewhat resembling Ming china, from which to sip your tea or chocolate; glass stemware in the shape of bells or bugles for cordials and wines; pewter or silver tankards for ale. And if drink led to the indulgence of other vices you could arm yourself (as contemporaries put it) against sexual diseases with the first commercially produced condoms: lambskins in packets of eight tied with silk for the well-to-do, linen soaked in brine for the not so well-off.

  The city as a great Bartholomew’s Fair – a gorgeous, chaotic theatre of eye-popping spectacle and greedy consumption – helped the oligarchs as much as it threatened them, since from Walpole’s view it all acted as a political opiate, or at least a distraction. Better that energy be driven by the gratification of the senses than committed to the revival of partisan and religious wars. But for precisely that same reason, the increasing number of Walpole’s critics in the late 1720s and 1730s saw the gilded web inducing a vicious stupor: robbing the deluded of the innocence of their bodies, the soundness of their minds and the integrity of their souls. London, they said, took free men and women and made them slaves.

  The works of William Hogarth and Henry Fielding are full of victims of the Mephistophelian city, arriving dewy-fresh from the country, falling for scoundrelly promises of easily gotten fortune and descending swiftly into a bottomless pit of iniquity, disease, madness and death. But the credit trap could make short work of even the most urbane and socially sophisticated, and the drop f
rom fashion to incarceration (for a debt as small as £2) was a descent into hell. Robert Castell, whose beautiful folio on Roman villas, The Villas of the Ancients: Illustrated (1728), was on the shelves of every country gentleman who fancied himself a new Pliny or Horace, found himself in the Fleet in 1728 at the mercy of his gaoler, Thomas Bambridge. Unable to pay the costs of his imprisonment Castell was thrown into a local spongeing house full of smallpox victims, effectively a sentence of death that duly overtook the unfortunate author.

  Prison was one of the most robust growth sectors of Britannia Inc. Accordingly, the going rate for a wardenship rose steadily in the Macheath years of Walpole’s prime. The sum of £5000 was what John Huggins paid for the wardenship of the Fleet, and he scaled his tariff of residential charges to the inmates to ensure that he got a decent return on his investment. Just £5 would get you your very own cell, a few shillings more something approximating food and (a hot-ticket item for purveyor and customer alike) regular rounds of beer or prison-distilled gin. If these rates were beyond your reach, you took your chances in the packed common prisons, sleeping on the filthy straw with no air, light or sanitation.

  And that was the basic service, before Huggins began a programme of cost-cutting to minimize his outgoings: ignoring clogged drains; shoving ever more bodies into ever smaller spaces; raising the fee prisoners were charged for their own shackles. As for the utterly destitute, they were using up valuable customer space, so Huggins did whatever it took to move them along to a Better Place. Sometimes they were inconsiderate enough to refuse to go. One morning a group of visitors to the prison chapel were surprised to see a completely naked, breathtakingly filthy man, covered only with a half-shredded mattress, burst in upon their meditations, feathers stuck to him with his own excrement, looking, one of them thought, like a demented chicken. As soon as the visitors had made a hasty exit, Huggins had the pathetic figure thrown right back into the freezing shed from which he had somehow escaped. He died soon afterwards.

  Word of such horrors got out – especially when they involved gentlemen like Sir William Rich, put in a room full of unburied corpses for daring to strike the warden. A parliamentary committee was established to investigate the state of prisons and published a report documenting conditions of unimaginable degradation. Hogarth, whose own father had done time for debt, painted the committee – for some reason in their own chamber rather than in the prison offices where they actually conducted their interviews. In one crucial respect, though, Hogarth’s vision is accurate. The manacled, trussed-up prisoner – actually a Portuguese Jew – has become a martyr, almost Michelangelesque in his torment, while the gaoler, shifty and sinister, is made to appear the real malefactor.

  In the late 1720s, the cry of ‘Who are the real criminals?’ became common in the news-sheets and coffee-houses of London. Everywhere the line between the lawbreakers and the law-enforcers seemed arbitrary. In 1725 the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Macclesfield, was himself convicted of embezzling £80,000 during the South Sea Bubble. Conversely, when he was executed at Tyburn the same year, the most famous of all England’s criminals, Jonathan Wild, was recognized by observers like Lord Chesterfield as having the distinctive quality of a ‘man of parts’ who, had circumstances been different, might have been ‘rather born for a ribbon round his shoulders than a rope about his neck’.

  Wild’s career had begun, like that of so many others, as a pimp running a ‘buttock and file’ racket, stealing from the clients of whores while they were busy in bed. But like the upwardly mobile apprentices of the legitimate trades, Wild aspired to a better kind of business and found his true vocation as a master-receiver. Presiding over an enormous emporium of stolen goods, Wild made himself indispensable to both the robbers and the robbed. The thieves needed him to fence their loot and keep quiet about where he had got it; the householders needed him as the only sure way to get it back, there being no police force to do it for them. It was a perfect entrepreneurial loop. Making sure there was no evidence to connect him to the crimes, Wild made no secret that he was actually running the gangs of highwaymen, housebreakers and cutpurses whom he was purporting to nail. Occasionally, for the sake of keeping up appearances as the ‘Thieftaker General’, he would in fact give one up to the magistrates – a regrettable sacrifice for the sake of business credibility. And he was not above complaining that the sums offered for the retrieval of stolen goods hardly compensated for all the onerous expenses incurred in organizing highway robbery. There were the horses to stable, the feed, the lanterns.

  Twelve days before Wild was hanged the shrewdest and most honest of all writers on the freebooting English economy, Bernard de Mandeville (who scandalized moralists by acknowledging the correlation between consumer extravagance and the general accumulation of wealth), saw this master-criminal’s true significance as having transformed petty larceny into a genuine industry, complete with regulated hours and places of work, and strict books kept on turnover and profits. He expressed his amazement at the hypocrisy of magistrates who ‘not only know and see this but . . . continue to make use of such a person for . . . evidence and in manner own that they are beholden to him in the administration of justice’. Wild’s authentic impersonation of the entrepreneur was capped, posthumously, by having Daniel Defoe ghost his gallows confession – which, needless to say, became an immediate best-seller.

  It was the genius of John Gay to take the coffee-house truism that the lawbreakers and the law-makers were interchangeable and turn it into the greatest hit of the eighteenth century: his ‘Newgate Pastoral’, The Beggar’s Opera (1728). The audiences who roared abuse at Peachum the Thieftaker of course recognized him as Jonathan Wild, just as they cheered Macheath the highwayman as a stand-in for Jack Sheppard the housebreaker, who had gone to the gallows a year before Wild and had become a street hero for escaping from prison no fewer than four times. But although there was a minor figure in Gay’s show called ‘Bob Booty’, it was just as obvious that Peachum, the extortionist and swaggering man of parts, the man who pretended to civic virtue while bleeding everyone white, was also a thinly veiled caricature of Walpole himself.

  So when The Beggar’s Opera took London and then the provinces by storm it took anti-Walpole satire out of the pages of opposition journals and into the taverns, coffee-houses and theatres. Perhaps it stung to be depicted as the Gangster-in-Office, but Walpole had a hide like an elephant and was certainly not about to fold his tent and depart at the behest of John Gay. He also comforted himself with the knowledge that much of the wave of opposition fury stemmed from their consternation that the new king, George II, whose hatred of his father had led them to believe he would inaugurate his reign by disposing of his prime minister, had instead succumbed to Walpole’s inexplicable spell. But although the newly aggressive tide of criticism did not for the moment do much to disturb his stranglehold on power, it did bear witness to a rising tide of revulsion at the world of which Walpole complacently boasted: a sense that beneath the platitudes about peace and stability lay brutality, corruption and misery. Dig beneath the dross, the moralists said, and you will find disease and death.

  A walk through the seamier areas of London, through the rookeries and alleys, was a walk over bodies. The supply of very potent, very cheap gin had created an entire sub-culture of dependency and violence in the city comparable only to the crack-houses of the 1980s. Hogarth’s famous graphic nightmare of a world in deathly auto-destruction was, of course, a polemical exaggeration. But not altogether, since we know of at least one mother, Judith Dufour, who became notorious for strangling her own baby daughter and selling every stitch of her own clothing to satisfy her craving for a dram. There came a point, though, when someone got tired of stepping over half-dead babies in the gutter or infant corpses thrown into the Fleet Ditch along with the ‘blood, guts and dung’ that, according to Pope, one expected to find there.

  Thomas Coram had made his fortune in Massachusetts from the Atlantic timber trade. All that he wanted was to s
ettle down to a quiet life in Rotherhithe where he could see the Thames and the tides. But the sight of the tiny abandoned corpses in the streets would not let him alone, and he also knew that the mortality rate for infants born in the poor house and sent out to wet nurse was close to a 100 per cent. Opulent London was a hecatomb for babies. So Coram determined to tap some of the city’s fortune to establish a foundling hospital, a place where infants, legitimate or illegitimate, could be deposited, no questions asked, and would be given a decent chance of survival. For almost twenty years he made himself a nuisance to his friends, lobbying the great and the good and going so far as to petition the king, until the necessary funds were raised.

  He also had to beat back accusations that a place to deposit bastards would reward depravity with impunity and thus further encourage it. Working with Hogarth, Coram had a fund-raising letterhead shamelessly designed to milk every kind of sympathy. In the drawing on the letterhead, Coram himself appears as a saintly patriarch leading his happy and smiling charges towards a better future. The campaign worked. George II – seldom a pushover for hard-luck stories – melted, along with the queen, and after that the Quality lined up to donate.