Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  As he read through the reports, Sir Robert Walpole found plenty to alarm him. There was the mysterious figure of ‘Captain Tom the Barber’ and the lists of Irish houses. This was no grassroots disturbance. Another report claimed that among ‘the greater and more ignorant part of [the] mobb’ there were ‘many intriguing persons of better sort amongst them in disguise particularly several who are strongly suspected to be popish Priests.’13 ‘Although the complaint of the Irish was the first motive,’ Walpole wrote to his brother, ‘the Jacobites are blending with all other discontents, endeavouring to stir up the distillers and gin retailers, and to avail themselves of the spirit and fury of the people.’14

  As if he wanted to add to Sir Robert’s woes, the King had gone off on one of his summer trips to Hanover. An agent who managed to infiltrate a Jacobite cell reported that ‘the conversation turned chiefly upon the advantages that their party will receive by His Majesty’s frequent visits to Hanover.’15 Then a Jacobite arms cache was found.16 Further signs of trouble came when a distiller in High Holborn, Francis Griffiths, received an anonymous letter:

  Sir, Strike and free yourselves and country. Rise in arms against the dog that governs this unfortunate land and fight for your right King. [Resist], and your properties and you will much oblige your Country and me youre King of right.

  Take Place

  J. St.17

  There may have been distillers in London who were fool enough to think James Stuart wrote personal notes exhorting them to rebellion, but Francis Griffiths wasn’t one of them. He contacted an agent called John Ibbut and passed it on to the authorities.

  By now, the chances of bringing in prohibition without trouble seemed remote. ‘By the seditious ballads and discontent that appears about the Gin Act,’ a Tower Hamlets magistrate wrote to Walpole, ‘it looks to me as if it would be very difficult to carry it thoroughly into execution, of which the Jacobites will not be wanting to take advantage and set us in a flame if they can.’ From another of the Prime Minister’s regular correspondents came an even more chilling warning. ‘It is the common talk of the tippling ale houses and little gin shops,’ he wrote, ‘that Sir Robert Walpole and the Master of the Rolls will not outlive Michaelmas.’18

  Sir Robert Walpole was rattled. A fortnight before Michaelmas, Joseph Jekyll told Thomas Wilson ‘that Sir Robt. Walpole was afraid to use rigorous methods against the Rioters.’19 The Prime Minister, the ‘Great Man’, ‘Bluff Bob’, had been in office for fifteen years; he had the support of the King; he was undisputed master of Parliament. But now he was rattled. It wasn’t just disgruntled distillers or Captain Tom the Barber. Storm-clouds were gathering. All the different strands of opposition to his ministry were starting to come together.

  It all went back to the Excise Crisis in 1733. Then Walpole had been forced to abandon a prized scheme to extend Excise duties and cut the Land Tax. Crowds had pursued him from the Commons with the slogan of ‘no slavery, no Excise, no wooden shoes.’ He had been caricatured as the ‘Excise Monster’, riding on a barrel and trampling Magna Carta. At a key moment in the crisis, the King’s support had wavered, and the scheme had been lost.

  For ten years before that he had hardly encountered strong opposition. But Excise had struck a chord on all sides. Excise was seen as foreign, an instrument of tyranny – hence the jibe about wooden shoes. It was an assault on English liberties. ‘The Excise man,’ as one writer grumbled a few years later, ‘is our constant companion from the crown of our head to the sole of our foot. If we clean our hair, he examines the powder, even the washing the ladies’ linen does not escape inspection. He walks abroad in our shoes, at our tables he seasons our meat … Is it daylight? He peeps in at our windows. Is it night? He shines in our candles. Have we sweets or sours, light or darkness, the custom house officers or Excise men are our constant attendants.’20

  The City of London, until then carefully managed by Walpole, had rebelled. The Lord Mayor, John Barber, had promoted an anti-Excise resolution from the Court of Common Council. The City MPs, John Barnard and Micaiah Perry, had led the parliamentary opposition, and in the ensuing elections the ministry had lost control of London. The Excise Crisis had drawn in all London’s diverse oppositional elements: its merchants, its Jacobites, its satirists, its anti-government newspapers. The Tories and the ‘Country’ Whigs had united. Popular protest had thrown fuel on the flames. The King had wavered. It had been enough to shake Walpole’s ministry to its foundations.

  There had been a lull in the opposition after the Excise Crisis. Bolingbroke had returned to France; Pulteney declared himself weary of the whole business. But three years later the Gin Act, another Excise measure, looked likely to drag Walpole back into the same turbulent waters. Micaiah Perry, for one, was a long-term supporter of the distillers. And by now Sir Robert had other problems to struggle with as well. He had lost the bishops. The Mortmain Bill in the last session of Parliament – another of the Acts which Robert Nixon had exploded – had provoked a rift with ‘Walpole’s Pope’, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. At court, there was trouble brewing with the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Relations between the King and his son were famously bad. By summer 1736 Frederick was starting to provide a focus for the opposition. Meanwhile in Parliament there was fresh blood coming in to challenge the ministry. ‘Cobham’s Cubs’, William Pitt and George Lyttelton, had entered the House the year before. Guided by Viscount Cobham and Lord Chesterfield, a leading Excise rebel, these ‘boy patriots’ would provide a fresh nucleus of opposition to Walpole’s ministry.

  If Walpole was expecting political trouble out of prohibition, he didn’t have long to wait. It came, not surprisingly, from the Craftsman, the magazine sponsored by Henry Bolingbroke, the Tory leader, and William Pulteney to foster ‘Country’ ideals, and a ‘Country’ coalition between Tories and opposition Whigs. The editor, ‘Caleb D’Anvers’, was sharp and funny, and he knew exactly how to get on the ministry’s nerves. Madam Geneva soon caught his eye as a way to stir up political mayhem.

  Madam Geneva, the paper noticed, had crossed the political floor. Once, she had been King William’s darling. But now ‘the ministerial advocates have made themselves very merry with the approaching fate of poor Mother Gin, whom they are pleased to represent as … a Jacobite.’ With a month to go before Michaelmas, Caleb D’Anvers raised the temperature with a scrap of dialogue which supposedly took place ‘on the borders of Scotland … between Mr Hearty, Innkeeper, and Mr Gage, Exciseman.’ Readers were left in no doubt of the point. Prohibition gave power to the Excise men. The Gin Act was the Excise scheme revisited, another attempt on English liberties. Along the way the Craftsman paused to ridicule Parliament’s record on the gin issue: ‘The last Parliament upon mature deliberation made a law against Gin; and finding themselves mistaken upon maturer deliberation, repealed it. The present Parliament upon the maturest deliberation, finding the last Parliament mistaken in repealing that act, have obliged us with the present; and who knows … but they may likewise find themselves mistaken, upon still more mature deliberation, and repeal even this law?’21

  Satirists generally had a field day that summer. Someone published the Life of Mother Gin, containing ‘a true and faithful relation of her conduct and politicks, in all the various and important occurrences of state that she was engaged in during her time; her transactions with several eminent patriots and great Ministers.’ The Life followed the twists and turns of Madam Geneva’s career from the Glorious Revolution through all the party conflicts of Queen Anne’s reign. By 1736 Madam Geneva was confirmed as a Jacobite, and her biographer could see how important she had become to the opposition. Gin gave the Tories and patriot Whigs a populist issue from which they could draw public support. They ‘knew … that if they lost her, they must, by a necessary consequence, lose what they called the voice of the people, which was entirely under her influence and direction; and from which they had received very considerable advantage.’ The irony of all that was not lost on the
writer. ‘Mother Gin,’ he noted, ‘who formerly was a zealous asserter of the divine right of Kings, became now convinced of the divine right of the people.’ The Tories had discovered populism.

  It wasn’t all newspaper articles and tracts. There was poetry too. ‘Ye link and shoe boys, clubb a tear,’ wrote Timothy Scrubb of Rag Fair in Desolation: or, the Fall of Gin,

  Ye basket-women join;

  Grubb-street, pour forth a stream of brine,

  Ye porters hang your heads and pine;

  All, all are damn’d to rot-gut beer.

  Discussed in the newspapers, serenaded in the streets, Madam Geneva became the ‘It girl’ of summer 1736. But there was even better to come. If it had been the early twenty-first century, she would have wanted her face on television. In London, in 1736, Madam Geneva started a career on the stage.

  London theatres in the 1730s were packed and noisy. Riots were commonplace. The plays – particularly the short ‘afterpieces’ put on after the main show – were topical and fast-moving. Political satire was always in the air.

  Most riotous and daring of all the London theatres – also the smallest and shabbiest – was the ‘Little Theatre’ on the Haymarket. Fifty yards up from Pall Mall, it was on the east side, cocking a snook at Vanbrugh’s grand Italian Opera House across the way. The booking office was a snuff shop next to the entrance. In 1736, the Little Theatre happened to have been taken over by a new manager. In the past he had written for the official theatres but in 1736 he was out of favour, anti-government, and looking for trouble. He was famous as librettist of the 1734 hit, The Roast Beef of Old England, and in 1736 would have the smash of the season with Pasquin. Styling himself ‘the Great Mogul’, he was the enfant terrible of London theatre, Henry Fielding.

  It might well have been Fielding, writing as ‘a Moderate Man’, who penned the Craftsman’s first attack on the Gin Act.22 He was certainly close to the opposition. He was patronised by Chesterfield, Bedford and others, and was an old school-friend of ‘Cobham’s Cubs’, George Lyttelton and William Pitt. On 28 April, Fielding premièred a new afterpiece at the Little Theatre, Tumble-Down Dic, or Phaeton in the Suds, which had a rake singing a ballad in favour of Madam Geneva and, in the evening’s coup de théâtre, the Genius of Gin rising out of a tub brandishing a wand which held the magical power of transformation.

  Then, as another afterpiece, Fielding put on a ‘heroic comi-tragical farce’ entitled The Deposing and Death of Queen Gin, with the ruin of the Duke of Rum, Marquee de Nantz, and the Lord Sugarcane &c. (the author, ‘Jack Juniper’, styled himself ‘a distiller’s assistant’). The Duke of Rum described how the people reacted to news of Queen Gin’s banishment:

  Rum: By different ways their discontent appears:

  Some murmur, some lament, some loudly roar …

  This day in pomp she takes her leave of all:

  Already has she made the tour of Smithfield,

  Rag-Fair, Whitechapel, and Clare Market: Now

  To broad St Giles’s she directs her steps.

  In a heart-breaking climax, with a mob of ‘ragged men and women’ outside shouting, ‘Liberty, property, and Gin for ever,’ courtiers urged the deposed Queen Gin to fly abroad, but her strength failed.

  Gin: Oh! what is this that runs so cold about me?

  A dram! a dram! – a large one or I die.

  Tis vain! [drinks hastily]

  O, O Farewell! [dies]

  Mob:

  What, dead drunk, or dead in earnest?

  To the authorities, in summer 1736, none of that seemed particularly funny. Exactly a year later Walpole would pass the Stage Licensing Act to curb the excesses of unlicensed houses like the Little Theatre. Reformers had been gunning for playhouses for years. But the Prime Minister’s real reason, according to at least one writer, was the ‘extraordinary liberties that had been taken with great characters upon the stage.’23

  As for magazines like the Craftsman, ‘Nothing,’ raged the official Daily Gazetteer, ‘was ever more notoriously designed to rouse up the minds of the people to rebellion … It is an evident exhortation to the multitude to rise and tear to pieces all the great … the Craftsman … is now full of glee, hoping for confusion, sedition and rebellion.’24

  Sedition and rebellion were on Sir Robert Walpole’s mind as well. On 6 August he wrote a letter to his brother worrying ‘what may happen on Michaelmas-day.’ Informers were sending through copies of anti-prohibition ballads they picked up on the streets. And then, with two weeks to go before Michaelmas, Edinburgh suddenly erupted in flames. Rioters had lynched a Captain Porteous for firing on the crowd at a smuggler’s execution. It didn’t help the Prime Minister’s nerves when an informer reported that ‘within eight or nine months … past, there have been considerable quantities of arms, exceeding ten thousand at least, landed on the northern coast [of Scotland] & some small ports in the Western Islands, & have been distributed among the common people, who are generally now trained in new arms.’ He knew exactly where the next flashpoint would come. ‘If upon the commencement of the Ginn Act there are any tumults in London they are to follow that example.’25

  Government nerves were strung taut. All the signs of trouble were there. And it was then, just five days before Michaelmas, that the Gin Plot suddenly came to light.

  The code-word was to be ‘Sir Robert and Sir Joseph’, the names of the two men blamed for prohibition. The information came from a public house-keeper, William Alexander, of King’s Street, St James’s. He had received a letter telling him ‘that he should have a quantity of ginn … sent to his house on Monday-night, in order to distribute among the populace on Tuesday night.’ Free gin would put the people in the mood for trouble. And then the signal for the uprising would be given. ‘When he heard the word Sir Robert & Sir Joseph, [he was] to joyn with an Huzza.’ There was a vague promise of support from outside London, including a hint of rebel units in the army. ‘There will be people of distinction that will surprise [you],’ the letter ended. ‘The Red-Coats are marching to London, but they will be the enemies to the Russetts, you need not fear.’

  In the end, four of the letters were picked up by Walpole’s agents. Excise officers reported that similar communications had been sent out to distillers all over town. Some carried ominous headings like ‘September. Critical Month,’ or ‘1736. Dreadful Year.’ All proclaimed that ‘the body of the distillers, farmers &c., aggrieved by the late pernicious and enslaving Bill on spirituous liquors have agreed to show they are not blind to the design in hand of bringing on a general Excise.’ When Michaelmas came, Madam Geneva was to be the Jacobites’ secret weapon. Enraged by prohibition, the mob would erupt in riot, the army would mutiny, and the Hanoverian régime would collapse. The trigger for the whole revolt would be free gin:

  The dealers in distill’d liquors to keep open shop on Tuesday next, being the eve of the day on which the act is to take place and give gratis what quantities of Gin, or other liquors, shall be call’d for by the populace … then christen the streets with the remainder, & conclude with bonfires … All retailers whose circumstances will not permit them to contribute to the festival shall have quantities of liquor sent in before the time … Invite as many neighbours as you can conveniently, & be under no apprehension of the Riot Act, but whenever you hear the words Sir Robert & Sir Joseph joyne in the huzza.26

  Walpole, for one, wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. As Michaelmas approached, orders were issued and troops posted. The redcoats were, indeed, coming to town. With five days to go, London awaited the Gin Act in a mixed state of fear and suppressed excitement. One thing was for certain. Madam Geneva would go out in a blaze of glory. Along Fleet Street new streetlamps had been erected. They were lit up for the first time on 25 September. On the same day, Sir Robert himself ostentatiously left London for Houghton, accompanied by servants and cooks. Joseph Jekyll was on his estate at Bell Bar. Sir Robert and Sir Joseph might have been the signal for Jacobite uprising, but neither man woul
d be in town to hear it given.

  They weren’t the only ones to keep out of the way. Everyone could see that the chief promoters of prohibition would be the first targets of the mob. Thomas Wilson suddenly discovered urgent business in Stoke Newington.27

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE DEATH OF

  MADAM GENEVA

  Nothing happened. The world didn’t come to an end and the state wasn’t overthrown. England didn’t erupt in flames.

  A journeyman tailor called Genns ‘died intoxicated with Geneva at the Crown in Wapping,’ as the Daily Journal reported, ‘and several lay in the streets dead drunk, with their taking leave of that liquor.’ A few were arrested and committed, ‘some to prison and some to hard labour, for publickly and riotously publishing No Gin, No King.’1 Walpole and Jekyll weren’t the only absentees from town; the King was still in Hanover. Meanwhile, the London Magazine recorded some demonstrations of grief outside London as well: ‘Several people at Norwich, Bristol and other places … made themselves very merry on the death of Madam Gin, and some of both sexes got soundly drunk at her funeral, for which the mob made a form of procession but committed no outrages.’2