Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  His rapid and garbled speech was accompanied by nervous jerking movements so that he was never for a moment at rest. He loved the hustle and agitation of business rather than the formulation of policy; but he went about his affairs in such a gyratory and sporadic way that his colleagues were often openly scornful of him. He did not seem to mind their derision, but any attempt to curtail his power sent him into paroxysms of paranoia; he lived in perpetual fear. Yet he enjoyed large levees, or grand assemblies, where to general amusement he hugged, kissed and embraced everyone in sight. Nevertheless he had within him the secret of longevity; he held major offices of state for almost forty years.

  Robert Walpole left for honourable retirement and was created earl of Orford for his labours; he returned to Houghton Hall where he could gaze upon the fruits of his public office. His departure was greeted with great joy and celebrations, as if all the disappointments of war rested upon his shoulders.

  But the fortunes of war were not materially improved by his absence. Its wavering course was not followed with any eagerness, and seems to have been prosecuted mainly by subsidies and mercenaries. No one cared much about its victories or its vicissitudes. Who took Juliers or Berg, Brieg or Wohlan, were matters of indifference. The conflict was marked in its last six years by treachery and criminality, double dealing and division, defections and secret treaties, lies and bloodshed on an enormous scale. When peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, not a moment too soon, it could record no single important result. Thomas Carlyle, the great Scottish historian with a style of fire, eventually described it as ‘an unintelligible, huge English-and-Foreign Delirium’.

  Everyone had wanted Wapole to retire, including his closest associates, but in truth his retirement made very little difference; the members of the old team were still there, now looking for support from some of the ‘new Whigs’ and the ‘prince’s party’. There was no great millennial change, as some had wanted or suspected. More Whigs of various tendencies did in fact join the ministry, and in time became known with some of their Tory counterparts as ‘broad-bottomed’. They could sit on anything. Whigs now battled against Whigs, Tories against Tories, Tories and Whigs against Whigs and Tories, in a game of internecine struggle that lasted for some sixteen years. Of course everybody became bored in the end. The earl of Stair noted in 1743, a year after Walpole had gone, that ‘London seems entirely employed about whist.’

  Some excitement was aroused by the landing of Charles Edward Stuart, the son of the ‘Old Pretender’, in Scotland during the summer of 1745. The Young Pretender, better known to posterity as Bonnie Prince Charlie, was taking advantage of the continental war to cause a little local difficulty. Some troops fighting in Flanders were recalled to home soil but the prince was able to occupy Edinburgh and to score a notable victory over the ancient enemy at Prestonpans to the east of the city. There ensued something like panic in London. The fear rather than the reality of an invasion necessarily caused consternation. To breach the moat defensive to a house was always a momentous event, especially at a time of general war.

  The Young Pretender gathered with him some 5,000 men and marched south into England where he reached as far as Derby. Further panic ensued. He was in fact unlikely to have advanced much further. The Scots did not flock to his banner, and the Tories that were inclined to the Jacobite cause went to no great lengths to support him. In a country generally concerned with national prosperity, no social or political revolution is ever likely; the Bank of England effectively destroyed the Stuart cause. Charles demanded from his French allies an invasion, but the French were too engaged in Flanders to oblige. At Derby the Jacobite generals knew that their game was lost and, over the prince’s strenuous objections, they eventually retreated into the Highlands. It was not the end of their humiliations.

  Charles chose with his advisers to fight the enemy on the open moorland of Culloden and, within an hour, his troops were wholly defeated by the British army under the guidance of the duke of Cumberland. Some of the Scots were ready to fight again in more auspicious circumstances, but their resolve was undermined by the Young Pretender’s decision to return to France. So ended the last attempt by Scotland to affirm its independence by violent means. Jacobitism was dead, its exequies marked by the brutal licentiousness of Cumberland’s soldiers who went through the highlands in a systematic campaign of rape, slaughter, theft and execution. In the aftermath of the bloody defeat all Highlanders were obliged to surrender their arms, and any man or boy wearing ‘the Highland clothes’ would be imprisoned for six months without bail. Transportation would follow a second offence. It was a deliberate policy of cultural genocide.

  The cheers and applause of the victors may have been enough to drown out the tears and lamentations of the renegade Scots. ‘Rule Britannia’ had been set to music five years before, and ‘God Save the King’ was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine at the time of the Young Pretender’s landing before becoming a popular refrain.

  The young prince ventured one further journey to England when, in 1750, he travelled to London in disguise. He seems to have stayed with a staunch Jacobite in Theobald’s Road, and conformed to the Anglican faith in the empty hope of being eventually accepted as sovereign. He must have worn a mask and costume as he walked through the streets of London; but, in that respect, he was very much part of a city that was often no more than a great stage.

  14

  Mother Geneva

  When an eighteenth-century visitor, Matthew Bramble, arrives at London in Tobias Smollett’s novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), he is much astonished by the fact that ‘the different departments of life are jumbled together – the hod-keeper, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican, the shop-keeper, the pettifogger, the citizen and courtier all tread upon the kibes of one another’. Profligacy and licentiousness ‘are seen everywhere, rumbling, riding, rolling, rushing, jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption – all is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest’.

  Some years earlier another innocent visitor had arrived, fresh from the coach, in the yard of the Bell by Wood Street. In William Hogarth’s representation of the scene, Moll Hackabout is immediately surrounded by strange sights. Chamber pots are being aired on some railings, while some ragged underclothes are hanging above a balcony. A well-dressed ‘rake’ is looking at her and fondling himself in a doorway. But the strangest sight of all is that of an elderly woman, patched and peeling with old beauty spots, who greets her as her cousin from the country. Her name is Mother Needham, a notorious procuress of the 1720s and early 1730s; she was eventually displayed in the pillory, and died of the injuries inflicted on her by the public.

  These two images of London are closer to the truth of the eighteenth-century city than anything found in the Spectator or the Gentleman’s Magazine; they are not caricatures, but intensely realistic. The polite literature of the period adverts to the auction houses and the coffee-houses, the reading societies and the debating clubs, the assembly rooms and the dancing masters, the masquerades and the balls, the theatres and the galleries, the lecture halls and concert halls. These were indeed part of the vesture of eighteenth-century London but beyond them was a deeper and darker life that had not changed for the better. No ‘improvement’ could touch it. The wider streets and the open bridges, the fashionable squares and the shopping arcades, had nothing to do with the shadows that London had always cast. Close by the rooms devoted to this ‘age of pleasure’ were those devoted to an age of privation, an age of poverty, an age of punishment and an age of pain.

  The smell of London was noticeable from several miles away, comprised, according to a tract of 1733, George Cheyne’s The English Malady, of ‘the infinite number of fires . . . the clouds of stinking breaths, and perspiration, not to mention the ordure of so many diseased, both intelligent and unintelligent animals, the crowded church
es, church-yards, and burying places . . .’. Above all else mounted the smell of horse-dung.

  The smell of the streets was a great leveller for the ranks of artisans, wits, apprentices, publishers, rakes, clerks, men about town, clergymen, stationers, ladies, serving-girls, actors and singers, politicians and vagrants who walked along them. There was a phrase that ‘one is not smelt where all stink’. The footpaths were not only thronged with pedestrians but by hackney-chair men and porters, dust-carts and post-chaises, dogs and mud-carts, the boys with trays of meat on their shoulders and the begging soldiers, the flower girls and the chair-menders, the second-hand-clothes merchants and the pastry sellers. There was not one culture, but several, in the space of a single street.

  It was no good trying to avoid these inconveniences by hiring a coach; the streets were so narrow and circuitous, the obstacles so many, that all the drays and carriages were often brought to a dead halt or ‘lock’. The coachmen would then begin to whip each other’s horses and often jump down from their vehicles to engage in a fist-fight, encouraged by a circle of citizens who liked nothing so much as a free brawl. The air of the city was always blue with oaths and maledictions, blasphemies and curses. The noise of the streets was like that of Bedlam; from a distance it resembled a great shout echoing into the firmament. To some it sounded like a volcano.

  This was the old violent London, which never went away and will never go away; the eighteenth-century city, until the improvements of its latter decades, was the arena for public hangings and floggings. The mad people of Bedlam were one of the city’s sights, as were the gibbets along the Edgware Road and the rotting heads on top of Temple Bar. The mendicants bared their ulcers, while the prostitutes tried to cover their sores.

  Moll Hackabout became just such a prostitute, and indeed it was a common fate for those who came up from the country or for those who were simply born and bred in the streets. Sex was plentifully available in the eighteenth century, from the most expensive harlot with lodgings in Covent Garden to the small boy or girl who was easy prey for a penny. Cheap and plentiful sex was the undercurrent of London’s energy. The richer citizens or merchants could have more or less whomever they wanted, and it is hard to believe that the religious pieties of the day prevented them. In his Autobiography (1771–1854) Francis Place, a radical campaigner, even at the end of this period when metropolitan ‘improvements’ were meant to be ubiquitous, noted that ‘the breasts of many [prostitutes] hung down in a most disgusting manner, their hair among the generality was straight and hung in rats’ tails over their eyes, and was filled with lice, at least was inhabited by considerable colonies of these insects . . .’. They would go ‘behind the wall’ for twopence.

  Addison left a more tender picture of the trade in his account of being accosted in St James’s Street by a slim and pretty girl of about seventeen. ‘She affected to allure me with a forced wantonness in her look and air; but I saw it checked with hunger and cold: Her eyes were wan and eager, her dress thin and tawdry, her mien gentle and childish.’ The same figures populated the streets more than a century later, provoking the journalist William Thomas Stead into writing The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885). Some aspects of London seem to be eternal.

  Crime and violence belonged to its streets as much as its flints and stones. There was of course no organized police surveillance except the decrepit system of watch and ward, its elderly members boiling tea or gin in their little watch-houses. The streets were dark and treacherous, the tenements grim and the slums dangerous. The night was filled with crimes to which no one responded. At times of crisis the press-gangs sought out unwilling recruits for the navy. When James Watt came to London in 1754 he hardly dared stir out of his house for fear of being taken up.

  ‘One is forced to travel’, Horace Walpole wrote in 1751, ‘even at noon as if one were going to battle.’ The thieves had their own lodging houses, clubs and taverns where they were divided even as an army might be, into housebreakers, pickpockets, footpads and highwaymen. Yet the detestation of a standing army was so great that even the call for more police was resisted by some citizens who did not wish to live in a military camp.

  As the city grew through the eighteenth century, its boiling point was lowered. Matthew Bramble, in Humphry Clinker, remarks to an acquaintance that ‘in the space of seven years eleven thousand new houses have been built in one quarter of Westminster, exclusive of what is daily added to other parts of this unwieldy metropolis’; so ‘unwieldy’ that ‘the capital has become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support’. Bricks arrived at the building sites before they were cool enough to be handled, and the bemused traveller might stand amazed at a nasty wilderness of half-finished houses.

  There was a driving method behind this madness of speculation. London was power and money. The voracious demand for food in the city helped to revolutionize the agriculture of the country. Tea and hemp and cotton cloth came from all over the earth. Sugar was ‘boiled’ in the capital. It was the largest industrial city in the world. The densely packed factories lined both banks of the Thames at the eastern end. This was the place of scientific equipment, kitchen ranges, gas meters, furniture and hackney carriages. The coal came down the east coast to stoke the fires.

  The divines and moralists, listening to the swearing and indecency rising up from the dens and caves of the city, were not slow in predicting an ultimate judgement. The songs of London were considered enough to arouse divine wrath:

  I’m sure she’ll go to Hell,

  For she makes me fuck her in church time . . .

  It should be remembered that Londoners as a whole were tremendously superstitious, as if they knew that they lived in a doomed city. Phantoms and witches and apparitions were reported in the city, and the king himself was said to believe in vampires – although that may have been part of his Germanic legacy. You should never listen to a cuckoo without money in your pocket. You should return home if a snake crosses your path. You should look down if a raven flies over your head. A screech owl in the morning presages a day of danger. Crowds flocked to a house in Cock Lane when numerous knockings and scratchings were heard. Samuel Johnson was one of a committee established to investigate the phenomenon, which turned out to be no more than the tricks of an older daughter. The reports of a ghost had nevertheless caused a sensation.

  A lady from Godalming, Mary Tofts, began to give birth to rabbits, after she had miscarried when trying to catch one. She was brought to London where at a bagnio in Leicester Fields she was visited by the more prominent doctors of the day. A courtier, Lord Hervey, reported that ‘every creature in town, both men and women have been to see and feel her: the perpetual motions, noises and rumblings in her belly, are something prodigious; all the eminent physicians, surgeons and man-midwives in London are there day and night to watch her next production’. This, too, was all an imposture. But it had worked on the superstition and credulity of the London crowd.

  On 8 February 1750, the tremor and reverberation of an earthquake were felt beneath London and Westminster; the people ran out of their houses, fearing an apocalypse. On precisely the same day one month later, 8 March, a second and more violent earthquake shivered to dust some of the foundations of the houses and occasioned much damage in the streets. It was now considered certain that a third earthquake, even more terrible and destructive than its two predecessors, would erupt on 8 April. The Gentleman’s Magazine, perhaps best known for its rational bias, reported that ‘earthquakes are placed among those methods by which God punishes a wicked and rebellious people’. The sins of London, mounting ever higher for many years, seemed to have found their apotheosis. The city was too black, too poisonous, too diseased, too venereal, to survive the wrath of the heavens. The bishop of London wrote a pastoral letter in which he denounced ‘the abominations of the public stews’, the ‘histories and romances of the vilest prostitutes’ and books by deists and others
who scorned ‘the great truths of religion’.

  A week before the expected tremor those who could leave London did so. A performance of Handel’s oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, was cancelled. Horace Walpole counted 750 carriages passing Hyde Park Corner into the relative safety of the country. Many of those who were panic-stricken migrated into the fields of North and South London. The centres, the black centres, the City and Westminster, were to be shunned. In the event all was calm. God rested. But the phenomenon and the panic were enough to turn some, if not all, to thoughts of repentance. Others had already turned to a different source of consolation. The arms of Mother Geneva were open.

  William Hogarth’s Gin Lane was issued in 1751, from the Golden Head in Leicester Fields, in the same year that Henry Fielding warned in a pamphlet, ‘An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers’, that ‘a new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us . . . by this Poison called Gin’. In Hogarth’s print a pawnbroker is engaged in a thriving trade; he inspects a carpenter’s saw while a harassed woman presses upon him a kettle and saucepan. Beneath their feet is to be seen a gin-cellar with the familiar sign of Gin Royal hanging above it. It is no more than a hole in the wall, a dark tunnel leading to the lower depths. Above it are printed the words.