Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  The six volumes of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones appeared in the early months of 1749 and the four volumes of Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle were published exactly two years later. As a fitting prologue for the immensity of these productions the full seven volumes of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady appeared in 1748. Three incomparable novels had appeared in four years. The eighteenth-century novel had come of age with the implicit declaration that prose fiction could encompass the whole range of human experience in ways that transcended the limitations of the stage.

  It became the age of novelists. In the literary history of the mid- to late eighteenth century we hear little of poets or of dramatists; all the attention is drawn to the innovation and invention of the writers of prose fiction. Fielding himself, in the second book of Tom Jones, described prose fiction as ‘a new province of writing’ and declared ‘I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein’. There are no dramatic ‘unities’ to keep and no orders of scansion to follow. The novels of the eighteenth century have very little command of narrative structure; one chapter is very much like the preceding and succeeding ones, but with intricate variations to maintain the reader’s interest.

  Smollett, in his preface to The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), describes a novel as ‘a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of a uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient’. Since the presence of ‘a uniform plan’ was the greatest truth of the age, its use here is not necessarily significant. Smollett was in essence remarking that the subject of the novel was human life in all its various detail. There were no rules. So Fielding described Tom Jones as ‘this heroic, historical, prosaic poem’, which might mean anything or nothing. Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle is another case in point in its combination of satire, melodrama, bawdry, theatricality, sentiment, pathos, realism, bathos, suspense and comedy. All that had been banned from the stage, even the characters themselves, poured in crowds onto the page crying out ‘Here we are again!’

  Despite the provenance of some of the novelists – Smollett was born in Dunbartonshire and Fielding in Somerset – theirs was a distinctive London vision. The novel was an urban form. It had its origin in satire and in journalism, not necessarily in romance or in allegory. Fielding himself called the novel ‘a newspaper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not’. The London roots go very deep. Fielding had a thoroughly urban sensibility which embraced the pantomimic and the scenic, which revelled in energy and adventure, and betrayed little interest in psychological or moral complexity. The outrageous eccentric was his version of the subtle personality. Smollett’s characters in Roderick Random also had to struggle to be heard among ‘the modish diversions of the town, such as plays, operas, masquerades, drums, assemblies and puppet shows’.

  Another aspect of the novel’s popularity was concerned precisely with the ‘middling’ classes who now comprised many of its readers. The novel dealt directly with those of ‘quality’, whether foul or fair; in the country they were squires or landowners, and in the city ladies and gentlemen. For those aspiring to gentility, therefore, the novel could become an instruction manual or ‘pattern book’; novels were guides to etiquette and polite society. The characters attain wealth and status through their individual virtue, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) was advertised at the time as written ‘in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes’. Richardson no doubt meant it, but the sentiment may have been taken with a grain of salt by Hogarth and Smollett. The general mood of eighteenth-century fiction is one of high-spirited if ironic gaiety, where the dominant tone of voice is at once comic, inspired and facetious. But the best and truest word is irony.

  21

  The broad bottom

  The earl of Bute, stung and surprised by his general unpopularity, had resigned. After the water covered Bute’s head, up rose George Grenville eight days later. Grenville was from a distinguished family and had enjoyed an equally distinguished political career, partly in association with William Pitt whose animus against France he shared. He was not, however, a favourite of the king who did not relish the replacement of his Scottish confidant with what might be considered a standard Whig politician. He also detested his long-winded and hectoring manner. ‘I had rather see the devil in my closet’, the king said, ‘than George Grenville.’ The king also said of him that ‘when he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch, to see if he may not tire me for an hour more’. But the arch-bore became first minister in the spring of 1763.

  The new minister’s first test of fire came before the month was out. In the king’s speech at the opening of parliament on 19 April, he hailed the treaty of Paris signed two months before as ‘honourable to my Crown, and beneficial to my people’. This was still open to question. The year before, John Wilkes had established a newspaper under the name of the North Briton as an ironic allusion to Scottish Bute. He was now set upon vilifying Grenville and the king. Madame de Pompadour, the principal mistress of Louis XV, had asked Wilkes how far press liberty in England reached. ‘That’, he replied, ‘is what I am trying to find out.’

  In the forty-fifth number of the North Briton, published on 23 April 1763, he effectively accused the king of lying; there was no peace with honour, but peace born out of corruption and weakness. He wrote that ‘every friend of this country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures, and to the most unjustifiable public declarations, from a throne ever renowned for truth, honour and unsullied virtue’. To accuse a king of lying, even indirectly, was a case of sedition.

  The name of Wilkes was in everyone’s mouth. The standard portrait of the man as a grinning malevolent was the creation of William Hogarth; so was the wig curiously reminiscent of the horns of the devil. Wilkes, however, was genuinely cross-eyed. He was in fact a London radical of an old-fashioned sort. The son of a malt distiller from St John’s Square in Clerkenwell, the home of radical groups and meetings since the time of Wat Tyler, he had a somewhat scandalous early life and two or three lacklustre years in parliament before his pen came vividly to life in the pages of the North Briton.

  The outcry against his attack on George III was immense. The calls for his arrest were predictable but, perhaps unfortunately, the government issued a ‘general warrant’ that could be used against anyone whom the authorities deemed to be deserving of it. Wilkes himself was placed in the Tower, but in two appearances in Westminster Hall at the beginning of May he denounced general warrants as illegal; as a member of parliament, also, he claimed freedom from arrest. In his second speech to the judge he declared that ‘the liberty of all peers and gentlemen, and what touches me more sensibly, that of the middling and inferior set of people . . . is in my case this day to be finally decided upon’. Whereupon the chief justice set aside any charges of felony or treason, and ordered Wilkes to be freed. Wilkes had applied the usual practice of the political radical, not by identifying with a popular cause but by creating a popular cause out of his own situation. He proclaimed that he was an honest citizen who had become enmeshed in the toils of the Crown and its servants. In his own person he posed the question whether English liberty ‘be a reality rather than a shadow’. So arose the slogan that echoed through the streets of London, ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ A crowd of thousands escorted Wilkes from Westminster to his house. Soon enough there would be a plethora of handbills, posters and pamphlets proclaiming his cause.

  Immediately after his release Wilkes sued the secretary of state, the 2nd earl of Halifax, for signing the general warrant; he was awarded £1,000 in damages by a sympathetic court. Wilkes had effectively taken on the government apparatus and had won
. It was a boon for those who felt that something was wrong with the machinery of power.

  But power itself could be malicious and devious. Some years before, Wilkes had played a part in the composition of a satiric parody of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man entitled An Essay on Woman, an obscene elegy ascribed maliciously to the bishop of Worcester. One of the objects of its insinuations was Fanny Murray, erstwhile mistress to the 4th earl of Sandwich. The poem opened, ‘Awake, my Fanny!’ which in some texts appeared as ‘Awake my C . . .’. She was also compared to the Virgin Mary.

  Wilkes had perpetrated a joke but he had also committed a blunder. Parts of the poem were now read aloud in the House of Lords. The noble gentlemen, far from supporting a parliamentarian who had demanded immunity from prosecution, were outraged at one who had the mob and the judges on his side. The leading Whigs held back from expressing their support. In November the Lords condemned An Essay on Woman as ‘a most scandalous, obscene and impious libel’. In the same period the Commons had concluded the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton to be ‘a false, scandalous and seditious libel’ that should be burnt by the common hangman at the Royal Exchange. A large crowd of Londoners assembled on the site, however, and prevented the sheriffs from consigning the paper to the flames.

  The Commons now decided that Wilkes himself was not immune from a charge of seditious libel. Although he was detained by a bullet in the groin as a result of a duel with a political opponent, he recovered in time to slip away to France at the end of 1763, avoiding a certain defeat in the courts at the hands of his powerful opponents. He had not lost his sense of humour, however. When asked to play a game of cards he declined on the grounds that ‘I cannot tell a king from a knave’.

  In his absence he was tried for seditious libel, found guilty and sentenced to exile. In Paris, according to reports, he was never so happy, preferring the wit and culture of the erstwhile enemy to the more formal and prudish manners of his London contemporaries. Tobias Smollett, in Peregrine Pickle, concedes that ‘France abounds with men of consummate honour, profound sagacity, and the most liberal education.’

  Wilkes might have been equally welcome in North America where his impassioned defence of liberty was universally acknowledged; it was said by some that Wilkes and America would stand or fall together. While he had been incarcerated in the Tower, Virginia sent him tobacco and Boston dispatched a consignment of turtles; South Carolina sent him £1,500 to clear his debts and the newly established American colleagues, Sons of Liberty, addressed to him a formal declaration of amity and sympathy. He was fighting their cause against a corrupt administration.

  The situation of the American colonies was in any case precarious. Some of them had already been attacked and harassed by a confederation of Native Indian tribes in what became known as ‘Pontiac’s War’ (1763–6) after the name of one of its leaders. The vicious fighting seems to have been confined to the Great Lakes region, to Illinois country and to Ohio country, but the panic fear spread among all the colonists. It was said that the English troops, in retaliation for native atrocities, spread among them blankets infected with the smallpox virus. This was unlikely. It was agreed in London that a large military force should be permanently stationed in North America, not only to discourage the Native tribes but to deter any French incursions on what had once been their territory. France still held the area around New Orleans, in any case, and so controlled the mouth of the Mississippi. Pontiac’s War lasted for a little more than two years.

  This conflict of course had to be financed and it seemed to the first minister, George Grenville, only reasonable that the colonists themselves should bear part of the burden of cost. The king had already accused him of having the mind ‘of a clerk in a counting house’. It was entirely in character, therefore, that the minister should devise a ‘stamp tax’ on the grounds that it was not too onerous or too obvious; it was raised on the stamps required to authenticate official documents. He even gave the colonists a year to come up with any proposal of their own to raise the required sums. Yet he failed to anticipate the clamour against what was a wholly new tax imposed without colonial consent. It was worse than a provocation, it was an insult. The Americans were, in a phrase of the time, ‘jealous of their liberties’ and apt to condemn any intervention from England as a form of tyranny.

  George Grenville resigned four months after he had introduced the Stamp Act but not as a result of his ill-starred proposal, even though the Act has some pretension to being the most disastrous piece of legislation in English history. He was obliged to leave because he had angered the king once too often. It was over a matter of place involving the king’s mother, but on his dismissal from office the wheels of fortune began to turn. The Butes, the Rockinghams, the Chathams, the Grenvilles, the Shelburnes, the Foxes and the Norths circled around and around on the vast gaming table of state until the golden ball dropped. The marquis of Rockingham was the fortunate recipient of the prize, but he did not last very long; he was in office for a year. When seventeen years later he picked up the golden ball a second time, death mercifully intervened after four months.

  This did not encourage steadiness or coherence of policy. Grenville’s Stamp Act had already provoked a furious reaction from the Americans. Virginia was the first to protest with a series of resolutions that were described as ‘the alarm bells to the disaffected’; the officer chosen to administer the Act in Boston was hanged in effigy from a tree and his office was levelled to the ground. The riots spread and became more violent, with the houses of officials ransacked and the records of the courts burned. The merchants of the various colonies agreed that they would order no more goods from England, and cancel all existing contracts; this would have a significant impact upon trade. It may not have been rebellion, but it looked very much like it.

  In October 1765, a Stamp Act Congress was convened in New York, when a number of colonies agreed to petition for relief, and also denied that parliament had any power of taxation in their territories. Yet it seems that the Americans were in many respects as confused and as uncertain as the English. Some were enraged at the apparent intention of the mother country to impose a system of colonial oppression, with a standing army. Others supported the king to whom they still believed that they owed allegiance. It has been estimated, but cannot be proved, that between one-third and one-fifth of the colonists were committed loyalists. The fact that each of the thirteen colonies had a different constitution and different precedents only served further to heighten the confusion.

  On 1 November 1765, the date on which the Stamp Act came into law, the bells of the American churches were tolled in funereal style and the flags hung at half-mast. The English response to this unhappy and unlooked-for revolt was divided; some ministers argued for compromise, while others wanted to stand fast on a matter of principle. Rockingham, only recently appointed as first minister, realized that it was better to bend in a gale than snap in a storm; he also recognized that the British administration was effectively powerless to mend matters across the wide Atlantic. In March 1766 ministers and members came to an agreement to repeal the Stamp Act with a decisive majority of more than 100 votes. Edmund Burke, Rockingham’s secretary, described it as ‘an event that caused more universal joy throughout the British dominions than perhaps any other that can be remembered’. It was of course a concession to force and to the threat of force, but it was accompanied by a ‘declaratory Act’ that the British legislature had the right ‘to make laws and statutes’ which would ‘bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever’. It was, in other words, a compromise and a muddle which few people noticed at the time. It was enough that the hated Act had been repealed.

  Some saw its significance at a later date. Thomas Paine, the champion of American independence, asserted in a pamphlet of 1782 ‘that the “declaratory act”’ left the colonists ‘no rights at all; and contained the full grown seeds of the most despotic government ever exercised in the world’; he added that �
��it went to everything. It took with it the whole life of a man . . . It is the nature of law to require obedience, but this demanded servitude.’ He sensed that it had been the real cause of war in 1775 and British defeat. Another proximate cause might be in the Stamp Act Congress itself, which brought together various colonies in the face of a common enemy.

  Rockingham did not last long enough to savour the consequences of his policy, however, since in the summer of 1766 he was replaced by the ageing Pitt who was still under the impression that he was a man of destiny. He had made what to many had seemed to be the mistake of accepting an earldom; he was no longer the ‘great commoner’ of political legend. As earl of Chatham, however, he was forced to convey his policies from the Lords where he was neither as authoritative nor as eloquent as he had been in the lower house. A ‘squib’ or pasquinade exposed his pretensions. ‘To be disposed of, considerably under prime cost, the stock in trade of a late eminent patriot, consisting of a large assortment of confident assertions, choice metaphors, flowery similes, bold invectives, pathetic lamentations, specious promises all a little worse for wear.’

  He chose to become lord privy seal, and the relatively unknown Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd duke of Grafton, was appointed first lord of the treasury, a recipe for unstable administration. The new earl of Chatham had never been known for his attention to administrative detail, but that incapacity now became fatal in a summer when a failed harvest led to bread riots and mob action. He pieced together a cabinet from diverse sources, which Burke described as a ‘tessellated pavement without cement’, so unknown to each other that the first question was often ‘Sir, your name?’ or the first comment ‘Sir, you have the advantage of me’. Frederick of Prussia told the British envoy in Berlin that it was impossible to do business with the British government; it was too unstable. Chatham was a dead failure and perhaps knew as much since, within a matter of months, he had descended into illness. He was first laid low again by gout, that universal ailment, and remained in Bath for October 1766; he then spent the first two months of the new year in the same resort. An absent first minister (even though he did not take the name) is not good for business. By the summer of the year he had grown infinitely worse and one contemporary, Lord Lyttelton, a former chancellor of the exchequer, believed that he now suffered from ‘insane melancholy’. Pitt the former, as he might be known, refused to deal with any administrative matters and an official letter would send him into a fit of trembling; he would sit in a darkened room in silence and suffering.