Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  Grafton became the effective leader of the government while Chatham was out of commission; Charles Townshend was chancellor of the exchequer who in 1767 seemed entirely to have forgotten the lesson of the Stamp Act. He devised what became known as the ‘Townshend Acts’ which imposed duties on certain items imported into America, among them tea, glass and paper, with the precise intention of paying for the expenses of the colonial administration. The money would go into the pockets of the governors and the military, giving them a large degree of independence from what were still called the colonists. ‘Every man in England’, Benjamin Franklin wrote, ‘seems to consider himself as a piece of a sovereign over America, seems to jostle himself into the throne with the king and talks of our subjects in the colonies.’ The American reaction to the new Act was one of thorough rejection. Court records were destroyed, and merchants refused to do business with England.

  Yet this reaction was less vociferous than that against the Stamp Act. Economic prosperity, and an instinct for moderation or compromise, guided counsels on both sides of the Atlantic and led to three years of relative inactivity. There was in any case now little interest in London concerning American affairs. A much more interesting, and apparently more dangerous, conundrum had emerged in the shape of John Wilkes.

  He had returned from his self-imposed exile in France, in February 1768, and if he hoped to cause a scandal he was disappointed. The authorities were not interested in arresting him. It would cause too much trouble. Yet he was determined to make an impression and decided to stand for the City of London in the forthcoming general elections, to be held between March and May, but came last in the voting list; the support of the craftsmen and City masters had not been enough. Not dismayed or deterred he turned his attention to the more radical neighbourhood of Middlesex which, with its market traders and small businessmen, was in a sense an outcrop of London. He managed the election at Brentford Butts, on 28 March, with a consummate sense of theatre: 250 coaches, filled with Wilkes’s supporters sporting blue cockades and brandishing ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ placards, set out for the hustings. He came at the head of the poll, much to the fury of the king and the delight of the populace. The citizens were obliged to light their windows in celebration or watch their glass being shattered, and it was reported that the number ‘45’ was scrawled on every door from Temple Bar to Hyde Park Corner; the seed of the scandal had appeared in the forty-fifth issue of the North Briton. It was reported in the Annual Register that ‘the rabble was very tumultuous’.

  Wilkes had an instinctive understanding of London life ever since his adolescence in Clerkenwell; he could connect himself with the innate radicalism of the crowd in a city where dissident opinion was commonplace. Radical clubs and fellowships met in alehouses and taverns, where they loudly proclaimed their fight against the threats to liberty and freedom by an arbitrary executive. The citizens who followed him were small men of property, urban freeholders, tradesmen, shopkeepers, craftsmen and labourers who were all ostensibly at the mercy of the larger powers of the City and the nation.

  ‘45’ became a war cry in the streets of the city, therefore, but it was also a symbol of the cause. It was perhaps not coincidence that the last Jacobite rising had occurred in 1745. A candlestick of forty-five branches was manufactured for a publican in Newcastle upon Tyne. The Newcastle Journal reported that a Wilkes dinner in April, just after the election, consisted of forty-five diners who ‘at 45 minutes past one drank 45 gills of wine with 45 new laid eggs in them’. Five courses were served with nine dishes each, making up the magic number, while in the middle of the dining table rested a sirloin of beef weighing precisely 45 pounds. And so it went on. It became a craze – forty-five toasts, forty-five pipes of tobacco, forty-five sky-rockets, wigs of forty-five curls. On the flags his supporters had carried into Brentford were inscribed the words ‘FREEDOM. LIBERTY! BILL OF RIGHTS. MAGNA CHARTA!’ It was the ancient discourse of the English.

  The king demanded that this seditious and disruptive scandalmonger should be prevented from taking his seat in parliament and there was much debate whether a convicted criminal, albeit one sentenced in his absence, should be able to disport himself in public. Wilkes himself then took the initiative and announced that he would surrender himself to the judiciary, and waited for the verdict in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark. His partisans crowded the district and the tumult grew so violent in the adjacent St George’s Fields that on 10 May 1769, a regiment of Scottish soldiers was sent in to keep the peace. In the subsequent disturbances a group of soldiers shot an innocent passer-by; the Riot Act was read for the second time and as a result some five or six others were killed, among them ‘Mr William Redburn, weaver, shot through the thigh, died in the London Hospital’ and ‘Mary Jeffs, of St Saviour’s, who was selling oranges by the Haymarket, died instantly’.

  In June Wilkes was fined and imprisoned for twenty-two months on the old charge of seditious libel; his confinement was relatively comfortable, however, bolstered by gifts of food and money from his more wealthy supporters. The Commons tried to compound his disgrace by depriving him of his new seat in Middlesex. His expulsion provoked some sporadic rioting in London, and the 2,000 freeholders of Middlesex determined to nominate him once more for parliament. There then ensued a political comedy in which Wilkes was returned unopposed before once more being disqualified; he stood again, but his victory was annulled. He was once more chosen by the electors of Middlesex, but then promptly expelled on the grounds of his ‘incapacity to be elected’. He stood for the fifth time and was again victorious in the ballot, but the Commons proceeded to invite one of his opponents to take the seat.

  In the spring of the following year he was duly released from the King’s Bench Prison to wild acclaim from the crowd for a popular hero who had shown both bravery and imagination in confronting the forces of authority. He had no political programme as such, and can hardly be claimed as a radical let alone a revolutionary; he appealed to what were considered the traditional liberties of the people, but he did so with an acute awareness of what might be called the power of the press. He orchestrated the political sense of the nation by a mixture of mockery, satire and denunciation. He was a symbol of defiance and independence. When canvassing in Middlesex, in his days of freedom, he was told by one householder that ‘I’d rather vote for the devil’. ‘Naturally,’ Wilkes replied, ‘but if your friend is not standing, may I hope for your support?’ His statue now stands at the bottom of Fetter Lane, the only cross-eyed effigy in London.

  The power of the press was not lost upon others. There had been a growing awareness in the middle decades of the eighteenth century of public opinion ‘out of doors’ as evinced in the circulation of the newspapers. The Morning Chronicle was established in 1770 and the Morning Post two years later; by 1777 there were seventeen newspapers published in London, seven of which were printed daily. A year later the Sunday Monitor became the first Sunday newspaper in England.

  It was in any case a great age for political excitement. The long decay of the earl of Chatham came to its culmination with his withdrawal from office in the autumn of 1768, confirming Grafton’s supremacy. It was Grafton who weathered the storms over Wilkes and the American tax revolt, but he was not made for leadership at a time of riots, petitions and the ridicule of the press.

  One anonymous contributor to the press created a sensation. A correspondent by the name of ‘Junius’ suddenly emerged in the public prints. He had a talent for scurrility and vicious abuse, but it was his anonymity that prompted the greatest excitement. As Samuel Johnson wrote, ‘while he walks like Jack the Giant-Killer in a coat of darkness, he may do much mischief with little strength’. Was this a minister or ex-minister telling secrets from behind the curtain? His essays were printed in the Public Advertiser from 1769 to 1772, at the very height of the Wilkes affair, and he did much to inflame public opinion. The duke of Grafton was ‘a black and cowardly tyrant’, one ‘degraded below the condition of a man’,
while the king is described by inference as ‘the basest and meanest fellow in the kingdom’. The king’s mother, the Dowager Princess Augusta, was denominated ‘the demon of discord’ who ‘watches with a kind of providential malignity over the work of her hands’. When the dowager was dying of cancer Junius wrote that ‘nothing keeps her alive but the horrible suction of toads. Such an instance of divine justice would convert an atheist.’ It was lurid and sensational, morbid and maleficent, and acted as a perfect complement to the fashion for political caricatures by Gillray and others in the 1780s.

  Their cartoons revealed a world of political horror and degradation, Westminster was consigned to Sisyphus where monstrous growths and wens disfigured all the bodies politic, where huge and pendulous arses squirted shit and where all the participants were crooked or disfigured. The so-called statesmen slavered over their spoils while spectators pissed themselves with excitement or fear. You can almost smell their foul breath. Political opponents blow each other apart with enormous farts, liberally mixed with excrement, or vomit out their greed or venom in vast waterfalls of sick. One politician is crowned with a chamber pot of piss, while another waits for a flagellation. It was a pictorial world of degradation that had no parallel in other centuries, unless we count the ‘babooneries’ sketched in the margins of medieval manuscripts. It was the tradition of salacious and scabrous English humour whipped up into delirium. There was also much horror in the real world. The duke of Grafton offered the lord chancellorship to Charles Yorke; Yorke accepted the office but then, overwhelmed by anxiety, cut his own throat.

  It was a time of riot, compounded by the agitation over Wilkes and the example of defiance demonstrated by the American rebels. Insurrection was in the air. Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1769, declared that ‘I have seen, within a year, riots in the country, about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers, riots of weavers, riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairmen; riots of smugglers, in which customs house officers and excisemen have been murdered, the king’s armed vessels and troops fired at’. In the previous year merchant seamen mutinied at Deptford, Newcastle upon Tyne and other key ports, while the hatmakers of Southwark struck for higher pay. In the year before that, there had been food riots, looting and general disquiet.

  Political clubs and fraternal associations emerged in greater numbers, particularly in the larger cities. Yet we may guess that every inn and tavern had its local Cromwell or Hampden inveighing against the squire or the parson or ‘them at Westminster’. Between May 1769 and January 1770 petitions were addressed to St James’s Palace from thirteen counties and twelve borough towns, all of them asking for or demanding a speedy dissolution of parliament. Public meetings, rather than crowds or riots, became for the first time an aspect of political life. In the summer of 1769, 7,000 people congregated in Westminster Hall to express their grievances against the administration.

  The duke of Grafton gave way under the pressure of events, and in his place the king nominated Frederick North, the 2nd earl of Guilford, who had climbed the greasy pole without as yet falling to earth. Lord North, as he was commonly known, has often been viewed by posterity as a dunderhead who managed to lose America in an act of clumsiness; but in fact he was a shrewd political agent not unlike Robert Walpole in his command of parliament. He was of an unfortunate appearance, rather like a caricature of the king himself; his bulging eyes and flabby cheeks gave him, according to Horace Walpole, ‘the air of a blind trumpeter’. But he had a broad bottom, as the phrase went, of sense and good humour that gave him balance and composure in times of crisis. When one member castigated him for running or, rather, ruining the country while he was asleep on the treasury bench, he opened one eye and replied, ‘I wish to God I were.’ He was circumspect, cautious, patient and methodical. ‘He fills a chair’, Johnson remarked.

  In England he was by some act of political magic able to induce a mood of somnolence or lethargy upon what had been a heated populace. ‘After a noted fermentation in the nation,’ Burke wrote, ‘as remarkable a deadness and vapidity has succeeded it.’ The violent agitation followed by sullen torpor is not readily explicable, except on some analogy with individual human psychology. Certainly Lord North did not have the same effect on the American colonies, where his efforts to calm the agitation served only to inflame the situation.

  On becoming first minister in 1770 he decided to abolish all the taxes Townshend had imposed upon American imports, except that upon tea. The measure was supposed to be a palliative, like the commodity itself, but it acted as a very plausible grievance. The lifting of the duties could be claimed as a moral victory by the Americans but the surviving tax on tea could be used as a call for further action; it was a token of American servitude.

  On 5 March 1770, a crowd of Bostonians surrounded the English soldiers who had been ordered to guard the customs house of the port; the Americans insulted, threatened and finally attacked them. The order was given to fire; three Bostonians died immediately and two expired later from their wounds. The English withdrew from the customs house under a persistent hail of stones, but a town meeting demanded that they leave the area altogether; consequently they were ordered to remove to Fort William on an island 3 miles away. The Americans had won another token victory. The event inevitably became known as ‘the Boston Massacre’ and inspired much magniloquent rhetoric. One oration to commemorate the occasion described ‘our houses wrapped in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery; our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion . . .’. The incident was never entirely forgotten, and it has been considered to be the single most important incitement to the coming war of independence. Yet other Americans at the time were not so stirred, and deplored the passions of the Bostonian crowd; the New York Gazette declared that ‘it’s high time a stop was put to mobbing’.

  So the drift of events was unclear and uncertain even to those closest to it. Some on both sides believed that a show of force would make the other party back down. Some Americans cried ‘Tyranny!’ while some English cried ‘Treason!’ Each side had a false impression of the other, and such mutual misunderstanding could be a source of conflict.

  Three small incidents are suggestive. In 1770 a customs collector was beaten up in New Jersey. In June 1772 a vessel being used by the British revenue ran aground off the coast of Rhode Island; it was promptly burned by the inhabitants. In March 1773 the assembly of Virginia suggested that all the colonial assemblies engage in correspondence, to which Benjamin Franklin responded that ‘a congress may grow out of that correspondence’. A congress would represent common concerns and ambitions that would greatly alarm the ministers at Westminster. The force of events could now silently do its work.

  22

  The magical machines

  Two brothers, John and Thomas Lombe, erected a manufactory in 1719 on an island in the River Derwent. It housed a silk engine which became the subject of popular curiosity and amazement, ‘a new invention’ combining, according to the original patent, ‘three sorts of engines never before made or used in Great Britain, one to wind the finest raw silk, another to spin, and the other to twist . . .’. An application for the renewal of the patent, fourteen years later, referred to ‘97,746 wheels, movements and individual parts (which work day and night)’. Malachy Postlethwayt, in his The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, reported ‘this little being, not above five or six feet in height, with two arms, will dispatch as much work as a giant’.

  The genteel came in coaches from all over the county to witness the marvel. The manufactory, a stone edifice of five storeys, was powered by a large water-wheel; within the building tall cylindrical machines whirred and rotated. One man was responsible for sixty threads. It was the principal sight of Derby and, with its machinery, its continuous operation and its specialized workforce, can be considered as the prototype for the silk mills and cotton mills of the
later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was said that the Lombes had stolen the idea from Italy, and that as a result John Lombe was poisoned in 1722, but this was no doubt part of the romance of the new age. By the early nineteenth century it sat on the landscape with all the authority of an ancient monument.

  Other wonders abounded. Daniel Defoe, writing in the year after the silk mill was constructed, remarked upon the ‘new undertakings in trade, inventions, engines, manufactures, in a nation pushing and improving as we are’. There was yet no concept of the factory as a powerhouse; it was generally used to describe a building inhabited by foreign merchants. But these solid, grim edifices began to enter social and economic calculations. Matthew Boulton completed his Soho manufactory, on Handsworth Heath in northeast Birmingham, in 1769; it was used for the manufacture of various ‘toys’ or small goods such as buckles and buttons. The main warehouse was nineteen bays wide, and three storeys high, with a Palladian front. But it looked more like a prison than a country house. This was the site where in 1776 James Watt began the manufacture of steam engines. Seven years before, Watt’s separate condenser and Richard Arkwright’s water-frame had been granted patents; new engines powered by steam could now be developed, and the water-frame could create miles of inexpensive cotton for cheaper and cheaper clothing.