Revolution, a History of England, Volume 4

by Peter Ackroyd

  On Wednesday, 7 June, long to be known as ‘black Wednesday’, the fears of the populace reached fever pitch. The mob sent warning that it would storm the Bank of England and distribute its contents, that the lions of the Tower’s zoo would be set free, that no prison or Catholic chapel would be safe and that they would tear down Bedlam and release its inmates into the streets. One priest, the Reverend O’Donoghue, watched the inmates of Bedlam dancing and shrieking ‘in the glare of writhing flames . . . in the glass of the hospital window’. This provoked especial fears. A contemporary Londoner, Richard Burke, wrote that ‘the metropolis is possessed by an enraged, furious and numerous enemy . . . What this night will produce is known only to the Great Dispenser.’ He watched as a boy, no more than fifteen, mounted a house in Queen Street and began to demolish it, throwing down the bricks and wood to two young accomplices. Yet some semblance of order was retained. While a huge fire burned in the churchyard of St Andrew’s in Holborn, where many were later killed by drinking burning spirits, a watchman went by calling the hour with a lantern in his hand.

  Eventually the military restored order with some judicious threats and violence. Many of the ringleaders were hanged on the spot where they had committed their crimes. Lord George Gordon was taken into custody, and eventually converted to Judaism. No one believed that such frantic and fanatic violence could still erupt in the streets of the eighteenth century; the scenes of destruction and violence were from a different world. London had become a different city.

  But it was not a case of the mob attacking the poor Catholics and their priests; it was an attack of the poor against the rich. The London poor did not attack their own. The Catholics who were pursued were wealthy gentlemen, lawyers and merchants. It came as an unwelcome surprise to those who placed their hopes in popular resistance to a corrupt administration, and confirmed the beliefs of those who believed that savage anger lay just below the surface of the century. Edward Gibbon, the chronicler of the decline of the Roman Empire, noted that he had witnessed ‘a dark and diabolical fanaticism which I had supposed to be extinct’. He referred here to the religious extremism that was supposed to have been rendered obsolete a hundred years before. Many now sought the safety of the established order in the supposedly reassuring shape of Lord North who was even then writhing in his shackles of government.

  Despite the victory at Saratoga, the advance into Providence and Rhode Island, and the alliance with the French, George Washington was downcast. He wrote at the beginning of 1781 that ‘I see nothing before us but accumulating distress . . . we have lived upon expedients till we can live no longer’. There was no food, no money and few reinforcements. The Americans had come to rely almost entirely upon the support of their new allies, but many in the French government were alarmed at the mounting expense. In turn the war weariness of the English was compounded by the fears of radicals that the prospect of American rebels and the Gordon mob would lead ineluctably to an absolute monarchy. The more practical realized that the war against the erstwhile colony was a pointless waste of money.

  Such was the mood on both sides before Yorktown. In the late summer and autumn of 1781 an English army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis had been out-marched and outmanoeuvred by Washington, until it was isolated at Yorktown in Virginia. With a French fleet at his back, surrounded by 8,000 French troops and 5,000 Americans, Cornwallis had no choice but to surrender. The English troops marched away from their broken and abandoned positions to the tune of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. With American victory assured, independence could not be far away.

  Just before the news of Yorktown had reached London the king had written to Lord North that ‘the dye is now cast whether this shall be a great empire or the least dignified of European states’. The defeat seemed definitively to have answered the question. The surrender of the English army caused outrage and sorrow. The report reached London on 25 November 1781, just days before the opening of parliament. Lord North is reported to have cried out, ‘Oh God, it is all over!’ He knew that the end of his political days was coming.

  Yet the king, the architect of the American policy, seemed prepared to fight on. In his speech from the throne at the opening of the session he reaffirmed his belief in the justice of the cause and refused to surrender the rights and interests of the country in the search for a febrile peace. There then rose up Charles James Fox, a leader of the Whig interest and a firm supporter of the American cause. He upheld the supposed fiction that George III’s speech had been composed by a cabinet council only to attack the king more vehemently as ‘an arbitrary and unfeeling monarch, who, having involved the slaves, his subjects, in a ruinous and unnatural war, to glut his enmity or satiate his revenge, was determined to persevere, in spite of calamity and even of fate’.

  These were hard words, but they bear the spirit of Fox. He has only made a passing appearance in this history as yet, having been part of a larger chorus of disapproval against the Crown and its ministers. He has been described as a born oppositionist, an aristocrat who moved in the highest Whig circles without being in the least impressed by considerations of rectitude. He was drunken and profligate, paying as much attention to gambling as to politics; but this was not unusual in eighteenth-century politicians. His charm lay in his happy and buoyant personality, often compared to that of a child. Burke confessed that he was ‘of the most artless, candid, open and benevolent disposition’. The duchess of Devonshire, a Whig grandee and devotee, described ‘his amazing quickness in seizing any subject’ and added that ‘his conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards: the strokes follow one another, piff! paff!’

  But he was not born to rule a party or lead a faction. He was careless and ill-organized; his speeches in the Commons were impetuous and impromptu, and he was utterly impervious to public opinion. He made no attempt to marshal the ranks of his followers. Politics was for him, as for so many of his contemporaries, a game of Hazard. He was, according to a German observer, Karl Philipp Moritz, ‘dark, small, thickset, generally ill-groomed’, his plump face overset by thick, shaggy eyebrows. His nickname was ‘the Eyebrow’ and his fat, dishevelled appearance became the object of a thousand caricatures. He would come to the chamber from a night of dissipation, perhaps still the worse for wear from drink, and deliver an oration of two hours that enchanted all who heard it. He was one of the greatest politicians of the age.

  The war with America, to which Fox had always been opposed, was ‘put down’ rather than concluded. On 27 February 1782, three months after the news of Yorktown had reached London, the House of Commons voted against the pursuit of military actions across the Atlantic. That was the equivalent of surrender. A month later the Commons prepared a vote of no confidence in Lord North and his ministers, a humiliation that North escaped by precipitate resignation. He wrote to the king that ‘the torrent is too strong to be resisted’. He had been first minister for twelve years, but he could no longer bear the perpetual anxious strain of administration at the time of the American war. The king was not impressed. He was of the opinion that North had somehow deserted him at a time of peril. ‘At last,’ he wrote, ‘the fatal day is come.’

  He was faced with competing factions and personalities who were avid for the benefits of office. In one period he even entertained the possibility of abdication, and drafted a speech declaring his imminent departure for Hanover. But it was never delivered. With the collapse of the Tory war faction, he was obliged to turn to sundry Whigs who were united only in their desire for peace with America. Even as they took over the administration they were divided, and four ministries emerged in the next two years. One of those who bobbed to the top was William Petty, 2nd earl of Shelburne. He was considered ‘slippery’ and an ‘arch-deceiver’ as well as being excessively ambitious, but that was practically the definition of any politician in the period. He is remembered principally, if at all, for his conduct of the negotiations for peace with the Americans.

  The negotiations d
id not concern the Americans alone; settlements with France, Spain and Holland, who had all taken the offensive against Britain in its time of crisis, involved intricate diplomatic niceties. The preliminary articles of peace with America were signed in Paris in January 1783, with the most important clause that Britain acknowledged the thirteen united states to be free, sovereign and independent. The Americans made no concessions to the loyalists among them who had fought for the British; they were left to the mercy of Congress, a decision that infuriated many at Westminster. What kind of treaty was it that abandoned the allies? Further treaties with France and Spain were signed at Versailles. France surrendered Grenada, St Vincent and other islands in exchange for Senegal in Africa, Pondicherry in India, and several islands. Spain gave up the Bahamas but obtained Minorca and the two Floridas. A cartoon of 1783 was entitled ‘The General Piss of Peace’ in which all the protagonists, including a Native American, urinate into a common pot:

  A little time past, sirs, who would have thought this

  That they’d so soon come to a general piss?

  So ended the American war that had created the first newly independent nation in the world that had full control of its common destiny. In the process of the fighting George Washington had in the face of extreme need managed to create a national army; his was the model followed by revolutionary France that inspired a new form of warfare. Another consequence followed. For the first time a group of people had advanced the cause of a nation without a king, without an aristocracy and without a national Church.

  The British truly believed that their empire was now in decline but in fact their commercial and maritime links remained intact and would lead to ever greater prosperity in future years. The French had emerged from the conflict with mixed fortunes, but the truth was that their subvention of the American colonists led to a grave financial crisis that found its culmination in the revolution of 1789. The foreign trade and domestic production of the United States were enlarged by the successful outcome of the war. In England, too, the cessation of hostilities encouraged the development of industry and commerce on a scale not seen for twenty years. The army and navy were cut back, to the great relief of the taxpayers, but the popularity of George III himself increased. He represented the still point in a turning world.

  That popularity did not attach itself to his ministers. A resolution concerning the treaty devised by Shelburne was put before the Commons by Lord John Cavendish; it stated that ‘the concessions made to the adversaries of Great Britain . . . were greater than they were entitled to, either from the actual situation of their respective possessions, or from their comparative strength’. The atmosphere was perhaps not conducive to strenuous debate. Karl Philipp Moritz noted that ‘it is not at all uncommon to see a member lying stretched out on one of the benches, while others are debating. Some crack nuts; others eat oranges.’

  The condemnation was passed by seventeen votes, and Shelburne resigned. It is unlikely that any other politician would have negotiated a more favourable peace, but he fell victim to a general mood of dissatisfaction and weariness. At a later date Benjamin Disraeli would acclaim Shelburne as the greatest statesman of the eighteenth century, but in his lifetime the earl was never thanked by a grateful nation for an unpopular but indispensable peace.

  The departure of Shelburne left the king in the unenviable position of being surrounded by men whom he either distrusted or hated. One parliamentarian, James Grenville, later recalled that George III exhibited all the signs of his anxiety; he remarked that ‘the feelings which then agitated his mind were strongly pictured in his countenance and gestures’; Grenville observed ‘the quick step and disordered motion of his body, his rapid utterance, his eager and uninterrupted speech, admitting neither of pause nor answer, and shifting perpetually in unconnected digressions’ which were perhaps a harbinger of his later nervous collapse. Yet he had some reason to be angry and alarmed.

  To popular amazement, and much disgust, Lord North and Charles James Fox had entered an arrangement; the dissolute Whig and the fatigued lord had in the past traded insults with abandon. Fox, for example, had accused North of ‘unexampled treachery and falsehood’ as well as ‘public perfidy’. But now they found themselves to be the very best of friends, staunch allies ready to form a ministry. James Gillray portrayed the two men on a roundabout, or the ‘new state whirligig’, while robbers plunder the house behind them; the inscription read: ‘Poor John Bull’s house plundered at noon day’. But they had the numbers, Fox with 90 votes and North with 120 against a combined ministerial alliance of 140. They had in the phrase of the time ‘stormed the [royal] closet’. The king had a particular hatred of Fox, whom he despised as a wanton reprobate, and was disgusted by what he considered to be the treachery of Lord North who had deserted him. He could not stop their alliance but he was clear that he would make it very difficult for them to continue; he barred them from using any sources of patronage, which was the lifeblood of a successful government. But even to the end he struggled to find an alternative.

  In his extremity the king approached William Pitt, son of the ‘great commoner’, who at the age of twenty-four was already chancellor of the exchequer. He bore a famous name, but in the course of his career he made it more illustrious still. ‘He is not a chip off the old block’, Burke said. ‘He is the old block itself.’ He had been brought up in the purple of the political aristocracy and had been marked out early for high office; it was said that he had never been a boy and knew nothing of men or manners except through the distorting mirror of Westminster. He was characterized by his pale face and his stiff, formal bow; tall and thin, he had all the hauteur of one who knows his destiny. He could be stern, supercilious and supremely uninterested; he had what Lord Holland called ‘an eye in the air’. He entered the chamber of the Commons without looking either to the right or to the left, and he sat in his place without nod or greeting to those around him.

  That was the public man. In private, after a few glasses of port, he was good-natured and even humorous. One of his colleagues, Sir William Napier, recalled an occasion when Pitt was playing with some children of his acquaintance; his face had been blackened with cork, and he was throwing cushions with abandon. It was suddenly announced that two great ministers wished to see him on an urgent matter. He called for a basin, washed his face, and hid the cushions under a sofa. Napier recalled the change that came over him. ‘His tall, ungainly, bony figure seemed to grow to the ceiling, his head was thrown back, his eyes were fixed immovably.’ He listened to them, answered with a few curt sentences, ‘and finally, with an abrupt stiff inclination of the body, but without casting his eyes down, dismissed them. Then, turning to us with a laugh, caught up his cushions and renewed our fight.’ His temperament was in that sense unstable. It was said that he was ‘always in the cellar or in the garret’.

  When the king approached the young man with the offer of being first minister, Pitt rejected it out of hand. He could not command a majority, and he could not work either with Fox or with North. So he waited. He realized that the new ministry was so unstable, so riven by internal weakness, that it could not hold. He could bide his time. Richard Porson summed up the characters of Fox and Pitt with an observation. ‘Mr Pitt conceives his sentences before he utters them. Mr Fox throws himself into the middle of his, and leaves it to God Almighty to get him out again.’

  Balloons were the rage of the early 1780s. For the first time in human history it seemed that men could fly. Excited crowds in Paris and London watched the ascents, and for a moment seemed to be exhilarated by a sense of liberation from the woes of the world. This was freedom, or at least the promise of freedom, for future generations. At the time of the French Revolution a political writer, Etienne Dumont, remarked that ‘the people of Paris were filled with inflammable gas like a balloon’. In the spring of 1785 Horace Walpole wrote, less dramatically, that ‘Mr Windham, the member for Norwich, has made a voyage into the clouds, and was in danger of falling to earth
and being shipwrecked. Three more balloons sail today; in short we shall have a prodigious navy in the air, and then what signifies having lost the empire of the ocean?’

  24

  The schoolboy

  The first British Empire, largely consisting of the thirteen American colonies, had gone. Yet many were glad to be rid of it. Its surcease had become inevitable. It was better to trade with the Americans than attempt to rule them, and this salutary lesson became the single most important principle of the second British Empire which was even then being created. It was not in England’s interests to have colonies scattered over the globe; it was more important to have a line of trading posts that could create a worldwide commercial empire along the routes of the oceans. These markets and factories would then be guarded by the navy in the world’s first maritime empire.

  Trading posts were set up in Borneo and the Philippines, while Lord Macartney led a commercial mission to the imperial court at Peking [Beijing]. The forts and factories of Britain stretched out to Penang and Malaya, to Trinomali [Tiruvannamalai] and Kandu, to Cape Town and central Africa. And of course the Indian subcontinent beckoned with its riches. It was said that the Tudor spirit of ocean-going adventure had revived, and indeed the idea of the British Empire was first raised in the Elizabethan period. John Dee had prophesied an empire that would unite all the peoples of Britain in its acquisition, a remarkably accurate vision of the future. Where could the ships and sailors not go? To Greece? To Araby? To the dark continent of Africa or to the realms of the Orient?